Gold Pocket Watch Season

If you’re younger than fifty, that headline won’t make much sense, but back in the “Leave It To Beaver” days, people tended to work for one company most of their career. When they retired after twenty-five or thirty years, they’d receive a gold pocket watch as a token of the company’s appreciation.

That’s not the case anymore. Depending on your worldview, the change is either due to the greed of soulless corporations who run off older employees to avoid paying retirement, or it’s the fault of a workforce more committed to being easily offended than to loyalty.

Either way, according to our friend, Chat GPT, the average corporate tenure of a baby boomer white-collar professional these days is 54 months. When you step down to Gen-Z’ers, it’s less than 24 months, and neither of those averages take into account the six-week job span of a typical food service employee.

I couldn’t have written this article much earlier in life because I knew few potential retirees. Today, I have friends who are retired and traveling the world. I also have friends who are retired and withering away inside their paid-for homes. More important, I have friends who are scared shitless about the prospect of retiring as well as friends who are excited about their upcoming departure from corporate life.

Full disclosure: I’m still working although I’m 69 years old — partly because I still enjoy what I do and partly because I like the extra income above the pittance Uncle Sam doles out from the kickback they’ve strong-armed me for since my fourth-grade paper route.

The biggest problem I see most people having with retirement is loss of identity. No matter how much we claim to serve a higher power or believe that worldly success is inconsequential, we’re B.S.ing ourselves.

I had what I now realize was the good fortune of seeing the company I built fall to pieces in the financial downturns of ’03 and ’08. I was one of those guys who would have insisted that it was only a way to support my family, but once the music stopped, Good-time Charlie got the blues and I had to make some serious reassessments.

So, what’s it all about? Are we just here to procreate and amass all the toys we can in seven decades? Are we complete failures if our lives did not mimic Mother Teresa?

All those great vacations we took – they’re just spent money. All those expensive clothes we bought – moth food. All those cool toys we purchased – they’re somebody else’s maintenance problem now (hopefully). All those hotties we once dated – look at ‘em now! Hell, it scares me to see myself in the mirror now. All those fond memories we made – fodder for dementia. Those are, one-and-all, what Os Guinness calls “weapons of mass distraction”.

But before you go hunting for a bottle of Bourbon and a straight razor, maybe there is a viable answer or, at least, maybe there’s a viable question. Perhaps all that stuff we wasted our first six decades amassing was really just a bunch of sign posts pointing us towards the bigger question of “What’s it all about?” Maybe it takes sixty-plus years just to realize how utterly transitory the things we once considered important really are.

If you were counting on me to provide the answer, you might as well resume the search for that wrist-cutting apparatus because my answers won’t work for your life. They only work for mine. I’m not saying there are no universal truths. I’m just saying you can’t get to ‘em by climbing up my ladder.

Maybe we start with “Why do I believe what I believe”? Hint: the question is not “What did life do to me that made me think this way?” It’s “Why did ‘I’ choose the responses to people and events that ‘I’ chose?” If we can be honest enough with ourselves to get to the bottom of that question, then we can get on to the hard questions. And maybe we can discover answers instead of empty rationalizations.

I actually happen to believe there are good and sufficient answers to the big questions. Maybe you agree. Maybe you disagree. Let’s have coffee and talk about it before we reach the end of our of runway. If you’re already retired, it’s not like you have anything else that critical to do tomorrow morning.

A meeting of great minds who think alike