Avoid people with bad juju but do everything else that interests you in moderation. Read more books, serf less net.
I retired 6 years ago at 61. In my youth, I used to volunteer for everything - now, they all can kiss my backside.
“Avoid people with bad juju”
the other thing i enjoy most about “retirement”: having the ability to almost totally avoid people i don’t care to be around ...
serf>surf
Avoid bad JUJU. I think that is the best part of it all. I loved what I did, solving problems and creating new ways of doing things better and teaching people willing and able to learn. I’m a hard core engineer with a lot of hard work nuts and bolts experience at the coal face. What I don’t miss though is needless drama that wasted lots of motion and created lots of problems. That is just the way people are. Just a few of the things I remind myself I don’t miss:
Three hours of windshield time every work day
Type As and want to bes and later female types of the same kind. It wasn’t the want to get things done type A so much as the posturing to prove who has the biggest package. Like bulls in my pasture.
Arguing passionately and bitterly about how to do something that accomplishes the same thing because it is your way. If it will work well leave it up to the guy who has to get the job done. There are a lot of people who never understand that they are just not that important.
How can so many people see the very same set of facts and draw so many different conclusions? Experience and agendas. That is how. I wish I had a nickel for every manager that got bit once upon a time and swears he will never do _____ again and it does not matter one whit that he does not understand the reason why it happened or why it probably won’t happen again.
Turf battles and posturing
Bullshit budget battles where some SOB wants something done for nothing. Good, Fast, Cheap... Pick two and let’s get on with it. This includes champagne taste on a beer budget.
Easily bruised egos leading to vindictive actions.
It was good that I was a consultant for the last half of my career, a guy hired for what he knew and ability to get things done. I was able to avoid or live on the edges of most of the social engineering stuff and my world was much better for it. However, it was becoming unavoidable near the end of my tenure. I would not allow myself to be in any situation with a female without several witnesses. I needed to get out when I did before I told someone what I really thought more than I showed it already. Expecting everyone to do what they said they would do and calling them out on it when they didn’t made lots of them really really angry, so did calling out liars, cheats, thieves and excuse makers.
People who thought they needed to be informed but never understood and just didn’t want to be left out.
I could tolerate incompetence and even laziness so long as I could find it something harmless to do since 20% of the troops do more than 80% of the worthwhile work.
That is a start of my list of bad JUJU but just about everything falls into those and an even smaller set of categories of mostly just little minded and insecure average people.
One day my hired hand here at the farm was telling me some who hit John story about a guy who lost it all because he got too full of himself. I held up my hand to stop, walked out in the barnyard, motioned him to follow me. I pointed down the road and asked him what he saw. The front gate to the farm is what I was pointing at. I told him all the troubles of the world that aren’t mine have to be invited past the front gate and this was not one of them. I’m trying to hold on to that in my retirement. I’m still struggling with my new life. Thank the Lord I have lots of things to do that I enjoy other than my previous work.