Tag: work

Reeling, in a year

Today marks a year since I retired.

Here’s one of the questions I get asked the most: do you have any regrets about retiring so young?

I have to bite back the glib answer, which is, man, do you even know me? I have regrets about everything. I’m pretty sure that there’s no major decision in my life I haven’t questioned furiously before, during, and after making said decision, for hours, days, months, or even years. I still feel bad about the way I answered some Very Important Questions1 when I was sixteen, and those were twenty-three years ago. Regrets? Yeah. Yeah, I have them. I have them all the time.

Another common question is this: does being retired make you happy?

(It’s worth taking a moment here to note that, while I’m never angry with people who ask me these things, they seem to be coming from a place of mild bewilderment that someone can retire before the age of forty without the excuse of being makes-cigar-wrappers-out-of-hundred-dollar-bills rich2. The world at large is still very confused by us lean-savings early-retirement types.)

And, to be honest, sometimes I’m not happy at all. I lead a pretty lonely life, and one of the biggest things I lost when I stopped having a job at a vibrant company was a large, easily-available social circle. Getting people together to hang out when outside of work is hard, and I still haven’t cracked that particular code a year in. I went from always having a person or two I could chat with in a moment of downtime to sometimes going for a week or two where the only people I speak to face-to-face are the cashiers at Walmart. They’re nice and all, but it’s not exactly high-level social interaction.

But.

Let’s change these questions around a bit, starting with the last one: are you happier, now that you’ve retired?

The answer to that question is an unequivocal yes. I had a rough time at work the last couple of years. The social aspects were great, never mind the food and the board games, but I didn’t find the job itself very satisfying, and could feel myself getting unhappier by the day. There were times when I had to take vacation for a week or so, not because I actually went anywhere–if you’ve read much here you know I’m not much of one for travel–but because I needed to get back the energy required to actually be able to show up for work again.

(There was a coworker of mine, a younger person who I regularly chatted with in regards to our careers. They were unhappy with their position, and I told them that they needed to grab hold of one of the many opportunities the company offered to move upwards and outwards, that being unhappy in a job was one of the most exhausting places to be in life, that they had years of working professionally ahead of them and they needed to make the best of them. Their usual response was: great advice, buddy, but have you ever thought of taking it for yourself? And they were right, of course. I was one of those jerks who didn’t practice what they preached.)

So, sure, some days I wake up and feel like I’ve made a poor decision… but most days I wake up and go: Yeah. Yeah. This is right. This is what I want to be doing right now. Am I happy? Maybe. Maybe not. Am I happier? Abso-freaking-lutely.

Let’s go back to that first question now, and take another stab at it: Do you have enough regrets about retiring early that you’d choose not to if given a chance to do it all over again?

And the answer to that question is as easy as the answer to the last: Absolutely not. I made the right decision then, and I’d make it again in a heartbeat if I had to. Retirement’s not regret-free, but nothing is, at least for me. That doesn’t mean I won’t change my mind in the future, of course, and one of the things I intentionally planned for is the ability to change my mind if I need to3. But regrets are a part of life, and every decision made is another decision unmade, every road traveled a path not taken.

And my footing is firm.

Weekly status update [0051/????]

The author stares silently at a calendar, a dazed look on his face.

  • Much of this week was spent watching HBomberguy’s Donkey Kong 64 charity stream for Mermaids. I read about it after-the-fact and am slowly catching up on it… but the stream’s close to 60 hours long, so even watching it at 1.25x (for the gameplay parts) and 1.5x (for the “just chatting parts”) is a whole lot of time. It’s been really good so far, though, and a pleasant change from the usual negativity and vitriol on the Internet.
  • Speaking of videogames, I’ve actually been playing them again quite a bit this week. I finally finished up Shining in the Darkness this weekend, played a bit of this and that earlier in the week, then settled in on trying to finish the PS4 remaster of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (or, as I like to call it, Assassin’s Creed 2.1). I made some serious progress in it, but am putting the game away for a day or two thanks to playing so much my right thumb hurts. I even played some online co-op Overcooked! 2, which was just as fantastic as I thought it would be.
  • We had a game night on Tuesday at Fercott Fermentables. It was just three of us, but we had a great time playing Aeon’s End, a quirky co-operative deckbuilding game. I liked it quite a bit more than I thought I would going in, and I actually had pretty high expectations. I also managed to play a pair of games of ConHex on Tabletop Simulator with a friend… which mainly just made me long to play more stuff on TTS more frequently.
  • I haven’t talked much about my diet since I’ve returned from Louisiana, but never fear: I’ve actually been sticking with it after the first few days of “travel is stressful and I don’t need this too” justification. (I mean, travel is stressful, but it’s still a justification for bad behavior.) I suspect I’ve taken off all of the weight I put on during my near-month back home, and maybe a little extra? I continue to not weigh myself due to the way that tends to mess me up, but pants sure seem to be looser…
  • …and speaking of food, I had dinner last night with one of my good friends and old coworkers. His last day at the company was this Thursday; he’s moving into the world of small business, helping his wife run a local veterinary clinic. I am extremely interested to see the similarities and differences with our experiences, although obviously there are a tremendous number of fundamentals that are already quite different for the two of us (family vs. single, working vs. not) so I don’t think they’ll actually be all that comparable. I wish him the best of luck, and we plan on having dinner on the regs to catch up, compare, and enjoy tasty Tex-Mex.

