Vindicated far more than bored...
by Randy in Vinton
I was "forced" to retire 19 days before my 66th birthday last year. So, for the record, I started working full time, the day after graduation from high school, Friday 06/06/69.
In those fifty years of blue-collar labor, I racked up nearly 60 employers. So I am the first to admit I have a problem with "authority figures" defined, by me, as those who with such convenience and ease confuse their authority with superiority, with being "better" than everyone else. Blame my generation, the boomers, for that shift in things.
My point, however, is that true "old age" begins the first time you hear yourself talking to someone else and the words "Back when" comes out of your mouth. At that second, you are admitting being witness to a world that has changed and you, regrettably, have been pushed to the side. In that regard, I've been "old" for, oh, at least thirty years.
So yes, count me in with the others who view retirement as pure boredom. At the same time, however, work, labor, "employment" of any kind, remains the single-most boring thing I ever did in my life.
So I have indeed paid my dues in every sense of the world and perhaps it is a bit morbid and pathological, but there is a certain serenity that comes in having nothing but time to watch those younger generations, oh so much more educated than myself, repeat the mistakes of the past.
Sorry, but those days of "thirty years and a pension" vanished, in my lifetime. And the last thing I want, in these "last years" of my life, is a continued association with "those people".
So I will avoid, like the plague, going anywhere where those "happy retirees" like to hang out. I prefer the happy solitude of the soul, here in the privacy of my home.
