Thirteen Thousand Days

On the long drive this week I worked out exactly how long I've spent employed. Thirty-six years, near enough thirteen thousand days on one payroll or another. I'd gone looking for proof that the time added up to something. The number couldn't give it to me.

June 2026 : 3 min read - Part of the My Personal Journey to Early Retirement series at FreeBefore65.

Somewhere on the road this week, with the career almost behind me, I started doing sums in my head. Then, because sums in my head were never going to be enough, I put them in a spreadsheet. Start dates, finish dates, the gaps between. I have spent my whole working life turning messy things into columns I can total, so of course this is what I did with the end of it. 

The figure came out at around thirteen thousand days on the books, across seven employers and nine locations, spread over thirty-six years. Take it back to the morning I first left for university and it's closer to fourteen and a half thousand. A whole adult life, rendered as a tidy number in the bottom right cell. 

A career looks neater on a spreadsheet than it felt

Laid out in rows, it has the look of a plan. It wasn't one.

One stint in the middle ran to nearly twelve years and anchored the whole thing. This is where I'd met my wife, found a house to call home and start a family. The rest came in much shorter bursts, one to three years at a time, and not all of those moves were mine to make. Some I chose, moving closer to my parents during my dad's illness, chasing a better role or just wanting something different. Others were made for me, by an office relocation I couldn't commit to, or a redundancy I didn't see coming. The spreadsheet doesn't record which was which. From the outside a chosen leap and a forced one look identical. Just another start date in the next row down. 

What the days actually cost

There's a second tally hidden inside the first, and it's the one I was really circling on the drive. 

Before COVID made hybrid working possible, a lot of those days weren't spent at home. For long stretches I was away three or four nights a week, living out of a suitcase near wherever the work happened to be, 100s of miles from my family, driving back at the end of the week. Within the day count is also, if you turn it over, a count of the evenings I wasn't there. Dinners I missed. The ordinary weeknights of a family I was earning for and not sitting among. 

We made a good life on the back of those years, and I won't pretend I was a victim of choices I mostly made freely. But it's the part the proud-career version quietly leaves out, and it's the part that was actually weighing on me. You can be glad of where the work got you and still feel the cost of how it got you there. 

Looking for evidence

What I was doing, totting up the days, was looking for evidence. Proof that it amounted to something. That I'd been worth keeping. That the time wasn't wasted. 

The odd thing is that the evidence is there, if that's the question. People don't keep paying you for thirty-six years, across that many companies, if the work isn't landing. There were the brands I'd worked on, the teams I’d managed, the projects that delivered the insights that led to award-winning ideas or just helped someone do their job a bit better. The long stint in the middle, the moves that were genuine steps up, the plain fact that I can stop at 58 with the mortgage gone. All of it says the career did what a career is meant to do. 

But that was never quite the question. Whether I was employable isn't really in doubt. Whether it was worth it is a different sort of thing, and it turns out you can't settle that one in a spreadsheet. Worth was never a number. The cell stays empty however many rows you add. The closest thing to it on the whole sheet was the people I’d managed and developed, and they were never going to fit in a column anyway. 

The end of one thing 

So I've stopped hunting for the proof. The era closes in a few weeks, and I don't think I need to defend it on the way out. It happened, and on balance it worked. It cost what it cost. 

The more useful question, the one I'll finally have time for, isn't whether the last thirty-six years were worth it. It's what I make of whatever comes next, now I've got the evenings back. 

Part of the My Personal Journey to Early Retirement series at FreeBefore65.

Tony writes about his personal journey to early retirement at freebefore65.co.uk. He is not a financial adviser. All content reflects his own experience and research.