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Back to the Forum Archives On September 24, 2004, I turned 74. I did not feel one bit different than I did the day before. I felt okay. I actually felt better than I did on October 1, 1992. That was the first day of my graduation from Ford Motor Company. Ford called it my retirement. For me it was a graduation. That final year at Ford was my final class in the school of hard knocks. I did graduate and I survived it. At the end of this September, I will have been out of that school for 12 years. Except to stay connected to a couple of friends, I have never looked back. That is not to say I never had any nightmares. Heck, I still have nightmares about my elementary schooldays. As to the nightmares, in all of the schools I attended, including Ford Motor Company, everything was not a bowl of cherries. Ford was better than highschool and highschool was better than grade school, but none of it was as great as it could or should have been. What made it bad was the inept people who had power over me. Now, I am done with all of that. One promise I have made to myself about that is I will never be subject to inept management again. I will never work for someone else again. I will not be subject to the whims and caprice of some blowhard who thinks he knows how to manage people. This does not mean I will never do useful things again. I seriously believe my survival is dependent upon my being interested in life and doing useful things. That is why I have never talked about being retired, only about graduating. It is a matter of attitude. It is why am I still living and active at 74. In a very real way, I am still attending the school of life and remaining interested. I am still learning and, I believe, contributing. I reject out of hand the notion of retirement. I reject out of hand the notion that anyone has a right to not contribute. I know a number of people who think they are going to retire and do nothing. They talk about kicking back, fishing, golfing , and taking life easy. I have know a number of people who have actually attempted to do that. I every case I know about it did not work out well. They ended up from feeling just uneasy to feeling downright depressed. I have seen people sitting in rocking chairs with glazed eyes and drool running down their jaw. I knew one person who became so depressed I feared for his life. I don't know what happened to him. One day, with no warning, he sold his house, disappeared, and never showed up again. None of his friends knew where he went or why. The truth is, doing nothing is deadly. You cannot do it for long without suffering emotional damage. People who have spent their whole lives in active participation cannot just stop. My advice is don't try to stop. Do not retire unless you have a very good idea of what you are going to do. That is one mistake I made when I graduated. I did not have a good handle on what I wanted to do. My plans were too vague. In fact, I was a bit too eager to get out of the rat race. I did not want to be on the fast track or even the slow track. I just wanted out. I felt that way even though I genuinely cared about some of the people I worked with. Management had made doing good work almost impossible. What the managers wanted more than any other thing was to keep a low profile. They did not want to draw attention to themselves. Because of that, they often scuttled good promising projects. That is why I was too eager to get out. That is just an explanation fo how I felt. It is not an excuse for not having a decent plan. There is no excuse fo that. My vague plan was that I would become some kind of inventor entrepreneur. I still have a large list of ideas for useful things that I could have developed. Some of them have actually been developed and marketed by other people, so I know they were good ideas. Nonetheless, a list is not a plan. I had no business or action plan of how I would develop products or how I would market them. One of the reasons for that was the wrong headed notion that I needed a partner in the effort. I wanted a partner who would help develop the plan and participate. So I floundered around trying to convince a particular person to be that partner. I fact, I floundered for almost three years after I graduated from Ford and I never did become an inventor entrepreneur. Quite by accident, I became a writer publisher. This happened because I have always been a weekend gardener. The transition from gardener to publisher is a long story that I have already told in the essays, On Writing and Publishing. I will not belabor it again. It is sufficient to say I turned a set of gardening notes into a book and realizing I would not find an interested publisher, I published it myself. Once I knew how to publish a book, I realized I had other things to say and I continued on with seven more books. This has got me to th point where I am now writing a critical analysis of American and Western civilization. This is now my life work and will express my personal philosophy of life. It will probably take the rest of my life. Now here is my take. Even though I floundered around at first, I never really retired. I always knew I would do something. I understood, better than anyone I could not waste my life screwing off with just pastimes. I would continue to make some kind of contribution. I would remain an interested and active participant in life. I think that is the important part. It's about attitude. I think attitude is everything because it connects me to life
energy, to the life force. That allowed me to survive some pretty
harrowing experiences and kept me going when some people would
have literally gone belly up. It believe it will continue to
keep me going. My attitude is such that I believe I will have
time to write at least five more books to express myself on civilization
and my philosophy. The point is, I will never run out of plans
and I will never quit contributing. I will live right up to the
day I die.
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