one shovelful at a time

A year ago, I announced my retirement from regular paying work. I have spent the intervening time resting, reflecting, and generally goofing off. I set two rules for myself for this year: 1) With the exception of fulfilling the requirements of a dutiful househusband, I would not do anything just because it was something that someone expected me to do or because I felt like I should do it; I would only do things that I actually wanted to do. 2) I would not discuss my future plans with anyone other than telling them about these two rules.

The result is that I have played video games (well, really just a lot of one video game, Baldur’s Gate III), read a lot of science fiction, listened to a lot of music, watched a few highly recommended TV shows, spent time with friends, and practiced with my camera’s manual focus settings on my patient dog’s nose.

The general idea was that I wanted to clear my head of all of the expectations and habits that had accumulated over a few decades of working demanding jobs for other people. Now that the year is up, I’m releasing myself from the restrictions against doing “productive” work and talking with people about my future plans. This period of forced rest has allowed me to more clearly see—no, feel—what I really want to do, what I feel compelled to do.

For the next year or so, I’m going to focus on building and rebuilding a few things: health, social connections, and ability to write.

health: The exact numbers vary depending on whether we’re talking about bone density or lung volume or muscle mass, but a general reality is that past a certain age it becomes difficult to make improvements in various physical traits, and the rest of life is a decline from whatever peak one managed to attain. So, in an attempt to climb as high as I can before the big drop, I’m going to treat improvement in a few health metrics as my full-time job. Notably, I don’t really care about weight, since my focus on building muscle mass, bone density, flexibility, balance, and cardiopulmonary fitness will probably also diminish my body fat percentage, though I may end up heavier.

social connections: I could blame the time demands of various corporate jobs for letting my friendships wither, but the truth is worse. Each job that I worked over the past 30 years had its own special means of depleting my ability to be social, so I’ll just use my most recent job as a technical editor at Google as an illustration. Simplifying somewhat, my primary job was to review work that other people had put a lot of effort into and tell them how they could do it better. That is a very social job. Delivering that feedback in a way that built the person up instead of tearing them down meant knowing and understanding each individual, their domain, and the context in which they were doing the work. That might not be so bad for just a few people, but I did this work for several hundred different people in my 8 years at Google. Oh, and did I mention that I’m an introvert with social anxiety and a tic disorder that flares up under social stress? I could keep my shit together for some number of hours each day before I needed to flee the noisy open-office environment and find a quiet place to recover. Can you see how this job didn’t leave me with the energy to reach out to friends after work? Well, fortunately, that is all over for me. Now, I have the energy to reach out to a friend, ask them out for a very long lunch, and begin the process of getting to know each other again. (Of course, you can feel free to beat me to it. My schedule is open.)

ability to write: Nearly all of the money that I’ve ever made has come from writing or helping other people to write. So, I should have this down, right? Nah. You see, virtually everything that I’ve ever been paid to write is something that the readers needed to read so that they could do their jobs. I have never been paid for writing something that the readers actually wanted to read. That kind of writing requires different skills, different practice, different discipline, a different mindset. I intend to spend the next year deliberately practicing the craft of writing things that somebody other than me will want to read. Of course, as a wise man once said, a lot of what I make in this stage will be crap, but I’m going to put in the work. Of course, when I say “writing”, I also mean photography or motion graphics or whatever else suits the message or story that I’m trying to convey, which is why I’ve got to practice with this new camera.

I feel good about this phase of my life. There’s a feeling of momentum in the direction of being the person I want to be, doing the things I want to do, with the people I want to share it all with.