You walk away slowly.  He doesn’t seem to notice, his eyes still fixated on the flimsy cardboard-and-paper construction. “Hang in there!” it blandishes. Hang in there indeed. 

Weekly status update [0033/????]

What a week.

  • Saturday, Sunday, and Monday: the storm that didn’t really hit us.  I had thoughts.
  • Most of my weekend time–and, actually, most of my time during the week as well–was spent reading.  I think I read something like twelve novels in the last seven days; I know for a fact that I read three just yesterday.  It was nice.  I particularly want to note the three Seanan McGuire novellas that start with Every Heart a Doorway and the three Ben H. Winters novels that start with The Last Policeman.  They were all particularly pleasant reads.  I’m currently in the middle of Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, the first in another trilogy.  It had a bit of an impenetrable start, but I’m over halfway through it and enjoying it thoroughly now.
  • I also got back (at least temporarily) into watching television.  It’s Last Man on Earth and Brooklyn Nine-Nine in the morning, then the just-released season of Bojack Horseman and season two of Jessica Jones in the afternoon.  Both of those are almost done, though; I’ll move onto Luke Cage for sure, and probably finally start the second season of Fargo as well.
  • Several of my old coworkers (and some that would be new, were I still working) were in town this week, and I was invited to a pair of group events.  Those were nice, but honestly the best evening was Tuesday, which involved just three of us having a long conversation about science fiction over dinner at the best local Tex-Mex place.  It’s always nice to catch up with folks, but I do much better in small groups than I do in large ones, and I’m delighted that someone reached out to plan that dinner.  (Thanks, Mike!)
  • The downside of said dinner: despite getting through a dozen novels this week, my library stack actually grew (in word count, if not volumes) thanks to suggestions-slash-recommendations from that extended conversation. Sigh.
  • Puzzles provided a nice series of interrupts over the course of the week.  Not just for me, too; I had Amazon ship a fat stack of puzzle books to one of my cousins back home, who had expressed interest in them back when I visited in April, and spent a couple of hours on the phone over the course of the week helping her work through some of them.  She seems pretty hooked, which gives me a good feeling.  Puzzles are awesome.
  • Nothing exciting on the video game front, though; I’m mostly taking a break after the heavy Creeper World action from the past few weeks, just maintaining my dailies in the handful of free-to-play games I still muck around with.  I really, really need to put Let It Die to bed.

I’ll finish up my Cardpocalypse series this coming week.  I know my tiny readership isn’t big on commenting, but: this is your final chance to get me to cover anything you think I’ve missed.  So, uh, get on that, I guess?

Weekly status update [0008/????]

I’m writing this right before crashing out early for tomorrow’s trip; I plan on getting up at 5:30am and hitting the road by 6am so that I can get into Baton Rouge at something resembling a reasonable hour.  We’ll see how well I manage.

