Showing posts with label Retirement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Retirement. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 27, 2025
Sunday, August 17, 2025
Roads not taken.
I've noted here before that I'm highly introspective. Given that, I can't help but look at the road not taken, particularly when I'm oddly reminded of it.
Brian Nesvik was just confirmed as the Trump administrations head of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
Brig Gen. Brian Nesvik. His Class A uniform here (the horrible blue one that the Army has since ditched) shows him with a 1st Cavalry Division combat patch on his right pocket and what I think is a Combat Action Badge.
I'm not sure when most people start contemplating a career. I sometimes hear people say the most unlikely things, such as "I always wanted to be a lawyer" or "I always wanted to be an actuary". When I hear those things, I don't believe them unless the person is downright weird.
Existential occupations, however, are different, and I can imagine a person always wanting to occupy one of them. I've defined existential occupations in this way:
Being a soldier is, I think, an existential occupation, but only for men. I'm not sure what to say about being a policeman of any kind, but I think that's likely the case for that occupation as well.
Growing up as a boy, one of the occupations I really wanted to do was to be a soldier. It wasn't the only one I contemplated. As noted here, I've always been really strongly attracted to agriculture. Most days find me at my office practicing law, but that was never a childhood dream and it didn't occur to me at all until I was in college. Law is the great middle class reserve occupation, truth be known.
At some point I began to struggle with my childhood desire to be a soldier. It'd take me away from the state, which I didn't like the idea of. I knew then, when I was more realistic about life choices than I am now, that I really couldn't hope for a career in agriculture, which is what I'd have done if I could have. And the days of Wolfers and other professional hunters were long over, of course. So around about that time, probably 13, 14 or 15 years old, I started thinking about becoming a Wyoming Game Warden.
I didn't give up the soldiering idea right away. But it occured to me that I could become a National Guardsman, and stay here in the state. So I hit upon the idea of going to university, then doing a hit in the Army as an officer, and then coming back out and becoming a Game Warden while staying in the National Guard. This idea was so formulated in my mind at the time that I imagined myself entering the Air Cavalry, which at the time was a really cool branch of the Army, and the serving with the Army National Guard Air Cav Scout Troop in Cheyenne.
I was still on this track when as a junior in high school my father and I spoke about my career plans. By "spoke" I mean a conversation that probably had three or four sentences in it. My father wasn't big on career advice for reasons I understand now, but didn't really grasp then. My mother was much more likely to voice an opinion about education and what I should do than my father, but I tended to flat out ignore my mother, particularly as her mental status declined with illness. She'd have had me enter one of the hard sciences, which I in fact did (I guess I listened to her some) and go to a school like Notre Dame.
Anyhow, I told my father that I was going to study wildlife management. He only mentioned that "there are a lot of guys around here with wildlife management degrees that can't find jobs". That was enough to deter me from pursuing that degree right then and there, so rare was his advice in this area.
As it happened, I pursued another field of science but I did join the National Guard, doing so right out of high school as soon as I turned 18 years old. One of the reasons I did that was that I also was contemplating being a writer, and I thought I'd probably write on history topics. As a lot of history involves armed conflict, being in the Army in some fashion seemed like a good thing to do in order to understand the background.
I was right.
Indeed, joining the Guard was the last really smart career decision I made. I'm clearly not very good at career decisions.
To play the story out, I was a geology major. I graduated with a degree in geology, and couldn't find work as the oilfield and coal industries collapsed (sound familiar, Wyoming?). While at Casper College law was suggested to me by a history professor (I have so many credits in history that I coudl have picked up a BA in it with little effort) and it seemed like a good idea as I didn't know any lawyers and had no idea what they did.
Lots of people become lawyers that way. Indeed, I know one other lawyer who became one due to the exact same advice from the exact same fellow.
But even at that, when I knew that I wasn't going to get a job as a geologist, I entertained picking up a BS in wildlife management. By that point, my father was supporting me in the goal. Evan so, his advance five years prior stuck with me, and I didn't do it. I ended up going to law school, and I ended up letting myself ETS out of the Guard, as I thought, in error, that law school is hard.
Law school, as an aside, isn't hard. Any idiot can graduate with a JD and pass the bar. And while I only have experience with one law school, I dare say that this is true of any law school Harvard JD? So fucking what?
Still, the idea resurfaced one more time. A friend of mine and I went down to the Game Warden exam and I was offered a temporary summer job, the usual introductory way into the Wyoming Game and Fish Department at the time. At that time, usually those who picked up summer work did it for a few years before being offered a full time job. My wife and I had just gotten engaged, so I ended up declining the job.
Yes, I'm an idiot.
Well, not really. But as noted, I'm not good at career decisions.
Brian Nesvik is a Casper native. He decided to become a Game Warden when he was fourteen years old and met a game warden on his first big game hunting trip as a licensed hunter.
He's 55 years of age now. He's a graduate of the University of Wyoming where he received a bachelor's degree. He was a member of the Wyoming Army National Guard from 1986 to 2021 and rose to the rank of Brigadier General. Sources say he graduated high school from Cheyenne East in 1988, but I can't make that make sense. I can accept it was 1987 and he was definitely in the Guard in 1986, the year I got out. He's a 1994 graduate of the University of Wyoming, which would suggest that he did something else for awhile as even with the late 1988 date, that would have been six years after graduating high school. I somewhat wonder if he had military service prior to going to university, but I don't know that. He wears a 1st Cavalry Division DI as a combat patch, as noted, which is interesting.
