One year Update

September, 2008 :

Culture Shock

I had observed that working at the Landing Gear emporium was a daily “grind” of eight hours of essentially doing very little or “enough” to pacify our so called superiors. The time spent at work, and travelling to work, was just waste. The average guy, dreaming about retirement has grand thoughts of escape, that the grind would stop and they’d be free to do whatever they want.

I stepped into this retirement thing with no expectations, didn’t know what I would do, except of course, discarding my peon status. It was new territory.

The feeling from day one is that you are on holiday, the strange effect is that you know that there will be no “end of the week” feelings and that it is open ended. This is just one of the strange feelings about retirement and a lot is down to the programming that we have had since primary school.

A second strangeness is that of guilt, this is a funny one and both of us have felt it. This is the conditioning I think, you feel some (not a lot) guilt about just making up your own mind about everything, waking up when you want, doing what you want and yes, not working for a living.

The thirty odd years of being rewarded is over, and whatever “work” you do for yourself is rewarded by achievement and nothing to do with cash, yes, you can save cash in various ways by being smart, but the paycheck has gone, which in itself is odd. The upward slope of accumulation has ended, and probably for the first year the pot stays the same because you don’t make a dent. However, you are very concious that the responsibility of money preservation has not ended and at some point the draw down will start.