A few years back I sank hundreds of hours into Fallout 4. I built it up, finished it, and bought more of it when it ran out. Now I load the old save now and again and there's nothing left to do. I've been thinking about that more than I expected to, with my last working day nearly here.
June 2026 : 3 min read - Part of the My Personal Journey to Early Retirement series at FreeBefore65.
I opened it up again the other week. Fallout 4, the one where you crawl out of a bunker into a world flattened by nuclear war and set out to find the family you've lost. I loaded my old save, stood my character in the settlement I'd spent weeks rebuilding, and realised there was nothing to do. A homestead needed defending. A couple of monsters were wandering about waiting to be shot. That was it. The map was clear, the work was done, and I was just visiting a place I used to live.
I had put a lot into it
And I mean a lot. Hours that turned into days. I levelled the character as far up as it would go. I rebuilt my ruined village into something I was proud of, walls and lights and crops, and dressed the people who lived in it. I collected every piece of armour there was to collect. The quests came one after another, each a little harder than the last, and I worked through all of them. It was absorbing in exactly the way these games are built to be. There was always a next thing.
Until there wasn't. The main story ended. I bought the add-ons, the extra chapters they sell you when the base game runs dry, and for a while there were new places to go and new quests to clear. Then those finished too. What was left was maintenance. Defending the homesteads, dealing with the odd attack. No more levelling, because I was already at the top, and no more story, because I'd seen all of it.
I didn't start a new game. I thought about it and couldn't face it. Starting again meant a level-one character with nothing, an empty patch of ground where the village would have to be built from scratch, none of the armour I'd hunted down. I'd put too much into this one to walk away and begin from zero. So I kept the finished save and went back to it now and then, to a world where I'd already done everything worth doing.
You can probably see where this is going
I didn't, for a long time. It took stopping work to notice I'd been living in a completed game myself without quite admitting it.
The last stretch of my career had the same shape. The role had gone quiet. The interesting quests were behind me, worked through years before. New projects and the push to get everyone back in the office did the job the add-ons did, propping up the engagement for a while with something that felt new, then running their course. What was left was upkeep, turning up to hold a position and deal with the occasional flare-up. I was at the top of my level with no higher one to reach.
And I stayed, well past the point it held my interest, for the same reason I never started the new save. I'd built the character. Decades of it. The standing, the knowledge, the whole village of a senior role with my name over it. Beginning again somewhere else, at level one with none of that, felt like throwing away everything I'd spent the years collecting. So I kept loading the finished save and telling myself there was still something to do.
The bit that actually worries me
Here's the part I keep turning over, with the laptop nearly handed back. I know what it is to finish a game and not want to start another one. And retirement, if I'm not careful, is precisely that. The save file with every quest cleared. Loading it up to see whether there's anything to do, and finding only homesteads to defend and days to fill, nothing that counts as getting anywhere.
A game can't make new meaning once the designers stop writing for it. The question nobody hands you a marker for is whether I can, after thirty-six years of an employer deciding what the next objective was. The structure did the writing. The next level was always there because someone had built it. Take that away and you're standing in the settlement with no marker on the map, and either you learn to set your own or you spend your retirement defending homesteads.
There's a detail I'd half forgotten until I started writing this down. The whole game begins with you losing your family and setting out to find them. That was the quest underneath all the other quests. And the thing I'm walking towards now, the real reason beneath the spreadsheets, is the time with mine I spent too many years too busy to have. The game I finished was about finding them. The one I'm starting might be too.
I don't know yet whether I'm any good at writing my own quests. I've never had to. I'll be finding out with a level-one character and an empty patch of ground, which is a peculiar place to be standing at 58. Ask me in a while whether I started the new game or just kept loading the old one.
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.
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