Why We Now Buy Water and Call Walking Exercise — And What It Means for Your Retirement

The Absurdity Dialled Up

Imagine walking into a pub in 1975 and announcing you’ve just spent £2.50 on water, you’d be laughed out the door. Probably followed by someone shouting, “Do you need a lie-down, mate?”

And if you bragged about hitting 10,000 steps?

Someone would pat your shoulder and ask if you were training for a moon landing.

But now? We’ve built entire lifestyles around things our grandparents did without a second thought.

We’ve taken life’s simplest acts, drinking water and putting one foot in front of the other, and turned them into industries.

And this, bizarrely, tells you everything about retirement.

Because if water and walking can be commodified, moralised, branded, monetised and measured…What the hell do you think happened to your expectations of later life?

How We Sleepwalked Into Nonsense

The ridiculous thing about modern life is how quietly it becomes ridiculous.

There’s no announcement, fanfare national briefing saying:

“Attention citizens: from next Monday, hydration will become a lifestyle choice, and walking will now be a competitive sport. Good luck.”

Nope. It just creeps in.

One day, you’re drinking from a hosepipe, tasting faint traces of rubber and childhood, the next day you’re standing in Sainsbury’s comparing pH-level-enhanced hydration experiences like you’re choosing a therapist.

One day a walk is how you get to the shop, the next day you’re marching around your kitchen at 11.57pm whispering, “Three hundred more steps, you lazy bastard.”

This is how society works now:

Take something ordinary → add marketing → sprinkle guilt → create dependency → charge for it.

Which brings us to retirement.

Because if you’ve spent 40 years marinating in this quiet creep of nonsense, you can be absolutely sure some of that nonsense has seeped into how you imagine your next chapter.

Retirement as a Bullshit Detector

Here’s the part no one puts in the pamphlet:

Retirement is basically a psychological blacklight. It reveals all the invisible crap you’ve been walking around with for decades.

Not the dramatic stuff... the petty, ridiculous, culturally absorbed nonsense we all take for granted:

• That being “busy” is a personality.

• That productivity is a virtue.

• That slowing down means you’re failing.

• That you need to earn rest like it’s a bloody privilege.

• That fulfilment can be bought, upgraded, or shipped with next-day delivery.

  
  

Retirement shines a big fluorescent spotlight on the absurdity.

It’s the moment you go:

“Wait… why did I care so much about half that shit?”

“Why was I living like a malfunctioning Roomba?”

“Why did I think a Fitbit needed to judge me?”

It’s not an identity crisis, it’s a clarity crisis.

You stop mistaking noise for necessity.

The ‘What the Hell Have I Been Doing?’ Phase

And this clarity can feel… disorienting.

Because suddenly you’re not rushing.

You’re not checking inboxes, schedules, Slack messages, or step counts like a caffeinated pigeon.

The pace drops, and the noise fades.

And with the silence comes a simple but unsettling question:

“How much of my life did I actually choose… and how much just happened because everyone else was doing it?”

This is the moment retirement starts to feel like you’ve woken up from a very long, very bizarre dream.

You look around and think:

• Do I even like the routines I’ve been loyal to?

• Did I ever need half the stuff I bought?

• Why the hell was I paying for water? Water!

• How did walking become a hobby?

  
  

It’s like discovering your whole life has been slowly curated by a marketing department without your consent.

The Good Bit (And It’s Not What You Expect)

Now here’s where we go somewhere different.

Most retirement advice says: “Reinvent yourself! Find your passion! Discover your purpose!”

Which sounds lovely until you realise that’s just bottled water all over again... taking something simple and turning it into a bloody quest.

Here’s a more interesting, more liberating angle:

Retirement is your chance to finally call bullshit.

On all of it.

It’s not about identity.

It’s not about purpose.

It’s about realising society has been slipping you nonsense for decades, and you’ve dutifully swallowed it like a multivitamin.

Retirement is the moment you get to say:

“No thanks. I’m opting out of the circus.”

Opting out of overcomplication.

Opting out of the metrics.

Opting out of living like a self-improvement project.

Opting out of manufactured urgency and digital dopamine, and the cult of ‘being productive’.

Retirement is a return to the un-upgraded version of life.

The tap-water version.

The “walk because it’s nice” version.

The version that existed before everything came with a price tag, a moral message, or a bloody app.

You’re not reinventing yourself. You’re uninstalling updates you never asked for.

The One That Lands

So yes... bottled water, step-counting, life optimisation.

We’ve normalised a lot of madness.

But retirement? Retirement is the first time you get to see the madness clearly.

It’s the moment you realise the world didn’t get complicated, it got commercialised. And you don’t have to play along anymore.

Because the real freedom of retirement isn’t time. It’s the ability to say:

“I’m done paying premium prices for things that used to be free.”

And if you can hold onto that, you won’t just retire well, you’ll live better.

Tap on.

Walk without counting.

And let the nonsense fall away.