Posted on 06/19/2019 7:23:18 AM PDT by Galatians328
I work like a maniac. But even if I stayed at it 12 hours a day, seven days a week, at some point my career would slow and stop. And when it did, what then? Would I one day be looking back wistfully and wishing I were dead? Was there anything I could do, starting now, to give myself a shot at avoiding misery—and maybe even achieve happiness—when the music inevitably stops?
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
A very LONG read that essentially says: Find something you love to do before retirement and then enjoy doing it after retirement. The unhappy retirees who I know are those who don't have anything to do all day and just sit at home hoping someone will come by who they can bitch to. If you're unhappy, it's your problem and you need to do something about it.
Speaking as someone who decidedly overworked and burned out - and speaking only about the excerpt - usually it is best to slow down and take longer to get where you want to go. Life is a marathon, not a sprint. Run slower, and stay at your best longer.
Hah! happened years ago. Just working for a paycheck and that is exactly what I told my boss after a 1.5% cost of living raise. ;-)
As long as the future remains open-ended, there is possibility, and where there is possibility, there is hope. Hope turns to hopelessness when the future is perceived as being as unchangeable as the past.
When you believe that a particular occurrence in the present will necessarily lead to certain future occurrences,you are generating a present-to-future cause-effect relationship between those occurrences. Doing X now will result in being happy in the future. Cause-effect relationships are part of the internal processes that are required to achieve desired outcomes.
I am at this point in my career where I feel there is nothing left to accomplish. I have no challenges other than to get out of bed and make it to the office in the morning.
There is plenty happening, but I am now on the sidelines of the action and feeling left out.
Time to move on and just enjoy life I guess.
Prepare to work for yourself by the time you reach 40. Start preparing while you are in college.
Good article, thanks for posting!
My contribution would be to recommend that men develop an absorbing hobby while they are still working hard professionally.
A hobby that they wish they could spend more time with.
Then one day they will get the chance to move from their old, absorbing work to concentrate on what they love.
The thread sponsored by Prozac™.
I disagree with this article. As a professional hit-man, I feel my body count is increasing every year as I enter dotage.
Who expects a really old guy to kill you with his jello cup?
Okay, my bet is that the man on the plane was Buzz Aldrin.
Yep. I burned out working in the corporate stream at 39. I started my own business and made it work for 20 years.
Now I finally got those chickens I’ve been wanting and I’m 22 chapters into my first book. Mr. GG2 and I are planning our little cottage industry for our immanent move to the mountains. Life is all about new horizons.
The problem is we don’t know when decline will happen or in what form. My view is do the best you can and if you don’t have the mental agility you once had, don’t worry about it. God still loves you. There’s no point in saying “i’m 60.My best engineering days are over.” You might still be a pretty good engineer but not what you once were. We don’t have to spend every moment in life on the peak. Somebody at 80 percent of their peak is still someone who is useful.
That’s what having Families is for.
But the Government decided to wage War on the Nuclear Family.
Couldn’t agree more.
I turn 66 early next year and will take full SS while continuing to work. I’ve been in IT since 1983 and contracting most of those years. It means I didn’t take many vacations and mostly did three day weekends, etc.
But next year I’ll start taking more time off to visit relatives around the country. And that’s because, in preparation for retirement, we moved from Seattle to A 32 acre “hobby farm” in central KY 8 years ago. It is 8 acres of “lawn” and the rest is woods, valleys and streams. I love to create paths and bike trails. It’s what I alrady do in much of my spare time. And I also can play bass in any band for any kind of music (except rap) and I teach Sunday School. I also am finally working on a large shop (I can build anything I want without a building permit in this county) and can do furniture refinishing, speaker building and other custom wood work. Once the mortgage is paid off (it should be pretty quick) I’ll quit my day job altogether and focus on all this other stuff that I greatly enjoy doing.
We’re even looking at getting a mini-van to tour the country for a month at a time. The fun part is that this is all very CHEAP.
but all studies in this area have found that the majority of successful start-ups have founders under age 50.
Hubby retired at 53, sat down, and never got up again. He is now disabled and I think a lot of it is due to not moving at all. I retired 7 years ago and have never stopped. I recently started a new biz simply because the idea was too good to pass on. I made my daughter and fave niece full partners with me because they are both younger and will be the face of the company. After about a year of running I expect to turn the company totally over to them with me just being the aye or veto vote.
It’s all in how you approach it.
My wife and I both retired ten years ago. She was a medical professional. I was self-employed, running two small businesses.
We never were idle folks, looking for something to do. We always had so much to do, that the difficulty became prioritizing what to do next.
We retired from the big city in Arizona and bought 30 acres in rural Florida. Discovering that the property taxes on bare land was going to take a big chunk out of our retirement each year unless we had an agricultural exemption.
So we decided to raise beef cattle. We bought two young heifers and a bull calf. By the time the heifers were ready to breed, we started building our herd to the thirty head we have now.
Building the farm up to raise cows meant, we had to build barns, build corrals, put in fencing, install water lines for stock tanks and over time buy tractors and other farm equipment to do the job.
We now have a fully operational, professional cattle operation that we love to work.
Our friends from Arizona want to know why we would take on all of this work in retirement instead of traveling. We both traveled the country and the world as military brats. Been there, done that.
When you get older (we're both in our 70s and healthy), if you have nothing to look forward to, nothing to get out of bed for and nothing you love to do, you will die. Simple as that.
Just recently, life has thrown us a new challenge. We have been awarded full-custody of our 2 year old granddaughter after CPS took her away from her mother for doing drugs. The little girl is our deceased son's but the mother is not kin. She has no one else to care for her. It's not her fault.
So now we have something new to look forward to, something to get up in the morning for and someone we love dearly to keep us going everyday.
Life is good in retirement.
I waited all my life to do the stuff i never had time for. Now I can do it. I have a thousand hobbies some of which I can make money at. I agree that if you just retire and sit around you will quickly deteriorate. My health is about the same as it was 20 years ago. We are rehabbing our house for sale right now. I am personally painting every wall in the house. It keeps you in shape.
I’m not much of a hobby person. I prefer projects. My boat keeps me pretty busy. I’m leaving Friday to stay til Tuesday to move the waste tank. Small job but requires time. Next will be doing the wood on the hand and bump rails. I just had a She Shed put in that needs finished inside because my granddaughter wants to kove into it. Insulation and beadboard for walls, carpeting, etc. I told her she has to help with the project. I like to stay on my boat for sometimes a week at a time and am always working on it. I travel. I just got back from a week visiting family in Arkansas and Oklahoma. Have a trip to Scotland planned for September. And I’ve been kind of busy getting the new biz started. I’m doing all this while hubby is laying in his recliner sleeping. I gave up on getting him to ‘move’ years ago and just go it all alone. I’ll quit when I’m either dead or my brain doesn’t work anymore.
I was a systems architect for the last years of my career, and frankly, it was a waste of my time. Those in power, particularly in government, do not want objective analysis and definition, as it is almost always at odds with their subjective beliefs and feelings. Plus, they refuse to do any operational analysis, for the same reason.
Typically, one to two years after rejecting the results of the systems architectural analysis, they realize that the SA was right and they were wrong, but they just throw more money at their bad solutions.
I retired and now am happy woodworking, restoring old woodworking machines, and spending quality time with my wife.
Those overpaid idiots can continue screwing up the world without me!
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