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Retirement

When I was 16, I worked more hours a week than I do now. Younger people may not know this, but when I was in high school, the minimum wage was somewhere around $3.75. Then again, the dollar sure did seem to stretch farther back then. When I graduated high school, I immediately started working full time, then at the end of the summer of 1989, I started roofing. my hourly pay was dreadful because I was working 7 AM - 5 PM, but I loved it. A few months later I would get a substantial raise. I worked there, at that rate, for a little more than six years. I was making more money per year then than I am now. A lot more.

Over the years I've had some decent and not so decent jobs. Some paid well, some paid terribly, and some paid an outrageous amount, but couldn't supply me with enough hours to call it a career. Come to think of it, I've never had a career because I've never stayed in any job other than childcare for longer than six years. Not even the same field. I do and I don't regret my choices in life, but I do know working with kids has been the most rewarding experience of my life. Without being morbid, there have been times where it's been the sole purpose I felt I needed to exist. This blog isn't about that.

Being friends with lots of men and women in police, fire, and other civil service professions, I have witnessed a lot of retirements. Some, many years before the customary 65. Let me take a moment to say how ridiculous the 65 requirement for retirement is. At 65, you've spent over one-quarter of your life, possibly as much as a third, educating yourself with the sole purpose of working. You then spent the following two-thirds to seventy-five percent of your life working to provide for yourself, your family, and possibly leave your kids with a little more than you started with. For what? To "enjoy" life as life starts to be taken away from you? Americans live, on average, to the ripe old age of 78.6, meaning roughly 82% of one's life is spent learning the skills to work, then applying them. To put that into context, someone who works a nine-to-five and has three weeks of vacation and sick days works about two-thirds of the time over those years. Wouldn't it only be fair that we retire at an age that would give us a final third for enjoying? Retiring at 50-55 seems like a more sensical approach to life. Honestly, with all the disease, accidents, and murders in the country, maybe we need some more time to enjoy the sanctity of a happy, quiet life.

Which leads me to my own adventure. It has dawned on me that I have not fit this mold and some may think I have lived a nice, easy, entitled life, but the reality is, financial independence is something I barely achieve. I've done for others and paid for it with my future and others have done for me and allowed me to get by during these times. I am going to be Fifty next summer and I want the end of my life to be happy. I don't have enough money to make next week so, so this may prove trying. I have wasted money on a social life over the years because I thought friends and family were more important than anything. This still could be argued, but not by me. I look at my current situation, and I don't mean this metaphorically, but in a completely literal sense. At this very moment. Sitting watching the sunrise, hot cup of Bustelo, typing at a patio table on my landlord's deck, watching Swag on his morning hunt. I do this every morning the weather permits and if I won millions of dollars, it's what I would do. Just someplace else.

In six weeks, I will be moving. I do not know where. I do not know if my next locale will afford me this morning pleasure. I do not know if I will be more alone than I am now. I do not know what tomorrow brings and for most of my life, this has been how it is. And yet, we live through all these routines and accept them as our lives. We call it happiness, but I've long argued we're a society that covents not any real form of happiness, but simply being content. The two kids and white picket fence has been sold to us as happiness, but we omit the sixty-five years it takes to pay for this, for it to finally be ours. Is that happiness?

I often think my visions of happiness are simply my mind conforming to what I have now, but the reality is, I've given up on having. Many years ago, I stopped collecting possessions. Even the word, and it's various definitions, is ironic. I don't want any more than what I need and as I said previously, both within these lines and in other posts here and elsewhere, I sometimes wonder if that is out of a change in my world perception or my acceptance of my self-inflicted impoverishment. I do know one thing, whether it is tomorrow or ten years from now, waking up early to drink coffee and watch Swag scamper through the grass is pretty much all I need. It would be a nice way to spend the last of my days, whether there be a few or decades left, but I know, the real world starts soon. One of these days, if I truly want what I say, I will have to join it. For now, I'll just take another sip and smile at a creature who shares this dream.

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