Seductive. Intoxicating. All-consuming. The Journal’s Katherine Bindley notes that these are not descriptions of romantic love or illicit drugs. They are how startup founders talk about managing their newest employees — artificial-intelligence agents that can work through the night, finish a task at 3 a.m., and sit idle until a human notices.
Aditya Sharma, 27, co-founder of a company that makes AI troubleshooting software, recently went to bed at 6 a.m. after being up all night with his agents. “The cost of the agents being blocked for eight hours is way too high,” he said. He has put on weight. He finds it hard to be present with people outside working hours. “They just demand your attention. Does it need anything? Can I help it in any way?”
That is a man describing a newborn. It is software.
The one that belongs on this page
Peter Pezaris is 56. He has been in the technology industry for more than thirty years and has four successful exits — which, for readers outside that world, means he has built and sold four companies and does not need to work again. He promised his wife he would retire this year.
As a young founder, he was hospitalized twice during punishing work stretches. He once slept an hour a night for a month. He knows exactly what the pace costs, in a way most people only learn once.
He has not retired. The capabilities of the agents, and the speed at which the models are evolving, have given what he and others describe as a once-in-humanity feeling — and the feeling that even though the pace is not healthy or sustainable, you just cannot stop.
Why a planner cares
Because we meet the Pezaris problem constantly, and it almost never looks like a technology story. It looks like a dentist who keeps one more year of the practice. A teacher on a third “final” year. A business owner who has the number and will not sign.
The pattern: people who could retire, and have said they will, and do not — because the work is where the meaning is and nothing on the other side of the date has been built yet. Money is rarely the obstacle. A blank calendar is.
There is nothing wrong with working at 56 with four exits if it is a choice. The signal that it is not a choice is the hospital history, the broken promise, and the sentence “I just can’t stop.” Those are three things a good plan is designed to catch before a spouse has to.
The practical version
Two questions that turn a retirement number into a retirement date. First: what, specifically, will Tuesday look like? If the answer is a shrug, the date will keep moving, regardless of the balance. Second: what does your spouse think the date is? The Journal’s story contains a promise made to a wife. It does not say whether she was asked.
Two weeks ago on this page we wrote about a marathon with twenty wine stops and observed that involvement compounds and obligation corrodes. Here is the same argument from the other direction: a man with every reason to stop, tending software at 6 a.m. because it might need him. Your retirement date is a decision. If you have not made it on purpose, something else will make it for you, and it will not be kind about it.