Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September of 2020 after 27 years of service on the United States Supreme Court. It was a devastating loss for social justice, in addition to being just pretty terrible timing overall. Since then, the state of democracy has continued to spiral leaving many to believe that she should have retired sooner. Others feel that she shouldn’t have had to leave a job she was good at and enjoyed because of a weird lifetime appointment rule and a set of circumstances that only the most cynical could have predicted would happen. Either way, almost everyone agrees that women can’t do anything right! But no matter what you believe, I won’t be leaving the general public to play any guessing games with my own legacy.
That’s precisely why RBG has inspired me to retire at the age of 23.
It wasn’t an easy decision. I’m pretty fresh out of college and barely got my feet wet in the workforce. Plus, I just became eligible for health insurance after one year of mandatory waiting! But the benefits of early retirement are too well documented for me to continue down this path of the daily grind. Retiring is great for your overall health, leaves plenty of time to travel and prevents droves of people across an entire country from constantly questioning if you should have done it sooner.
Seems like a no-brainer to me!
I guess what moved me the most to retire were the “what if” questions. Would the current radical Conservative takeover of the Supreme Court be quite as severe if RBG had retired? Would she do it all over the same way again if given the chance? Would I ever get to spend several months in Europe if I remained employed? Retiring was the only way to find out. Plus, working was pretty annoying and I kinda just don’t want to anymore.
And I know what you’re thinking. Is the scenario where millions of people were left wishing that I, an ordinary American citizen with a trust fund, had retired earlier extremely unlikely? Probably. But I simply do not wish to find out. A lot of people feel that the shift to remote work during the pandemic transformed their lives. Well, RBG inspired me to take it one step further. No work at all, ever. RBG showed me that women can do anything, and that includes sitting on my ass checking my phone all day and it is technically discrimination if you say otherwise.
RBG’s decision not to retire will likely remain controversial for years to come, but one thing is for sure: Her legacy will continue to live on. Some women are continuing the fight for reproductive justice in her honor. Some went into law themselves. Some are now 23-year-old retirees having a cocktail at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday because they literally don’t have anything to do or anywhere to be. We all owe her so much.
We’ll never know how different things could have been in this country if RBG had retired, but as the saying goes – fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, well you can’t because I don’t have a job or any accountability at all. I dissent!
