This is not a post about erotica — reading it or writing it. Well, mostly not. It’s about changes, and getting older, and some weird things I’ve observed over the past few weeks. Tune out if you’re only interested in reading about what fuck stories I’m writing. Insert smiley face here.
After a 44 year career in IT, specifically IT infrastructure support, I let my boss know a few weeks ago that I’m planning to retire in August. That’s a couple of months before I turn 66, so it certainly isn’t “early”. And I’ve been very happy about the whole thing — certainly a little worried about the bad things that could happen that would cause us financial problems, but not at all about the being retired part.
I’ve never felt old. I joke about it, as pretty much everyone my age does. But I’m active, reasonably healthy, have tons of interests outside of work (including writing my smutty stories), and have a million things that I want to do that I’ve been putting off. So I know for a fact I’m not going to get bored.
The COO is using this as an opportunity to figure out if he wants to reorg, so he’s not announcing this yet, but I’ve been quietly letting people know. Some folks profess to be jealous, some have told me that they’re planning to do the same in a couple of years, but some have looked at me like I’ve grown an extra nose (my one nose takes up quite enough real estate, thank you) — and they’ve looked at me like I was suddenly something less.
And that made me think. These are not people that are decades younger than me. But I got the distinct impression that they suddenly thought of me as “old”. I had to sit with that for awhile. Can I not hack it anymore? Can I not keep up with the technology? Am I really getting “old”? I suddenly had doubts.
But I think I’m figuring it out. These are guys (and it was all guys) that have no identity outside of work. Their work persona is their persona. I suspect that they have no intention of ever retiring, because they have nothing to retire to. It was also interesting that the guys that gave me that look are all enamored in particular of Gen AI, Agentic AI, etc. I am so very not.
I started out in the mainframe days, right out of college. I didn’t just survive technology changes, I made them possible for the companies that I worked for. The PC revolution, the server vs. mainframe revolution, opening corporate systems to the Internet, virtualization, cloud services — I’ve been there for all of it and gladly helped implement every single one of those.
But I’ll admit that I have absolutely ZERO interest in learning AI in any meaningful way. Yes, I mucked around with some of the image generation systems a couple of years ago (you can see some of it in my early Medium stories — sorry). I don’t do that anymore. And I’ve used CoPilot to generate some quick and dirty answers on subjects that I already know as a shortcut, but knowing the material, I can tell whether the results are hallucinations or not.
But as a writer and a photographer, AI is not my friend. And as a thinking person, it is also not my friend. While waiting for a meeting to start recently, someone mentioned turning on the AI-fueled meeting facilitator/note taker. I was not the only person that maintained that I take meeting notes BY HAND in a notebook (eNotebook, but still). If I write it down, I remember it (this is common and has been borne out by numerous studies). I’ll guarantee that the folks that thought I was wasting my time ended up actually paying very little attention to the meeting and likely got very little out of it. Knowledge is funny — use it or lose it.
So anyway, after a few days I realized that no, I’m not getting old and those guys that think so are, maybe, kinda sad. I have always had a life outside of work — I owned a bar, I led an animal-rights non-profit, I sold original photographs, and now I write. I want the time to write more and take more pictures and ride my motorcycle more often and make improvements to the house and help my wife with her art studio and learn to play the guitars I’ve collected and get better at disc golf and go see some places I’ve never seen and revisit some that I love. Gimme twenty years of that and then maybe I’ll start feeling like I should slow down. Maybe.
Now my biggest issue is staying motivated for the next four months. That’s generally never a problem for me, and the combination of my drive to do anything I do well and my abject fear of being embarrassed will keep me working hard. But honestly, it’s hard to care. But hey, only four more months.
I don’t have a lot of role models for retirement. My dad had health problems that took him off the road and onto disability when he was younger than I am now. My mom never officially retired, although she hasn’t worked in a few years. I’ve got peers that retired early ’cause they worked their asses off and made a lot of good decisions, but it’s hard to compare since we’re going to need to be a lot more careful.
So I’m going to blaze a new trail (not for the first time) and we’ll figure it out as we go.