His career as a game warden was very notable, and he became the state's chief game warden, the pinnacle of the game warden chain of command. His military career is also impressive, noting the following:
Apr 18 Dec 21 Assistant Adjutant General, Cheyenne, WY
Jan 16 Mar 18 J3/7, Joint Fore Headquarters, Cheyenne, Wyoming
Sep 15 Jan 16 G1, Joint Force Headquarters, Cheyenne, Wyoming
Feb 15 Sep 15 Chief Facilities Maintenance Officer, Joint Force Headquarters, Cheyenne, Wyoming
Jun 10 Feb 15 Commander, 115th Fires Brigade
Apr 09 Jun 10 Commander, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Camp Virginia, Kuwait
May 07 Apr 09 Commander, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming
Oct 06 May 07 S-3, Headquarters, 115th Field Artillery Brigade, Cheyenne, Wyoming
Oct 05 Oct 06 Operations Officer, Headquarters, 115th Field Artillery Brigade, Cheyenne, Wyoming
Feb 04 Oct 05 Commander, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery (FWD), Baghdad, Iraq
Oct 03 Feb 04 Executive Officer, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming
Jul 02 Oct 03 S-3, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming
Aug 01 Jul 02 S-4, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming
Jun 00 Aug 01 Operations Officer, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming
Oct 97 Jun 00 Commander, Battery C, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Worland, Wyoming
Jul 97 Oct 97 Fire Direction Officer, Headquarters, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Sheridan, Wyoming
Oct 96 Jul 97 Platoon Leader, Battery A, 2nd Battalion, 300th Field Artillery, Gillette, Wyoming
Jul 94 Oct 96 Executive Officer, Battery A, 3rd Battalion, 49th Field Artillery, Lander, Wyoming
Jul 93 Jul 94 Fire Support Officer, Headquarters Battery, 3rd Battalion, 49th Field Artillery, Laramie, Wyoming
Jul 90 Jul 93 Fire Direction Officer, Battery A, 3rd Battalion, 49th Field Artillery, Lander, Wyoming
Dec 86 Jul 90 Flight Operations Specialist, 920th Medical Company (Air Ambulance), Cheyenne, Wyoming
His time in the National Guard and my own would have overlapped, but only barely. My Guard service concluded in August, 1986, 39 years ago this month.
Shoot, by this time in 1986, I was probably just about to do my last Guard drill.
I wonder if Nesvik went to Korea with us?
Anyhow, it's interesting how something you thought of doing yourself, worked out for somebody else.
Indeed, frankly, I've known several for whom it did. Was I wrong in my analysis, way back when?
Well, maybe. I was an indifferent high school student and sort of figured I would be as a college student too, which turned out not to be the case at all. Externally, I look like a real success.
But then, we always have the backdoor view of ourselves, don't we?
This is an interesting article:
Catholic Parents: Free the Hearts of Your Daughters
The author of it, Leila Miller, had to know that she was really swimming against the tide with this one.
Indeed, I'm reluctant to even post on this, as there are a lot of pronatalist nutjobs out there right now that immediately latch on to such things. But, here goes anyone.
Almost every Sunday I go to Mass at the same Catholic Church. The celebrant there is an absolutely excellent homilist. Probably most Priests give homilies that are good from time to time, but his are consistently great, which is rare in the extreme. So much so, really, that I'd put him alone in this particular class in regard to those which I've personally experienced.
He's very orthodox, which doesn't keep a wide number of parishioners to attending his Masses. In fact, for the first time last week, I could barely find a place to sit. I was attending with my daughter, who is about to go back to grad school.
Lots of weeks this parish features a fair number of young women wearing mantillas. Not every week, however. It's interesting . Some weeks they're all missing. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that those are the weeks the Byzantine Catholic Church has Divine Liturgy in town. The Byzantine Catholic service is conservative by default.
These are not the only young women there. There are quite a few, but most dress like young women in this region do, if a little nicer. My daughter, for instance, would never consider wearing a mantilla. I know a few of them, but only a few. There's the recently married nurse, whom I've known for a long time. There's the young lawyer and her family. And there's the girl working in the sporting goods shop.
The latter is particularly interesting as she just graduated high school about a year ago. She's been working there for about a year as well. Her concerned grandmother told me that she's been hoping that she goes to college and that she's very smart. Apparently, she has no desire to do so.
Most of the young women I know, and I know them only barely, are either newly minted lawyers or friends of my daughter. My daughter, as noted, is in grad school. Some of those young women are as well. Some have graduated from school already and are in the early stages of careers of one kind or another. Because we live on the shores of jello belt, a few are Mormons, who are already married (Mormons tend to marry young) and have children.
There are a lot of misperceptions about Catholics, including Catholics and marriage. Catholics do not, and never have, tended to marry young. The opposite is actually the case. My parents were in their late 20s and early 30s when then married. My mother's parents were about the same. I think my father's parents were in their early 20s, which isn't up there, but it's not as if its a teenage wedding either. Anyhow, most Catholic women fit in to the general demographics for American women in general on these topics, although not strictly so. The mantilla women are outliers.
What do they all hope for?
That's hard, if not impossible, to say. Each person's hopes and dreams are personal to them. . . but. . . well, within the confines of the nature of our species.
So perhaps they're more determinabel than we might think.
