Rant #3,066: Release Me

How was your Groundhog Day?

No matter what the little critter said, mine was busy, busy, busy, and that will extend into today, my latest personal day of hell.

I lost my full-time job more than three years ago, yet I find that I am busier now than I ever was.

How can that be? I am supposed to be retired … or semi-retired.

But what with work and my other family responsibilities, the time just melts away each and every day.

Today, I have to take my son to work …

Then, I have to go to get my allergy shots, 20 miles there, and 20 miles back (this imbecility still irks me, but it appears to have no positive end result for me) …

Then I have to buy myself a new watch—yes, I still wear/use a wristwatch—as after a little bit more than three years, the thing finally gave out on me …

Then, I have to go and buy some supplies for my computer, including paper, an ink cartridge, and a new thumb drive (I keep the receipts to try to lessen my taxes, as it is all work related) …

Then I have to go pick up my son from work …

Then I have to go with him to pick up my mother at the local Jewish Community Center (JCC), which isn’t really local at all, but wherever it is, she takes a class geared to her mental state right now, so I am glad that she is going to this group, as it gives her something to do outside of the house, even though she usually doesn’t remember a thing what they talked about …

Then, after I try to fit into the day my work, and then lunch and then dinner, I have to take my son to his evening basketball scrimmage, which honestly is probably the most “relaxing” thing I will do all day.

I guess all of this is better than just sitting at home doing absolutely nothing … and today is Social Security pay day, so I have that to look forward to too.

But this is not the “retirement” that I envisioned when I was a younger person.

I thought retirement was when you sit around, put your feet up, and do only what you want to do, and if that meant doing absolutely nothing, then so be it.

When I thought that way, as a society, that is pretty much what retirement was; you could sit around and do nothing, you could take on a small job to keep you active; you could play golf or smoke your pipe if that is what you wanted to do.

After working full-time for 50 or 50 years, you earned it.

But even though retirees still deserve it, there is no way that they can do this anymore.

Not with inflation, not with a recession (I don’t care what the Feds say, we are in a recession brought on by record-setting inflation), and you just can’t live on Social Security, not with prices of everything going right through the roof.

I remember that when my daughter was young, we used to go to McDonald’s every time I saw her. She loved the place at the time, and it was a really good place to connect with her, since I did not see her every week.

I remember that I used to always see what I defined as “little old ladies” working in the fast food restaurant, and I mean, in every McDonald’s that we went to—from Queens through Nassau County and into Eastern Suffolk County—and I used to wonder, “Why are they killing themselves at this age?”

Now I know; they weren’t “killing themselves,” they were there out of necessity, a necessity that I did not understand until I lost my own job all those years later.

Very few of us can fully retire today.

Even if you retire on your own—something that I never got the chance to do—there are challenges at not bringing in a full-time salary anymore, and you have to kind of work around it and do the best that you can with whatever money you are bringing in.

For instance, what with my Social Security and my remote job, I literally get paid once a month.

In other jobs that I had over the decades, I got paid either every week or every other week.

Now, it is much more difficult to budget yourself when you get paid just one time a month, in particular on a day like today, where I know I will be spending more than $100 for the things I need that I listed above.

And when you get to the last week of the month, you almost count the minutes until you get paid again.

And remember, not only do I get paid once a month, but I get paid at about 50 percent of what I made as a full-timer … and if I was still working full-time, I might be making two-and-a-half to three times what I am making now, so it makes it all much more difficult to budget getting paid once a month and getting paid much, much less than I should be bringing in.

And knowing that the government continues to regulate the amount of pay I can get, since I had the audacity at retiring early … that really gets my goat.

It is not like I go down to my last dollar by the end of the month—far from it, I am happy to say—but it makes life a little more difficult when you begin to approach that level that kind of makes you a little queasy.

So that is where I stand today, a retiree—a semi-retiree really—who doesn’t feel anything like what I thought a retired person would feel like when I was in the midst of carving out my career.

I wish I could really retire at this point—I have been in this position for more than three years already, so if no one wants me as a full-timer anymore, I have accepted my plight to an extent—but it is not in the cards for me or for probably millions of other people in the same boat that I am in.

Even if you despise your job, cherish it for as long as you can, because you will find that when you retire, you will be lucky to get that proverbial gold watch for your efforts, and there is absolutely no gravy train on the other side of the rainbow when you hang it up.

Have a great weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.