Now 32 and an at-home artist in the Hudson Valley, Morgane tells me, “There’s no retirement from here.”
It sounds contradictory – but makes perfect sense as she retraces the path to her pivot. “Out of university, I was recruited by a hedge fund and told myself: ‘This sounds like a job that will impress people.’ Within five seconds, I realised it was wrong but stuck it out.”
Seeking a plan that fit an “ambitious” narrative of what she was doing with her life, Morgane applied to law school. Within two weeks of landing at Yale, she felt it was equally wrong, yet was committed to a path towards a promising career. Her final semester coincided with the pandemic, so, being fully remote, Morgane moved in with her now-husband in New York City. “I rented a studio as a gift to myself before graduating – what I saw as a last hurrah to do the thing I really loved. Suddenly, I had all this time I had never given myself to paint. My work began to get good and exciting, and the world was so blown up, it felt like if I made this radical pivot, no one would notice me vanish. So I did.”
Upon graduating, Morgane was offered a position with a law firm, which, due to COVID, they agreed to postpone. “I took that year and ran hard at being an artist. When the year elapsed, it was impossible to imagine being anything else.” A friend in a more conventional corporate job told her he’d never taken an opportunity that didn’t involve an online application portal. “There can be a linear path from how you get from point A to point B, and you have to be the best of the people who apply through the system,” Morgane says to this.
“Art isn’t like that. It’s deeply relational. It’s about community building, putting yourself out there in a vulnerable way. With other careers, it can be clear what’s business and what’s personal, but in art, there isn’t that distinction.” As we get older, our circles inevitably narrow, but there’s something to hone in on when it comes to retirement: nurturing relationships.
Before Morgane made the leap, she and her husband talked about what life would look like if, instead of being two professionals, they’d be one, plus whatever she could make as an artist. “We spoke to a financial advisor and asked if we could do this,” she adds. Dr. Reid echoes what financial planners have long touted: start putting money away as early as you can. “The earlier you start saving, the better off you’ll be, because of the beauties of compound interest,” says Reid. “The same is true with the art of becoming. The earlier you learn to apply visioning to your life, the faster you embrace that ‘becoming’ transition to what you’re aspiring towards.”
“If I’m lucky, I’ll never ‘retire’,” says Morgane. “Had I become a lawyer, I’d be working towards a certain expiration date. My husband is a cybersecurity engineer, so he’s very aware of retirement. But this is my life. This is my identity, my vocation, my passion. I hope that I’m 98 years old and in the studio, painting with arthritic hands.”