Non existential careers, which are most careers, are not really something that makes anyone fulfilled. For that matter, they don't really make anyone actually happy. But people are sold in the idea that they do. Indeed, the way that comes in up in the subversive movie Office Space so frequently is what makes the movie actually profound:
Peter, most people don't like their jobs. But you go out there and you find something that makes you happy.
Joanna, in Office Space.
What feminist who yearned for careerism failed to grasp is that men didn't really want it either. It was foisted upon them.
One of the things about the existential occupations is that they all existed when we were in our aboriginal state, t hat state not really being grasped by a lot of people. People like to look back and think that we were "cave men" at that point, but that was never actually true for our species. For most of our time here on Earth we lived as hunter/gatherer/farmers. Interestingly, the farming aspect of this, which was t hought to have been a revolutionary development, was with us when we were still hunting and gathering, which should have been obvious as modern hunter/gatherers tend to also farm. Those occupations have stuck with us in one form or another all along.
What also was with us was our basic natures. No matter how you conceive of our species coming about, we've always paired up, male and female, and we've always had children. Everything, in fact, centered around that. While we imagine ourselves to be very complex, we really aren't. That remains our basic natures and for most of us, defines, if you will, what we really want. The existential occupations served that purpose.
Things began to become unhinged from that as we developed more complex societies, as once we do, something always goes amis. Greed has a lot to do with it. Somebody will get into a position where he, and its usually a he, wants more of everything, food, resources, women, than anyone else. Wealth always corrupts.
Still, even with more and more advanced societies over the centuries, it wasn't really until the Industrial Revolution that the basic nature of life started to be wrecked. We should not idealize pre Industrial Revolution societies, which had plenty that were wrong with them, but something that wasn't wrong with them is that men and women tended to work close to the land, and close to each other. A 17th Century English farmer, for example, might not be farming a farm he owned, or tending sheep that were his, but he was working close to nature and probably normally saw his family throughout the day.
The Industrial Revolution changed all of that.
Industrial capital needed labor and it took male labor, at first, out of the village and into the factories. It's not that simple, of course, but the reasons that it was mostly male is. Originally most industrial jobs required a fair amount of physical strength and endurance, which men have more of. Where this was not true, it might be recalled, children and women were in fact employed, although that always meant, at first that they were poor.
And, additionally, two other things were at play, one of which we've already touched on.
The first one is that biology worked against the conscription of women into the workforce at first. There was noone to take care of children other than women and almost always those women taking care of the children were the children's mothers, for host of additional biological reasons. The second one was that domestic life required female employment in the home. There were exceptions to all of this, of course, but they were exceptions proving the rule.
None of this, however, goes against industrial employment being unnatural in and of itself. Men whose fathers had come and gone throughout the day now left for industrial employment early in the morning and came back at night. They didn't see their families throughout the day, and indeed, as time went on, teh gruelling nature of industrial work created a sort of mateship amongst blue collar workers that previously had really only been seen amongst servicemen. When that occurred, it came to often be the case that when they got off work after a long day, the first thing they did was to hit a blue collar tavern, and then come home. One lawyer's site on the net notes how the author's father worked a schedule like this, hit a blue collar bar every night, and cheated on his wife with the women found there, who would largely have been working there.
White collar and professional employment followed the pattern.
If you look, for instance, at the practice of law prior to industrialization, lawyers usually worked out of their houses. Doctors did as well. Indeed, almost anyone who "ran a business" outside of farming did. John Adams, for instance, practiced out of the same farmhouse that he farmed from. Once again, this meant that people were not really separated from their families much.
This even shows with some of the occupations that we regard as the wildest, or perhaps the freest. Trappers in the American West, for instance, were married into native families at a high rate and took their spouses with them. Career soldiers who made it to the upper NCO ranks, or who were officers, tended to bring their families to frontier posts with them.
But as industrialization developed, the workplace industrialized. Lawyers moved out of offices and into firms that moved into houses used only for that purpose, and then into downtown office buildings. Doctors moved out of their houses into a professional building. Every male began to leave early in the morning, and come home at night.
None of that was natural on a day to day basis.
The introduction of domestic machinery made much of the formerly necessary female labor surplus. AS that happened, they too began to be available for out of the home employment. Between World War ONe and World War Two domestic machinery was revolutionized, but its introduction was retarded by the Great Depression, and then World War Two. After the war, the new domestic machinery flooded the markets and female labor was released from the home at an enormous rate.
The only thing that kept a greater expansion of female labor in the workplace, and by this we mostly mean the office, heavy industry was still off bounds, was biology. The pill took care of that.
The results were nearly inevitable, even if never expressly stated as desired. Now that women could be free of biological reasons not to work, they soon had to work. First generation feminists took up the cause in publications like Coso, which was basically the flipside of Playboy, with the same evolved message. Joy and meaning was found in the (white collar) work place. Sex was for entertainment. Your value is your work, and nothing else. The same line of crap that men had been force fed for years wsa now force fed to young women.
Problem is, it's all a lie.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not stating that women should not work. What I'm saying, really, is that men have to. We have no other choice in the world, and most of us will occupy jobs that are just jobs, and nothing more., even when they are well paying. But the basic nature of our species, that cries for the home to be the focus of our existence, and in which the old occupations still cry out, is unchanging. And for women, part for that basic nature is to be mothers. For men, part of it is to be fathers.
