Never Retire: What Happens When Your Neighborhood Replaces Your Car

Life without a car isn’t radical. It’s just better.

The biggest lifestyle upgrade we made in moving to Spain wasn’t about money or work.

It was not needing a car.

The other day in the Never Retire newsletter, I wrote—

People often ask how life is different in Spain. The honest answer? It’s not radically different if you look at what my wife and I actually do each day. It’s better, yes—but not wildly different. The core of our life is the same. The difference is in the quality, not the structure.

So, while the actual things we do aren’t super different, the way we do them absolutely is. And so much of this comes down to the reality that we don’t have a car.

Because we don’t need one.

When you live in a dense neighborhood with everything you need, want—and more—within a few minutes by foot, your life changes drastically. When you live in a city that is broken down into a series of blocks that contain most, if not all of your needs, wants—and more—you quality of life increases exponentially.

You cannot overstate the impact of living in a place where you don’t need a car.

It’s something most Americans who have not lived in traditional cities or obsessively studied urban planning can’t get their heads around. Like so much else in the United States, car-free and walkable neighborhoods have become marketing slogans.

Most old cities in the U.S. no longer have the infrastructure or abundant concentration of shops and services to fully and truly support car-free lifestyles. The new shit that gets built and billed as New Urbanist, mixed-use, or whatever is little more than glorified suburban shopping centers anchored by Whole Foods and Starbucks.

You can’t do all of your business on foot or by bike in these places. There will always be something lacking. And even if America’s traditional cities and modern replicas were complete and true urban places, they’re so expensive as to be inaccessible to most people. Plus—even in places where it sort of works, our city neighborhoods have been so left for dead that they’re no longer habitable if you desire even a decent quality of life.

Paying $6 for a coffee and getting screamed at by a circus of mentally ill people while you drink it in the “plaza” is hardly an attractive proposition.

The sad thing is that outside of America’s big cities where the federal government has helped concentrate then hyperbolize the nation’s social problems, there are hundreds of Main Street towns with the infrastructure to make true urban life work at a physically small, but not less bountiful scale. However—as

Kevin Alexander

pointed out after he toured some midwestern Main Street towns—they, too, have been allowed to fall into a pathetic degradation.

It’s a shame.

It’s a shame to watch my able-bodied 90-year Dad effectively give up on living life outside of his home because he can no longer drive. But I can’t blame him. Even as a guy who was in and out of the house three times before my Mother changed clothes in the morning, he lost the desire to drive, primarily because there’s nothing to drive to in his deader than dead small northeastern city.

He called me a few months ago, bored from a bench in a local park. That was the first sign that something was up.

Now, he doesn’t leave the house. He fiddles around the basement and backyard, sits outside when the weather is right, and watches television the rest of the time. If he was here in Spain—in my neighborhood—or somewhere like it, he would have a built-in social life outside his front door. Watching old people—alongside every other type of person you can imagine—traverse this environment daily makes me smile at the same time as it hurts to think a couple simple facts keep people like my Dad from participating fully in his final years.

• A lack of density.

• The need to drive to experience most anything outside of the house.

In the U.S., people tend to hate density and they think you’re a loser if you don’t have a car.

Bikes are toys. Cars are freedom.

Such a poor excuse for a culture and society.

If you're tired of organizing your life around a car—subscribe.

The U.S. makes independence harder the older you get. Never Retire is about flipping that.

Whether you're abroad, planning to be, or just dreaming of a better setup, this is for you.

Monday’s Never Retire newsletter story is a free follow-up on how I work without forcing motivation. It’s about movement. Leaving the house. Creating rhythm, not routines.

If the idea of designing your day without burnout or strict schedules sounds appealing, I think you’ll like it.

Me when I sold my car before moving to Spain. No regrets.

Here’s What Living Without a Car Feels Like

We walk to the market, ride bikes to the beach, stop for coffee on the way, grab a loaf of bread on the ride home—and never think about parking, traffic, or gas. We bump into neighbors. We see the same people. We exercise without thinking about it. We move through the world using our own power at human speed.

This kind of life makes the work I do possible—and sustainable. Being physically and mentally engaged is a key ingredient in working less now so I can work less longer. That engagement is built into my day-to-day. No half-assing required.

It should be a national emergency in the U.S. that low-density development and car necessity—not merely dependency, but necessity—relegate entire groups of people to second-class citizens.

And it’s not just old people.

In Valencia, tactile paving—raised rubber tiles—guide visually impaired people through the city. They're everywhere. That’s what universal design looks like. You don’t need a car, and you’re not taking your life in your hands just to walk somewhere.

In the U.S., most urban planning doesn’t even pretend to care about this. Because in too many places, encouraging people to walk is a liability risk—not a basic right.

Never Retire isn’t about doing nothing.

It’s about building a structure that lets you keep going and actually enjoy it. But that structure only works to its full potential in places that make it possible. Places that support it—naturally, passively, and at every turn.