My brain has been coming to grips with some odd things lately. For most of my professional life my mindset has been: what’s the next thing I really should learn in order to improve myself, and when I say improve myself I generally mean “make myself more marketable for the job market.” Y’know, I need to learn another programming language, or get good using some tool or something. Lately I’ve started wondering if maybe I don’t actually need to keep doing that.
I make lots of plans but never get around to executing them. By the time my work day is done I just want to chill and relax. Watch TV, play a video game. Have a beer. Nothing the least bit productive in any of that.
For years I’ve carried around low-grade guilt that I’m not working harder to make more money so that I have more security. I’m not talking “buy a new yacht” money. I’m talking “not being one disaster away from being broke”.
Everywhere you go online you’re bombarded (or at least I am) with offers to teach me how to code better, how to learn AI, how to improve this, that and the other thing. Get smarter, get more marketable, make more money, work more!
Recently, though, I’ve started coming to terms with some truths. I am 65 years old. Almost 66. Every day the news is full of people younger than me who have died recently from one disease or another. I could be gone tomorrow and it’s probably like a 50-50 chance I’ll still be here in 10 years. And I very much doubt I’ll still be working in 10 years, at least not in my current job. Maybe I’ll be one of those old folks stocking the shelves at Walmart or something, but I doubt I’ll be a 75 year old web developer.
This is just reality, not trying to sound like I’m throwing a pity party for myself!
But here’s the good news that comes with that. I’m getting close to being done. I don’t NEED to continue to improve my skills all that much. If I WANT to, I certainly can and will. But I can let go of “I should” completely and not feel guilt around that. If I want to spend my free time gaming, or hell, napping, why not? I don’t have kids that I’m ignoring. Don’t even have a pet. PartPurple is always busy doing her stuff and I’m pretty sure she is far from feeling ignored. We both work from home so we’re both in each others business all day most days.
This wasn’t a lightning bolt of a realization. It’s something I’m still orbiting, getting closer and closer to really accepting that when I’m not working I don’t really have to be doing anything I don’t want to do [setting aside, y’know, personal grooming, keeping the apt clean, paying bills… basic adulting].
Let me tell you, it’s a weird feeling and a very ‘light’ feeling. All this self-imposed stress and guilt is slowly, slowly melting away.
So I guess there is a silver lining to getting old, after all.
I’m curious though — has anyone else felt something like this? Either the pressure to improve or better yet, the relief of accepting that you are enough as you are.
[A note on the AI used in this post: the header image was generated at Night Cafe using Seedream 4.0. It’s a representation of how I’d like to spend my final days. Sitting on a beach like a piece of driftwood, drinking rum and taking it easy.]
I’m younger than you, but only by a little, and most of my days are spent saying “I don’t want to die doing this.” I have other things I’d like to do. Write. Develop more games. But work is taking up all the time I could be spending doing creative things, because after work, well, there’s dinner and housework and family stuff and plinking away at my mandolin while my partner and I watch random YouTube videos.
I want more of the time left to me to be mine.
You are like the smartest person I know so I don’t even know what else you’d have to learn to keep yourself marketable, anyway!
But yeah those after work hours just melt away so quickly.
I opted out of any kind of career structure while I was still in school. I went to university for two reasons: to keep people off my back and to avoid having to get a job. I graduated with a degree in English and went to work in a comic shop for a year at less than I would have got on social security. After that I did a three-month training course in programming, did one interview for a job that would use it, didn’t get it and took an unrelated job in Insurance instead. Stayed there three or four years before quitting and doing temp work for a year or two. Got taken on permanently in one of the temp jobs, doing nothing to do with anything I’d trained for and stayed there a few years before taking voluntary redundancy. Took a year off and wrote two novels I never did anything with, then took a part-time job in a bookshop that ended up being full-time.
By then I was in my late thirties. After a few years I got made redundant again, not voluntarily this time, took half a year off, then went back to work in another branch of the same bookshop, where I’ve been ever since, working all kinds of variations of full and part time. In all that time the only things I did to increase my skills were the computing course and a year of insurance exams, none of which I ever used.
Now I only work two days a week and since I’m on a state pension I don’t really need to do even that. I just quite enjoy it and it gets me out of the house. The weird thing, though, as I’ve said before, is I feel I had *much* more time to do the things I wanted to do when I was working longer hours. Back then, I’d come home and feel 100% entitled to do absolutely nothing useful at all. All the years I spent playing MMORPGs 30-40 hours a week were the years I was working full time. I’d play all evening, every evening and most of the weekend.
These days, I feel like I ought to be doing “something useful” a lot of the time because I have all those hours free. Even the huge word-count I build up on the blog and the hundred songs I made with AI have more to do with feeling I need to use my time “productively” now I’m not working much than they do with indulging myself in something I enjoy. I find it very difficult, for example, to sit and watch a two-hour movie because it feels like there must be more useful things I could be doing! Semi-retirement has certainly not turned out to be the lazy option I thought it would. I dread to think what it’ll be like when I retire altogether. I’ll probably have less time to do stuff just because I feel like it than I did thirty years ago…
I think I’d be pretty happy retired, but I’m not sure how full retirement will ever happen for me. I have Social Security and a tiny 401K that’ll get me through maybe a year and then I’ll have to figure out how I’ll live. I guess in a 1 room apartment somewhere eeking out an existence and living on a lot of beans and rice.
So more likely when I lose my ‘profession’ job I’ll have to get some kind of minimum-wage work somewhere that is willing to exploit desperate old people.
At that point I might just prefer to send my energy back into the cosmic whole via a the big sleep, though we’ll see if I still feel the same when the time comes!
Since I was 16 or so, I’ve been out of work for 3 months one summer, but I’m so terrible with money that here I am, end of life and broke. No one to blame but my younger self, though. Geez, this came out depressing. But I don’t feel depressed about it…it’s just how things are.