Being a mother remains a more demanding role than being a father, when children are young. When they get older, this is less the case, but the entire "let's warehouse the children" nature of modern life is existentially immoral and we know it. We managed to come around, in a capitalist society, to the same position the early communists did, and for the exact same reason, warehousing kids means the mother must work.
Not can, but must.
And the pressure to do so remains massive. Nobody really advocates for women in this area, as it would men the actual return to a pre pill, pre first generation feminist, world outlook. That'd be bad for capitalism as there would be fewer workers, and worse yet, consumption would decline.
But, frankly, that's' the way it ought to be.
I've already noted it once, but I was recently at a legal event in which there was a huge number of lawyers. One thing that was noted was how many Catholic lawyers were there, which was in fact quite a few (Catholics here, however, are a minority). Something I observed, however, is how many older lawyers there were.
On that, there was in fact a comment, from lawyer in his early 70s (maybe very late 60s) to another in his very late 60s. "Lawyers don't like retirement".
If that's true, it's phenomenal.
I typed most of this entry out a while ago, but after I did it, Jerry Spence passed away, and I noted it here on the blog. I'm not sure why I even did. I guess it's just because he was a notable Wyoming figure. After I did it, it occured to me that I don't think I noted the passing of former Wyoming Senator Al Simpson, who was also a lawyer from a long established family of Wyoming lawyers who have played significant roles in the state's history. I should have. He was quite a character.
One of the reasons that I'm a bit surprised that I noted Spence's passing is that I'm not a Spence fan. I'm not a Spence enemy either, but the extent to which a certain group of people simply worship him astounds me. Since he died, those close to him, semi close to him, and others who simply know his name have engaged in near hagiography about him. I actually had somebody stop me just yesterday to related how they were deposed by Spence and his crew back in the day as a defendant in a case in which he represented a plaintiff. You could tell he was proud of that fact, and obviously thought I would be really impressed.
I'm not.
I knew of Spence way back when I was in grade school, actually, which means back into some date in the early 1970s and I just don't get it. I guess I don't get worshipping any lawyer.
I particularly feel that way as I am a lawyer.
Daniel Webster noted that “Most good lawyers live well, work hard, and die poor.” I think there was a huge amount of truth to that. There's still an element of true to it, but the "live well" part is pretty questionable..
Working hard as a lawyer brings in less money than a person supposed, usually, and at any rate, lots of lawyers. . . and lots of other professionals for that matter, spend money as quickly as they make it. As an oddity, right now, I drive the oldest vehicles of any lawyer I know. I don't regard them as old, but the newest one I've had for twenty years. The point is, a lot of people just burn through cash, and at a certain point, they have to keep working.
A bigger factor is, however, that the practice of law just burns out the core of a person's personality until, in many instances, there's nothing left. Lawyers who have left the law often joke about being a "recovering lawyer", but at a certain point, there is no recovering from it. All forms of work, if engaged in for a long time, or indeed any human endeavor you engage in for a while, changes you permanently. It's part of your experience, and you are hardwired to react according to your experience.
I was going to go on and say more about this, but my original draft was extremely harsh, so I took it out.
You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermude, away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.
Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again.
Tomorrow it will be 28 years to the day that I've been in the service. 28 years in peace and war. I don't suppose I've been at home more than 10 months in all that time. Still, it's been a good life. I loved India. I wouldn't have had it any other way. But there are times... when suddenly you realize you're nearer the end than the beginning. And you wonder, you ask yourself, what the sum total of your life represents. What difference your being there at any time made to anything - or if it made any difference at all, really. Particularly in comparison with other men's careers. I don't know whether that kind of thinking's very healthy, but I must admit I've had some thoughts on those lines from time to time. But tonight... tonight!
Col Nicholson in The Bridge On The River Kwai.
Related threads:
Work with meaning and the meaning of work.
Labels: Commentary, Daily Living, Distributism, Existential Occupations., Mid-Week at Work, Retirement, Subsidiarity, The Practice of Law, Women, Work
A conversation with an old friend. The Good Death, and the Good Life and Existential Occupations.
Thursday, August 7, 2025
Pushing the Introvert
I've been introverted my entire life.
The way introverts experience the world is completely foreign to extroverts. It's impossible to explain it. It's stressful to not have extroverts grasp that. It's also stressful to live in an extroverted society, which we do.
A lot of lawyers, although I doubt anywhere near 50%, are introverted. That surprises people, and it may in particular surprise people that their own lawyer may be introverted. Being introverted doesn't mean that you can't interact with people, even in a very public and effective fashion.
Added to this is the phenomenon of "Type A" personalities, who are competitive and achieving, for lack of a better way to put it. I have no idea if most Type A personalities are extroverts, but I'll bet they are. It's always universally assumed that lawyers, particularly trial lawyers, are Type A personalities, and I'll bet most are, at least the trial lawyers. but not everyone is. I'm not. I don't like competition at all and never intentionally get myself into most types of competition, at least public competition.1 Knowing that I like history and know a bunch of stuff in general, people will try to draw me into competition or even force me into ones if I'm in a setting where I can't avoid it, which I absolutely despise. "You're on my team!" I'll hear and we're off into a game of specified trivia or something, which I don't want to be in.2 I once had this occur with somebody betting on me following a bunch of "no, no, no" comments from me, all to no avail.
More than one I've been talking with some other lawyer or professional who will say to me "we're both Type A personalities. . . ".
No, I'm not.
So why do I bring this all up?
