Now that I have officially moved on from my 40 year career in the oil patch I constantly get the question ‘how is retirement’.  I’ve always had a disdain for this word as it sounds like too final of a word.

In it’s place I’ve been using the word transition since it’s really just a transition to a new phase of life.  This served me well until recently when an industry colleague said ‘isn’t that what Bruce Jenner did’.  Well, that was not what I was doing so it was time to come up with a new word or phrase.

Once I pondered the different phases of life I came up with a new way of looking at it.

In the first phase of our lives, which I shall call Life 1.0, we go to school and things are pretty much set for us in terms of following the protocol of getting thru grade school and then perhaps on to a post secondary education.  This phase takes us into the 20ish year age bracket.

The second phase of our lives, let’s call it Life 2.0, is when we embark in to a career where we toil away for the next 40 or so years.  In this time period we are striving to have a decent paying job that a person hopefully enjoys while paying the bills of life and working towards saving a financial nest egg.

The next phase of our lives is when we get to enjoy the fruits of our labor and do the things we want to do on our own schedule.  It seems to make sense to me that this part of life should be referred to as Life 3.0 so that is what I’m going with.