The three stages nobody warned you about

The moment I received one of those long, italicized “share as received” forwarded messages from Kat, my friend of many years, it actually stopped me in my tracks instead of getting scrolled past.

Somewhere in nearly everyone’s phone is a folder of forwarded messages nobody asked for; most are forgettable, but occasionally one lands with more weight than expected.

One has circulated quietly for years, describing retirement in three unsentimental stages.

From 58 to 64, your workplace begins drifting away from you no matter how influential you once were; you become, in the world’s eyes, simply ordinary again.

From 65 to 71, society itself loosens its grip; old colleagues vanish, and people at your former office may not even recognize you.

And from 72 onward, even family begins, gently and without malice, to draw back, busy with their own lives, their visits now a genuine gift instead of an obligation.

And then the message concludes with an unflinching line: eventually, even the earth is ready to let you go!

It’s blunt, occasionally clumsy in its phrasing, and still undeniably honest, which is probably why it keeps getting forwarded instead of forgotten.

But I think it’s only telling half the story, and Ecclesiastes chapter three tells us the other half.

Solomon opens that chapter with his famous poem: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to uproot; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.

Read against the forwarded message, that poem suddenly sounds less like poetry and more like a diagnosis.

Every stage that message describes, the fading relevance, the thinning circle, the quieter house is simply Solomon’s ancient observation playing out in a modern inbox.

Seasons change. Influence fades. People move on, not out of cruelty, but because that’s what seasons genuinely do.

Pretending otherwise, clinging to the identity of a season that has already ended, only makes the following one more painful than it needs to be.

But right in the middle of that same chapter, Solomon writes something the forwarded message never quite gets to: “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart.”
That one line changes everything about how we should read the three stages.

Here is the real reason the fading of relevance, of recognition, of company stings as deeply as it does.
It isn’t only sentimentality. It’s evidence of something eternal lodged inside us that refuses to treat any earthly season as the final word.
If we were purely creatures of this world, with nothing eternal woven into us, we could simply adjust to each stage the way a thermostat adjusts to temperature, with no ache, no resistance, just recalibration.
But we don’t recalibrate that easily, and Solomon tells us exactly why: eternity is in the heart, and nothing under the sun was ever built large enough to hold it.

That reframes the entire arc the forwarded message describes.

The fading isn’t proof that life eventually empties out. It’s proof we were never intended to find our final significance in a workplace, a social circle, or even our own family’s daily attention, genuinely good things, all of them, but never eternal ones.

They were always going to loosen their grip, precisely because they were never designed to be the place where our deepest significance lived.

This is where the message concludes. “Eat your favorite food with joy, do your favorite work with zeal, stay in touch with old friends because life comes only once” is wise as far as it goes, but incomplete without what Solomon adds a few verses later: “eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all your toil for this is the gift of God.”
Not a consolation prize but an actual gift, received from God’s hand, meant to be enjoyed precisely because it’s temporary and ordinary, not despite that fact.

So yes, call your old friends. Enjoy your favorite meal without guilt. Do meaningful work with real enthusiasm for as long as your body allows.

That part of the message is worth keeping.

But don’t stop at “life comes only once, so make the most of it.”

Solomon’s deeper counsel is that life, precisely because every season eventually fades, was never meant to be where your soul finally rests.

Eternity was placed in your heart for a reason, and it was never satisfied by any stage of life to begin with, no matter how full, how influential, or how surrounded by people you once were.

The world will indeed loosen its grip on you, stage by stage, exactly as that message describes.

But Someone with an eternal grip has already made sure that goodbye was never the final word.

Every season under the sun eventually ends.

The One who placed eternity in your heart does not.

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