I recently have had some legal matters which featured a crop of older lawyers. Lawyers older than me. Guys who really ought to be retired. I heard at one of these things that "lawyers who retire are unhappy".
These guys love the association of other lawyers.
Recently it occurs to me that I've never really liked that. I don't pal around with big bunches of lawyers. I have some lawyers who are my friends, but I don't call up other lawyers at random to go to lunch, or things like that. Indeed recently the abuse that lawyers do to society and individuals has come into sharp focus to me, in part I guess, as I'm close enough to the end of my career that I don't have to pretend that every legal cause is somehow ennobling. I think lawyers who have the attitude expressed above have it, as they love hanging around with other lawyers and, as odd as it may seem, they like the forced captivity of witnesses and deponents as they love the game aspect of the law, and just like being around with people they don't know, even if those people really don't want to be around them. I've actually seen lawyers go on yapping at somebody in a deposition for the obvious reason that they're enjoying talking to the witness, who if examined closely is in agony.
Indeed, I bet they don't even realize that's the case.
Okay, again, why do I bring this up?
Well, first of all, I'm supposed to go to an event this week. Well, today. It's out of town. But I have a lot of work to do, and I can't afford the time, and beyond that, I just don't want to go.
I just don't want to.
I don't want to sit around with the lawyers all day, and I don't want to go to the dinner. I don't want to engage in small talk about the law, or tell war stories, or anything like that.
I shouldn't have signed up for it, but there are CLE credits, and I need those.
So yesterday, I told my long suffering spouse that I wasn't going.
Then the hard sell came on.
"You need to go". "You need to keep the networks".
My wife and I, at this stage of my career, have substantially different ideas about the near term future. I've come closer to death that I generally admit within the last couple of years, and this past week two people I know who were just a few years older than me suddenly died. A woman I went to law school with I recently learned passed away four years ago, at age 58. I really don't expect to be like those lawyers in their 70s, keeping on as (annoying) happy warriors until they die in their late 70s or early 80s. Why would I?
They could probably answer that, but I can't even fathom it.
But my wife is an extrovert, and she can't conceive of a situation in which a person doesn't want to go to work every day, or even retire. And she worries about finances, which of course is her absolute right.
So, the big push.
A lot of extroverts regard introverts not wanting to do things as something needing to be addressed. It's sort of, in their minds, like kindergarteners who don't want to go to that first day of school. They just need a little push.
And there's a lot of truth in that. Sometimes introverts do need a push to go to something they'll like.
Sometimes, they need to be able to be left alone, or just with their families.
I generally work six days a week, sometimes seven. I'm in the introvert category that needs to have some downtime. And, quite frankly, to be pushed to go to something by those who can't go themselves, due to other commitments, is agony. My first question whenever I'm invited to something is to my wife, and that question is "are you going?" More often than not, it's "no, but you need to".
I really don't.
And she doesn't grasp that, nine times out of ten, when I go and enjoy these things, it's because she went with me, which she very rarely does anymore. It was her company I enjoyed, not the attendance at the event.
I tend to yield on these things, and we'll see about this one. But, for those close to introverts, or married to them, knowing that we live in an extremely extroverted and competitive society, first do no harm.
"Don't make things worse for me" is sometimes my reply, which is not appreciated at all.
In other words, taking somebody whose brain is wired for hard on full bore activity in public, and for whom there are no casual conversations whatsoever, and pushing them into having their brain work overtime, is not always a favor.
Footnotes
1. I will participate in some sorts of competitions, but they're mostly ones that are really individual and I'm basically competing with myself. In terms of team sports, I really only like baseball, which is a team sport that has such individual positions. It's almost like a series of individual competitions. The man up to bat is really an individual.
I detest football. I find soccer boring. I do like rugby, however.
If I'm in an individual competition, I like to do well, but I'm not upset with myself if I don't. I will note that highly competitive people, however, can make even individual competitions absolutely miserable by introducing their personal competitiveness into it. Some competitive people make things into competitions that don't need to be.
As an example of the latter, two of my highly competitive colleagues are this way. On the rare occasions I've been bird hunting with them, "who has the best dog" becomes some sort of stupid aggravating competition and during football and basketball seasons endless arguments about adopted teams go on and on, in a public setting, on the presumed assumption that everyone likes to watch these verbal jousts.
For that matter, they both like to argue and will engage in verbal sparring on various topics just for sport, and again where everyone else can't avoid them. Some time ago, I actually intervened to stop their arguments on religion as they were outright insulting to two people here who are members of minoritarian religions.
Oddly, I've found that a lot of former soldiers who really liked the military have the same mindset and don't follow team sports. I think I know the reason why, but I'll deal with it in some other thread.
2. I've actually had "we'll play trivia" thrown out as an educement to attend something, which nearly guarantees that I'll try to avoid it. It's not that I mind trivia topics, or trivial pursuit as a game, but I don't want to compete with people out of a close circle who don't care if I win or lose. I really hate being made the presumed champion who will carry a team to victory as its stress I really don't need.
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
Allison Schrager: America’s debt problem is also a retirement problem
Allison Schrager: America’s debt problem is also a retirement problem
Thoughts?
The average American retirement age is 62, up from 55 in the early 1990s. Some sources say the US average is now 64. The average age in Wyoming is either 63, or 64. It's hard to find percentages for lawyers, but it's well known that many lawyers work past 65, which is sort of falsely, now, regarded as "retirement age" (67 is now "full" retirement depending upon a person's age).