  • In preparation for the aforementioned trip, I picked up a Samsung Chromebook 3 from Amazon this week.  My full assessment will have to wait until I’m back, but so far I’m pretty impressed.  It even natively supports Colemak, which came as a pleasant surprise.
  • Speaking of which, my wrists are behaving quite a bit better… or, at least, they were, until I was lazy last night and didn’t put them on before going to bed.  Sigh.  I plan on wearing them for at least most of the day tomorrow, which should help some, but I’ve got to stop doing that.  It’s not doing me any favors.
  • Not a lot of gaming this week, other than the usual little stabs at the various free-to-play games you’ve gotta do every day to keep up with the grind.
  • Well, that’s not entirely true.  I had a couple of old coworkers/friends over on a whim yesterday afternoon, and we had a blast playing video pinball (both Pinball FX 3 and The Pinball Arcade) along with the perennial Towerfall Ascension.
  • I went to a farewell dinner for one of my old teammates; they’re moving to Raleigh, which makes me sad to see them go, but I suspect they’re going to be a lot happier there from a social perspective.  It’s rather too quiet here for most people.
  • (Re)read some more of the Culture series, watched a few more episodes of The Punisher, solved more puzzles.  Steady state, in other words.

Now to try and get some sleep.  I usually have a lot of trouble sleeping the night before traveling, but I hope that won’t be the case this evening, particularly given how much less stressed I am about this trip than, uh, any other one in living memory.  I guess it’s time to find out!

A question of time and space

We had our second “folks from work” game night last night.  This time it was where we wanted to have it the first go-round, Fercott Fermentables.

The difference was striking.  Fercott has a fantastic, laid-back vibe; we played in the far back last night, but the next time I think we’re going to colonize the nice wooden table in the front, which has more room for a larger game like Power Grid or Concordia, and more seating for the more casual games that we could play as well.  They have lots of beers, if that’s your thing, but also a surprisingly solid selection of what I call “hipster drinks,” only half-snarkily.  I drank two Shirley Temples and a really good root beer.

I’m glad that my discomfort the time before came from the circumstances of venue and not just a general “I can’t handle playing games in public” sort of situation.  I should have known better; I used to spend almost every evening at the local game store, after all.  But I’m now actively looking forward to our next game-playing venture, something I couldn’t say the last time.

Also, Power Grid continues to hold up, more than a decade after its release.  Also also, I won, I think for the first time.  I promise that that’s not why Fercott left such a positive impression.  Well, mostly promise.

Down where we belong

We had our first real “game night” outside of the workplace tonight since I retired, at a local bar and restaurant.  It was nice; given that we took over a prime table at 4pm and didn’t leave until after 8pm, the venue showed remarkable restraint in not kicking us out.  But I have to admit that it was also a pale shadow of the gaming I did at work.

Part of it, a big part, is comfort.  Bars are loud, and I’m a little hard of hearing, so they’re never ideal venues in the first place.  I also don’t drink, so the prime benefit of holding game night in such a place is lost on me.  But these are honestly superficial issues.  The real difference in comfort is, for lack of a better term, a complete difference in feeling.  In belonging.

At work, we have a really nice gaming table that a coworker and I (mostly him) got made to order.  It’s in a well-trafficked area, so sitting at the table is a good way to say hello and/or goodbye to lots of coworkers and friends as they come and go.  Some people linger a moment, watching the action, even occasionally asking a question or two about the game we’re playing.  I had a specific place where I almost always sat, a place where I put the inevitable bottle of Hint Water.  It was in a place I knew, surrounded by people I knew.  It felt like I belonged there.

The vast majority of times I’ve played games at other people’s houses, I’ve felt a similar sense of belonging.  There, it’s less about familiarity; instead, the sort of warmness of being somewhere that people want you, with food and laughs and the coziness of a home well lived-in, engenders that sort of feeling of belonging.  Just this Monday, one of my old coworkers invited me over to play games.  Even though I had never been to their house before, I immediately felt at home.  I felt that I belonged.

We’ll have to see if doing this sort of thing regularly in more public venues changes my view.  Unfortunately hosting at my house is a non-starter, as it was too small to hold a table for gaming even before I packed it to the rafters with board games, and using other people’s homes is usually a scheduling nightmare.  In my experience, it doesn’t take much difficulty to stop things like “rotating game nights” to fail just as soon as they start.  I just hope it doesn’t fall totally by the wayside because that’s the easiest option, and I know it’s at least somewhat on me to try and make sure that doesn’t happen.

I’ll let you know.

