I added a new country to my list and revisited three of my favorite cities in Europe. I accumulated almost everything I could imagine wanting – outerwear, drinking vessels, footwear, hats. I drank at two of my favorite tiki bars. I finally got the shed with the string lights as the Sunday night retreat. I was working from home without any issues, able to walk to the local, an active participant in a spiritual community and relatively happy with how things had landed…with one eye on the approaching meteor.
And then, it hit.
Now we live in a foundering country that is speedrunning the “we’re going to be the next Russia” plan. The rule of law is being abandoned with barely a whimper from the press and no interest from people whose lives are about to turn much worse, because some people won’t know the circus has come to town until they’re crushed beneath the piles of elephant shit. Our financial situation has taken an unexpected turn and now there is a non-zero chance we will have to sell the house and move as a result. And as insult to injury, after almost five years of doing tremendous work and going completely unrecognized for it, I’m back in the office five days a week, which was not the base condition well before the pandemic, and there has been no attempt at a justification for why.
Life took an irrevocable hard turn on November 5, 2024, and at this point in history it’s hard to argue that it’s going to be possible to ever get back in my lifetime. I have, at best, maybe 30 years left for America to claw back any of the 50 years of progress that have been attacked in the last month and a half. And the Zoloft that made 2024 possible and enjoyable is now apparently in the crosshairs of the snake-oil purveyor in charge of American health. Who is not to be confused with the drunk rapist at the controls of national defense, the foreign billionaire whose interns are shredding the civil service or the convicted felon at the top of it all, whose handpicked Supreme Court has paved the way to make him king.
I would love to get out, to decamp for some other English-speaking country and retire and see out my days. But I don’t think that’s possible any more. Even if we could cash everything out, it’s not enough to finish our lives on, let alone endure if the markets implode and take out our retirement savings. Retirement, at all, is suddenly a lot less plausible, and the odds that I’ll be doddering along at a help desk at 70 are only reduced by the likelihood that first level tech support will all be AI and second level will all be in Hyderabad by then.
The odds are very high that right now, things are as good as they will ever get again. There is nowhere to go but down, and the only hope is a controlled descent as slowly as possible. That would be different at 60-something, when you don’t have that long a life expectancy anyway, or at 30-something when there’s still a prospect of making a fresh start somewhere else. But 53 is no-man’s-land. It’s too late to begin anew from scratch without giving away a lot of income and accumulated wisdom that has no value in a new career. It’s too soon to start Medicare or Social Security, so you have to have some sort of job that will provide health care – and sufficient health care, in case you have some prior condition.
I enjoyed pre-tirement. Even though the job was annoying and frustrating, being able to do it entirely from home meant I could empty the dishwasher or move the laundry into the dryer or bring in the trash cans during a dull moment instead of staring out the window across a sea of cubicles for five minutes. I didn’t waste a half hour or more every day putting unnecessary miles on a vehicle. I could have stayed pre-tired long enough that I could have staved off actual retirement for a long time. But now, we don’t know what life holds in the next year, and even pre-tirement seems as unlikely as retiring.
The only thing left now is to play out what’s already on the board as best we can. See friends one last time before they head for a better country. Visit London on airline miles and hotel points while it’s not coming out of our cash reserves. And then, a whole lot of learning to love what we’ve got and being satisfied with a couple of cans of Guinness in the shed or by the fire pit instead of going down the pub, or watching endless British and Irish television on Prime Video and trying to get lost in books instead of counting on another international trip, and reconciling to the notion that you have to live in the moment, enjoy the moment, and be grateful for the moment, because nothing is promised. Not even tomorrow.
Find all the little blessings and immerse yourself in every one. A sausage biscuit, a comfortable sweater, the grippy socks, a new book, an extra half hour cuddled up in the morning without having to think about the world. If putting a D-ring on your lightsaber, or skiving off to work from home in the afternoon, or rewatching QI, or wearing your East Belfast GAA shirt – if anything can bring you contentment for the day, do it without hesitation.
That’s the plan for 53.