The average retirement age for ranchers is 75.
Sunday, May 25, 2025
I'm Eligible for Early Retirement. . .
or in other words to start taking my early, if reduced, Social Security benefits.
Saturday, May 24, 2025
The Best Post of the Week of May 18, 2025.
It was quite a week.
We started the week off with a look at the Vietnamese Diaspora
A Sunday Morning look at the Vietnamese Diaspora.
And we delved into local politicians betraying local values.
The occupant of the Oval Office was on display again.
I posed a query to our readers, but received no response.
We noted a momentous anniversary for Christianity.
Republicans were all atwitter about alleged coverups of Joe Biden's decline, while they're covering up Donald Trump's.
Some depressing news in the age of science denialism.
Women were on the blog a lot.
We considered authenticity.
The U.S. took a giant step towards economic disaster.
Governor Gordon called Chuck Gray out on the carpet.
Monday, May 19, 2025
A query for the retired readers.
Just remember this, if you wait until 67 fra (full retirement age), the money you gave up between the age of 62 and 67 won’t be made up until you are around age 81. So hopefully by the time you break even at age 81 you can still enjoy your life and that is if you are even still alive. I’m starting mine at 62
From a Reddit thread.
I figure there's pretty much no way I'm going to be living when I'm 81.
Occasionally I'll ask readers questions here. Very rarely to they respond, and I don't blame them, which doesn't keep me from doing it anyhow.
For my retired readers, what age did you retire at, and why?
I'll be 62 in less than a week. I'm tired, and had two bouts with my health after a lifetime of being mostly healthy. I have one kid in grad school for two more years and my wife of 30 years is ten years younger than me.
I'm struggling with what to do. If it was just me, there's no question what I'd do. This week I'd send around the announcement that I'm planning to retire. It'd still take me a year or two to extract myself.
I've brought on a new employee recently to help me. As I wasn't planning on retiring, even though I'd like to, that employee has no concept that I might be soon. Indeed, the new employee just left the employment of somebody who did retire at age 67.
But I've also seen something recently where I've reencountered somebody I haven't professionally for probably fifteen or twenty years. I'll mention more of this in a thread to come, but I can tell that person isn't firing on all their cylinders anymore, and yet there they are, working full time. . .when they shouldn't be.
Anyhow, if you have an opinion, or experience, I'd be curious what it is.
Wednesday, March 12, 2025
The Populist Far Right and their goal to touch Social Security.
Eh?
I know, you're thinking, I voted for Don Trump and I sure didn't vote to eliminate retirement.
Well, first of all, Donny isn't exactly dialed in most of the time. He's out golfing.
That he wouldn't be dialed was obvious to those who had eyes to see. And likewise was that the Project 2025 cabal would be running the show.
Barely noticed in all of this are the statements by far right punditry that are outright hostile to retirement, but they're there. Comments about how "nobody should retire". Not there? Consider this:
And let's be real about this - it's insane that we haven't raised the retirement age in the United States. It's totally crazy. Joe Biden -- if that were the case, Joe Biden should not be running for president. OK? Joe Biden is 81 years old. The retirement age in the United States, at which you start to receive Social Security and you are eligible for Medicare, is 65. Joe Biden has technically been eligible for Social Security and Medicare for 16 years, and he wants to continue in office until he is 86, which is 19 years past when he would be eligible for retirement. No one in the United States should be retiring at 65 years old. Frankly, I think retirement itself is a stupid idea unless you have some sort of health problem. Everybody that I know who is -- who is elderly, who has retired, is dead within five years. And if you talk to people who are elderly and they lose their purpose in life by losing their job and they stop working, things go to hell in a handbasket real quick.
Ben Shapiro.
Now, Shapiro was largely populist babbling, so there's an extra element of stupidity in what he said. In the Trump era, saying really stupid stuff as a populist has become almost mandatory for that class. But is there something to what Shapiro said?
Well yes and no.
On the yes side, a fair number of men in particular become their jobs, their souls basically a burnt out husk with nothing left, and they slip into missing their job or depression It happens.
But like the polls that deal with lawyers who hate practicing law (a surprisingly high percentage), I suspect the figure are weighted towards confirmation bias.
Lots of people retire and love it.
And exactly what retirement is, isn't the same for everyone. By retirement, what quite a few people actually have is time to devote to something else they've always wanted to, but couldn't.
And that gets to this. The current crop of Cultural Calvinists don't like the concept of retirement, as all they value in the world is work. That's it. Work makes them part of the Elect and without work, they'd have to be human beings. They don't want that.
So they're attacking retirement itself.
It'll be hard to pull that off, so what they'll do is push the retirement age up closer to death. Project 2025 would like the "full" Social Security age to be 69, up two from 67, which was up two from 65. At some point they'll start moving the bottom age upwards. And their argument, which at least makes fiscal sense, is that this is necessary to save the fund.
My guess is that within a decade the full will be 70, and the lower something like 67.
The dirty little secret, however, is that starting in a person's late 50s, an increasingly number simply can't carry on at work. The average retirement age in the US right now falls between 61 and 64, with layoffs and health playing into that.
And a good argument can be made that for some jobs, those requiring a license, the retirement age really ought to be something like 60.
Why Trump’s Idol, McKinley, Abandoned His Own Tariff Strategy | WSJ
This is well worth watching as it not only gives a good historical glimpse into McKinley's tariffs, which King Donny admires, but gives an insight into what King Donny is likely really trying to do.