COBRA commanding

I signed up for COBRA today, which was one of the big bits of Adulting I still needed to do with regards to my retirement.  For those of you unfamiliar with it, COBRA allows you to maintain the health insurance coverage that you had at a previous employer.  You have to pay for all of it yourself, rather than the (extremely) subsidized rate that most companies offer, so many people don’t opt for COBRA.  Instead, they go with personal insurance from one of the exchanges or–depressingly often–opting for no insurance at all.  Fortunately I can afford the extra expense, so I’ll be sticking with COBRA at least until the next ACA enrollment period.

When I’m a little more comfortable with the format of this blog and the state of the readership, maybe I’ll go on a long rant-slash-ramble about how utterly ridiculous it is that the number one deciding factor in my early retirement was the state of the gorram healthcare system here in the United States, not anything so practical as amount of money saved or whether I was ready to retire.  But not today.

Before I actually made the commitment, it was easy to think of retirement as a sort of bright line, a single Rubicon to cross: one day you’re working and the next day you aren’t.  But what I’ve come to realize is that it’s a long series of much smaller Rubicons that you continue to cross, one after the other.  The first was actually tendering my resignation, many months ago.  Then there was the hustle near the end of my tenure at my job to actually get everything turned back in, all of my paperwork in order, and all that.  My last day was a big one, of course, but not nearly the last.

And then that first Monday, where I woke up and realized, huh, I’m not going into work today.  Or maybe ever again.  And then this past Monday, the second one, where that happened all over again. A bunch of small realizations that a bunch of people I used to interact with on a near-daily basis are going to be much harder to see on the regular.  And now this.

I know that doing my taxes–by which I mean using a professional for the first time in a decade because holy moly are my taxes gonna be complicated this year–is another big upcoming river to cross.  But I’m more curious as to what the others will be, the ones I don’t yet know of, haven’t yet thought of.

An oblique reference to that Simple Minds song

I’m sitting at home, shivering; I didn’t bother turning the heat on, because I thought I would be throwing up a quick WordPress install, dashing off a quick blog post, and then heading immediately to snuggle under several layers of blankets to protect me from the North Carolina winter.

Sigh.  Turns out there really isn’t such a thing as a “quick WordPress install.”  Mea culpa.

Anyhow, I’m writing this the night before my last day of work.  I’ve been at my current job for slightly more than five years, and I’ve made a lot of friends there.  (And no enemies, as far as I’m aware, although that’s the sort of thing that it’s easy to be oblivious about.)  Deciding to leave was simultaneously one of the easiest and hardest decisions of my life.

On the one hand: I’ve been planning on this early retirement thing for years.  YEARS.  And working in the tech industry is a sure-fire way to accelerate that sort of plan, especially if you’re a somewhat thrifty single person such as myself.  In addition, my excitement at doing my job has been declining for a while, to the point where it was starting to impinge upon my performance, which meant it was time to Make A Decision, something I had been putting off for as long as I could.  And that decision ended up being pretty easy: when you’ve been planning on doing a thing for a long time, why not do that thing?

And yet.  Never mind the free food, the camaraderie, the ability to learn about cool new things way before the rest of the world sees them.  There’s something deeply satisfying and invigorating working in a high-energy high-skill environment, where just about everyone you interact with is smart as hell, challenging you on a daily basis to learn, to be a better person, to understand the way everything works just that little bit better than before.  My previous job was at a university; there, I could sometimes just glide through an entire day, interacting only with the UNIX systems I maintained and my regular lunch-time card game crew.  Not so much here.

There are a lot of unknowns still.  How will I handle simply not seeing people for days at a time?  I keep telling everyone that it’s crazy to “be bored” in this modern era of video games and, you know, the Internet, but will I actually be able to stave off ennui?  I’ve got plans to polish up one of my many novels and try to get it published; will it turn out that, as much as I enjoy writing, I simply can’t handle the editing/re-drafting process?

I’m not a person who deals well with change, and I’m changing just about everything about my life effectively overnight.

This blog, too, is a change.  I’ve never been able to write one consistently, although I’ve tried over the years; I had thought about bringing one up as I neared my planned retirement, then never followed through on the idea until now.  Enough people have asked me over the past week about how they could keep up with my plans that I figured, what the hell.  Surely I’ll have enough time when I’m retired to actually post something on the regular, right?  If nothing else, it’s an excuse to flex my writing muscles at some time other than during NaNoWriMo.  (Knowing me, it’s likely to also be an excellent way to procrastinate.  I could teach a master class in productivity as procrastination.)

I’m excited, and terrified, and excited all over again.  Perhaps we can see how it all works out together.