More speculation

About six years ago, I took an early retirement from the company where I had worked for over twenty years. For the next year, I took care of the house, including being point man for a kitchen remodel, making dinners, and cleaning, and went to the Y frequently. I read a lot, too, though not as much as I'd thought I would. At the end of the year, I was offered a job by a company that I'd always wanted to work for, and I took it. Three weeks later, I resigned, finding that while I still wanted to work for the company, I didn't want to do the frequent travel that working for them entailed. But I had found that I liked the idea of earning money again, and so I found a job with the Largest Software Company In The World. On the second day, I discovered that the job wasn't what I had thought it would be, and, true to the ethos of my first (and damn near only) company, where one of the dicta was that Bad News Did Not Improve With Age, I called my group's manager and told him that we seemed to have a mismatch. He was less than interested in helping to resolve this issue, but I stayed anyway.

Now I find myself in a position where I am between seven and twenty four months from retirement (seven if I bail as soon as I'm vested in their retirement program, and twenty four if I stay long enough to bring our savings over a certain magical number, and let my wife stop working in a relatively short number of years afterward). The decision on whether to retire soon or later has been on my mind, and as the job I'm in grows more onerous, I think about it more often. I'm hardly unique in that regard! I'm charmed by the prospect of not working, again, but also a little saddened and a little apprehensive. Saddened, because like a lot of people I derive much of my self image from what I do. Even though theres a goodly amount (including the nature of the job itself) that I'd gladly give up, I'm not sanguine about just - stopping. I still dream of greatness with this company. I know that the possibility of working with any of the people doing marvelous things is vanishingly remote, but while I'm here, I can at least be aware of them, and send them internal emails on occasion -- and they'll respond! Its the only contact I have with seriously bright people, and I'm reluctant to give that up. And apprehensive, because as things go even the later date would be an early retirement; I'd be stopping when I'm 58, which is several years before most people, and, if the Ownership Society comes to pass, decades before some. Thats a lot of time to have to fill up.

I've been asking myself what I want to do with all of that time. Some whimsical thoughts occur to me. I'd really enjoy learning a lot more about artificial intelligence, for example. The areas of expert systems, neural nets, pattern recognition, and all of that, are fascinating to me. I only understand them at a slightly deeper level than Popular Science, sometimes, and I'd like to know more -- to twitch aside the curtain and see how these things actually work, and how they're made to work. I'd like to learn how to identify where these tools, these products could be used, and then help to make it happen. I don't think that its realistic for me to have those aspirations, but I do.

I'd also like to know more about some areas of medicine. (I've been tickled for quite some time that we call the field where doctors work 'medicine'. It's like calling the field where carpenters work 'wood'. Though calling it 'health care' or some of the other clunky phrases that have come along is hardly better.) I'd like to know more anatomy -- what the diaphragm looks like, how a ligament is attached, how a shoulder works. And I'd like to know some biochemistry.I'd like to understand, if only in a general way, how drugs are designed. Like the computer area, some of this isn't realistic for me to think about, but I do anyway.

And I'd like to be good at portrait photography. I think that a good portrait -- one that is lit well, with expression and humanity evident in the subject - can be a delight. I'm not speaking so much of the technical details, but the creative act.

Its true that when I think abstractly about what I'd like to do, my thoughts are usually incoherent -- about at the level of what I thought when I asked myself that same question at the dawn of my employment years, and the best I could come up with was I'd like to do cool things. I still want to do cool things. I want to learn, and I want to apply what I learn. I have no interest in the 'classic retired' things -- hospital volunteer, crafts, trips to Our Nations Capitol. I suspect that image is outdated, but I sure don't see a lot of retired people studying medicine or pattern recognition. I want to be with the people who are doing that. That's fun. That's cool.

Dreams are a good thing.