The entire drug smuggling this is bs. I don't know why Donny feels he has to lie about this, but he's a pathological liar and lies about everything. The real goal is autarky.
Somewhere, probably somewhere inside of the Heritage Foundation, somebody believes that if we make tariffs high enough, industry will spring up here and the golden age of the 1950s will return. Those people don't care if it drives prices up, as they believe that "good" middle class jobs making 1958 Cadillacs will "come back" to the country. That's the essence of it.
It won't work.
Instead, it'll inflate prices and drive the country towards a major recession which will be in full bloom when the mid term elections come around.
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
On hating the government. Being careful what you wish for, if you don't really grasp what you are wishing for. American Populists and the return to a mythical age.
A friend and I were discussing the current state of affairs and the Donald Trump assault/Project 2025's aggault/Wyoming Freedom Caucus on the government. We both are pretty conservatives fellows. We both served in the Army. We both are lawyers. Both of our fathers were Korean War veterans.
We're both horrified.
In part we're horrified as it clear that a huge portion of Trump's base absolutely hates their own government. Just hates it.
In the discussion, something occurred to me.
The world the MAGA/Populist/Project 2025 people wish for is one they've never seen nor experienced. A lot of them, quite frankly, don't have the capacity to grasp what it was like.
More than a few of them don't have the capacity to live in a world like that either.
No American born before 1932 lived in the world these people imagine as perfect. That means, in my case, as a member of Generation Jones, and even more so for the Baby Boom Generation, the last people they know who experienced it was their grandparents.
Or more likely, their great grandparents.
And our grandparents are all dead.
There's no living memory of it at all.
Nobody has one, at all.
The first President I voted for, as noted here, was Ronald Reagan in the 1984 Presidential election. I thinking of it, the first Presidential election my father could have voted in, when the voatin gage was 21, would have been the 1952 Presidential election. The first Presidential election I can remember, although only vaguely, is the 1968 Presidential election, when I was five years old. If that held true for my father, the first one he would have remembered would have been the 1936 Presidential election, at which time FDR was already well into establishing the government that Musk and Trump are destroying.
It was the Great Depression that brought the government into people's lives in a major way, although that it was going to happen was foreshadowed by the Progressive Era. Theodore Roosevelt was really the first "imperial President" who was willing to broadly act with executive orders. Franklin Roosevelt expanded the government enormously, however, in reaction to the extreme economic distress. That gave us the government we have today, but World War Two and the Cold War expanded it.
FDR, of court, brought big government in, and with World War Two proving that it was necessary to retain it, and the Cold War building on that, we've had it ever since. But we might be able to state that modern American government goes all the way back to 1900, before Theodore Roosevelt really started to bring in the progressives and the concept that the government was supposed to make things safe and fair for average people.
The generation that had lived through the Great Depression and the war were grateful for the larger Federal role and accepted it. It wasn't until the late 1960s that things began to be questioned. Even by then most Americans had no real memory of a day when the Federal Government was only active nationwide to a limited extent.
Nobody has that memory now.
What will this all mean?
Well, assuming that Must/Trump pulls it off, starting here in a few months, a real schock. And the best evidence is, so far, that Musk/Trump will have enormously wrecked the Federal Government in that time period, no matter what happens with Trump himself (and there are growing signs that Trump isn't really going to be around that long).
And the shock that will ensue will be in everything from what amounts to minor irritations to body bags.
Wyoming is going to have to pay for its own forest fires, and fight them on their own for one thing, snarky comments from Cowboy State Daily imported columnist aside. The State's going to have to pay for its own highways as well, which it can't afford. Things will just burn, and the highways decay.
And we'll be at the tender mercy of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which seemingly hates state government as well. Municipal services are really going to take a hit, to include police and fire fighting.
Education, which the WFC basically opposes, as students might learn the world is older than 5,000 years and God might not be limited to the restrictions people who can't imagine a world older than that would demand to be placed on, will be gutted.
Benefits provided to all kids of people through the Federal Government, from Veterans benefits to Medicaid, are in real danger.
A Federal and state government that makes sure your food, water, and living conditions are safe, won't be there.
Robber Barons, however, will be there once again, for the first time in well over a century.
The truth is, most people won't like living in a United States that's a third world nation. But the rich will, as the rich have always profited in the third world. And that, not some sort of rugged paradise, is where we're headed.
Calvinist believers were psychologically isolated. Their distance from God could only be precariously bridged, and their inner tensions only partially relieved, by unstinting, purposeful labor.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the "Spirit" of Capitalism
As part of that, the National Conservatives and the populists seem to outright hate government employees. That's already come up in of comments about them, one being how they'll go into "more productive" work. This group has a very Protectant Work Ethic view of life, in which your Calvinist purpose is to prove your worth by working harder and longer and for less than the value of your work, and never retire.
Many street level conservatives have hated Federal employees for years. I've heard them complain about how they're all lazy as they didn't do the correct Protestant thing and choose to go into the rough and tumble of the free market, by which they mean the corporate controlled market.
This is sometimes stated by people who actually depend on the government in spades themselves, and can't recognize it. For instance, if you are truck driver, you are living on the government dole, Mr. Knight of the Road. Fortunately, in this instance, truckers will soon be out of business as highway subsidies will end and railroads will take back over, which is a good thing.
