The Big Retirement Lie: What The Financial Services Industry Doesn’t Want You To Know (And How To Design A Career Worth Doing For Life)

Retirement isn’t the dream—it’s a dangerous lie.

In The Big Retirement Lie, Category Pirates—Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Katrina Kirsch—expose how Wall Street, society, and the retirement industrial complex sold an entire generation on a broken promise: work 40 years, save enough, and someday you’ll get to stop. But what if that’s the wrong goal entirely? This provocative mini-book dismantles the myth that unlimited leisure leads to happiness, challenges the idea that work is inherently bad, and offers a new blueprint for designing a career you want to do for life. Drawing from sharp economic data, timeless wisdom, and inspiring real-life stories—like the 84-year-old pilot still rebuilding planes and the 94-year-old farmer still showing up daily—this book will help you stop chasing escape and start designing agency.

In this “mini-book” you will learn:

• How the retirement myth evolved—from gold watches to Wall Street’s trillion-dollar 401(k) scheme
• Why most people aren’t saving enough for retirement (and why they probably don’t need to)
• How “unretirement” is becoming the new normal for high-impact, high-agency professionals
• The 3 levers that let you control your work: Quantity, Quality, and Agency
• How to design a career you never want to retire from—one that maximizes purpose, energy, and freedom

Sharp, provocative, and loaded with mindset-shifting insight, this “mini-book” will help you reject the premise of retirement—and start building a career (and life) you never want to quit.