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Retirement is Where Momentum Goes to Die
Momentum, Space, and the Refusal to Power Down
Michael Kennedy
January 25, 2026
In partnership with
Retirement? What's that? Definitely not an afterthought for an Athletic Entrepreneur.
Not because I’m wealthy—I’m not. Probably never will be. But because my mind is too active, my curiosity too alive, and my sense of the future too vivid to imagine voluntarily stepping into a life built around slowing down.
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Every day, I frequent X spaces and have discussions with people who are thinking forward at planetary scale. I’m not talking about poliTRICKS. I’m talking about AI, rockets, satellites, infrastructure—about what comes next. Reading about SpaceX launches, Starlink deployments, and long-term visions of humanity beyond Earth—often from voices like Elon Musk—does something subtle but powerful to my nervous system.
It gives me a future to look toward.
I’ve already traveled most of this planet. Basketball gave me that. Different countries, cultures, rhythms of life. It rewired me to expect movement. But space—that’s still untouched. We’re not there yet. And the fact that we’re trying matters more than whether it happens in my lifetime.
I’d love to live to 100. I’d love to see us go to space in a real way. I’d love—selfishly—to go myself, even if that’s just a dream. But dreaming at that scale keeps me alive in ways no retirement fantasy ever could.
It keeps me excited.
It keeps me working out.
It keeps me creating.
When your imagination points forward, your body follows.
This is something retirement culture never accounts for. It assumes people want rest more than they want wonder. But wonder is fuel. The desire to see what happens next—to witness something unprecedented—creates a quiet urgency that stabilizes the mind and sharpens the body.
That’s why I create so much space-inspired work. Not aliens. Not fantasy. Machines, motion, velocity, purpose. Ships moving forward. Systems in transit. You can see it across my AI portfolio, my short-form videos, and now increasingly on TikTok through the Athletic Entrepreneur account.
My TikTok following is small. for now—just a few people—but it’s alive. The videos move. Four to five thousand views isn’t unusual. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because the work carries energy. And the energy comes from an active, curious, forward-looking mind.
Retirement doesn’t fit into that picture.
Because retirement, as it’s commonly practiced, isn’t just the absence of work. It’s the absence of orientation. No next frontier. No pressure to adapt. No reason to train the body for future demands.
And most people don’t just stop working when they retire. They stop working out. They stop stressing the system. They stop distributing energy throughout the day. Sitting replaces movement. Comfort replaces friction.
That combination is devastating over time.
The Athletic Entrepreneur framework I’m building is a rejection of that model. It’s about energy distribution—working while we work out, training in fragments, staying metabolically and mentally engaged throughout the day. It’s about refusing the false trade-off between productivity and physicality.
Athletes understand this instinctively. So do builders and creators. Momentum isn’t something you earn and then abandon. It’s something you protect.
That’s why the idea of retirement never resonated with me. Not because I’m afraid of stopping—but because I’m deeply invested in seeing what happens next. In technology. In creativity. In humanity’s reach. In my own capacity to adapt.
I don’t need a guaranteed ending.I need an open horizon.
So no, I don’t have a retirement plan. I have skills. Curiosity. Mobility. A body I still train. A mind I still challenge. And a future I’m genuinely excited to witness.
That’s enough.
Because the real danger isn’t aging.
It’s running out of reasons to look forward.
And as long as there are rockets launching, ideas forming, and worlds—literal or metaphorical—still left to explore, I’m not powering down.
I’m staying in motion.
