Never Retire: Why I Want To Grow Old in Spain

A short essay I wrote this week that captures what Never Retire is really about

I wrote this Thursday and published it on Medium, almost in one sitting, because it just hit me.

Some pieces come out clean because they’re not about explanation or persuasion—they’re about how you’re feeling in the moment.

This is one of those pieces. It’s the clearest way I can show what we’re doing here with Never Retire: not chasing escape or fantasy, but building a life that works, day by day, in a place that makes sense for the second act of life.

Before I share the article…

Next up: I’m thinking about longevity—the kind that’s about rhythm, not retirement accounts. What does “never retire” really look like twenty years from now?

I write Never Retire from the ground here in Spain—not as an expat influencer, but as someone living, working, and figuring it out day by day.

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When I hit the street of my neighborhood — Russafa, in Valencia, Spain — each morning, I see what growing old looks like.

Russafa is full of pensioners — people who have seen a lot. Many lived in Spain when it wasn’t yet a democracy. When I was a baby, this country was preparing to come out of Franco’s dictatorship. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about how wild that is — or how easily the U.S. takes democracy for granted as it teeters on the edge of losing it.

But that’s another story for another day and, probably, a different writer.

I have studied cities — particularly neighborhood-level psychological constructs such as sense of community — for more than 20 years. It’s crazy to think how the work I did before moving to Spain has taken on new relevancy in my life and writing.

I’m 50 now, which feels strange to admit because it doesn’t quite line up with how I feel inside.

I’m not old, but I’m also not part of the demographic of the many “new arrivals” who have been landing here in recent years. The remote workers on the younger end of the spectrum and foreign retirees on the other, sampling Mediterranean life before moving on.

In my opinion, a majority of them will leave. They won’t grow old or — like me — older on these streets.

The older people in Russafa move through the neighborhood like they own it — because they do. They walk slowly but without hesitation, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk to talk to friends they’ve known for decades.

Their routines help create the rhythm of the street: shopping at the same stands in the market that I do, sitting at the same café tables, watching the same patch of sun cross the same plaza every afternoon.

They remind me that belonging isn’t something you achieve. It’s something that accumulates — moment by moment, conversation by conversation, until the city‘s theater becomes muscle memory.

I’m not there yet, but I am starting to feel like I’m super close.

Sometimes, when I see those pensioners gathered or walking to and fro, I wonder what it will feel like to grow old here. To grow old together with my wife. To maybe — one day — speak Spanish almost as fluently as she does.

In the U.S., aging often means retreat: from work, from relevance, from the public world.

Here, aging happens in the open. In the abundant public space.

You don’t disappear into retirement communities. You sit outside the café, argue politics, gossip, keep living among everyone else. It’s ordinary and beautiful — a kind of civic participation you don’t really appreciate until (a) you live it and (b) contrast it with, for example, the experience of your once active 90-year old Dad who rarely leaves the house now because he can no longer drive.

The United States eats its seniors up and spits them out — a byproduct of car culture and low-density development. In Spanish cities, older people are still central figures in a daily public life that never really pauses.

Maybe that’s what draws me to stay: the sense that life here doesn’t end when work does or when you’re “too old” to do whatever people love to say you’re “too old” to do in the U.S.

When my wife and I started making plans to leave the U.S. more than three years ago (we finally moved to Spain on January 2, 2025), we didn’t want reinvention. We wanted continuation.

I wanted to build a life that fits who I’ve become, as a lifelong city lover who never quite felt like he lived a truly urban lifestyle. Spain made that easier by showing me that I can work hard and take on new challenges at the same time as slowing down.

The days feel longer here — in a good way. Because time doesn’t fly in an environment where you’re giving your brain a daily workout exactly at the age where many let it cave into stagnation.

Work happens, but it doesn’t run the day. You want to be outside because there’s so much life on these streets.

The rhythm isn’t productivity; it’s participation in an exciting second act and as a small player in a city with a huge supporting cast of characters.

I’m still learning exactly where I fit in Spain. How to let the pace shape me without losing my own sense of self that I brought from America. How to keep showing up for the work that matters while recognizing that showing up — period — might be the work itself.

City living — and moving abroad — teach you patience. They humble you daily.

If you stay long enough, you start to see that the people who built this city — the ones who’ve been sitting on these benches for decades — are holding the city together in ways statistics will never show.

They’re the quiet architecture of community.

And if I’m lucky, maybe one day I’ll take my place among them — not as a newcomer or an observer, but as another piece of this country’s and this city’s rich history.

Living proof that staying is its own kind of movement.