The FILE Movement: Why Child-Free Adults Are Choosing to 'Live Early' Instead of Retiring

A couple in their 40s runs playfully down a street in Oaxaca, Mexico. He carries a camera.

There’s a growing number of people rethinking retirement, not because of Social Security changes or longer lifespans, but because of something far more personal: They don’t have children, and increasingly, they don’t plan to.

In a way, they’re following a path not unlike Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, the 20th-century literary power couple that famously chose a child-free life and built a partnership around freedom, intellectual work and self-directed purpose.