More than one of the NC/Populist crowd who holds this view also abhor retirement. The comments are out there, people just refuse to recognize it. The push in this crowd, short term, is to raise retirement age to 69, but the real push will be just to do away with Social Security in the end. That neatly solves the Social Security crisis.
So, anyhow, like driving on Interstates?
Get used to your state funding them, and they won't.
Like safe air travel?
Notice how many air disasters there have already been since Trump took over, they're likely not his fault, but you probably ought to get used to that too.
Miss polluted air and water?
Well, it'll be back.
Come to expect the Federal government to be there if you are black, or Catholic, and can't get hired?
Well, lower your expectations.
Looking forward to retirement?
Forget it.
Injured and need assistance?
Well, you have your family to turn to. Or the church.
Lose your job and need help?
Well, move in with your parents, or your children.
Miss the days when the Marine Corps was used to make sure American economic interests weren't harmed in Central America and around the world?
Well, you'll get to live out the nostalgia.
Like living in a country where the rich get richer, the poor get dead, and the middle class are on the verge of poverty?
Well, you'll get to.
Welcome back. . . to about 1900 really.
Wednesday, January 8, 2025
Work with meaning and the meaning of work.
You see, in this world there's two kinds of people, my friend: Those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.
Blondie, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
I have a theory that certain work is existential by nature. My post on that from several months ago:
Why do I note this?
Well I've had a bunch of synchronicitous events happen recently that perhaps demand it being noted, assuming that anything must be noted here at all. Because they're all sort of circular, I'll start in one spot and gather the round corral, noting that these recollections are all recent, but not chronological.
I was walking out of the sporting goods store and ran into a law school colleague. For some reason or another, for much of my life, I've always been the youngest person in a group as a rule, even when I really shouldn't have been. Anyhow, this fellow, like two other of my law school friends, was an older law student, in law school, although I'm not sure how old he really was then, Two of my other friends, both Vietnam War era veterans, were in their 40s, so they're in their mid 70s now. I think this fellow was probably in his mid to late 30s. He remained remarkably the same looking all that time.
He kind of bounced around at first as a lawyer before landing in a firm where he practiced for maybe 20 years. He's retired now, and has been for awhile. He asked me if I was getting ready to retire, which I indicated I wasn't, but I did ask him about the process, and he gave me some details of how he'd gone about it.
Good to know from somebody who has done it.
He doesn't miss practicing at all.
In contrast to this, a close friend of mine, well really a relative, who is a lawyer who must be crowding 70 told me the other day he's not going to. He'd miss the collegiality of being a lawyer.
That answer shocked me. Not that he wasn't going to retire, but the collegiality.
Eh?
It may be just me, but only a handful of my friends are lawyers. I do have some lawyer friends. But most of my friends aren't lawyers and never have been. I wouldn't miss most lawyers whatsoever. Indeed, I miss a lot of my genuinely close friends due to the practice of law.
This, frankly, is probably an exception to the rule. Law is a unique profession, litigation with in the law even more so, and by and large the onliy people who have a grasp on what it is like are other lawyers. It is, I suppose, kind of like being a combat veteran that way. Lawyers hang out with other lawyers as they're lawyers.
Indeed, being heavily introverted, I've often noted how much lawyers enjoy professional gatherings. They really do. There are organizations that we're all part of and we'll go to a conference and there will be a big dinner or something, everyone goes.
Unless my spouse is with me, or one of the few lawyers I really know well and like, I tend to avoid those gatherings.
Anyhow this takes me to a second point.
I know a couple of lawyers who have lost their souls.
I don't mean in a metaphysical sense. That is, I'm not saying they're condemned to Hell. What I'm saying is that their personalities are gone and been absorbed by false ones in the pursuit of nothing more than money.
It happens to people. It's not a pleasant thing to see.
I was never friends with either of the ones I have in mind. Interestingly, however, one seems to be trying to emerge. One, who sank into this a long time ago actually started talking to me the other day about what he was going to do "next", something he's never said before.
A really good lawyer friend of mine is mostly retired. Like the fellow I mentioned above, while he had his doubts, he hasn't missed the practice at all.
Another good lawyer friend of mine, a woman, is trying to transition from one practice to another.
Two women I know otherwise recently lost their jobs. They weren't lawyers.
I note that as I think women in particular are subject to the Capitalist lie that careers are existentially defining, a completely modern notion.
St Paul was a tent maker. St. Peter a fisherman. I don't know if there are any classic Medieval or Renaissance paintings of St. Paul making a tent, but there should be.
Why do I note that?
Well, for this reason. You don't think much about St. Paul being a tent maker as his occupation didn't define him. His sainthood did.
But a lot of us moderns sure have made our occupations define us. And women are very much doing so now.
This takes me back to the item I linked in above.
That's more than I really need for my point here, but it ties in, this way.
Most careers are just jobs. They're an industrial way of separating you from your homes to make money for somebody else, in exchange for which you make some money too. This was done to men first, and then with the "women's liberation" movement of the 1960s, women drank the KookAide and have been wondering when the good feels will arrive.
They won't.
Most jobs have no greater existential meaning than that. If you define yourself by them, you are defining yourself as a fiction.
Which is why I worry about the lawyers who collapse into the cartoonish litigation personality. It makes you a cartoon, and not a very interesting one.
It's also why lawyers who become deep dive into the Whaling For Justice personality, or something like it, sort of boil off the people they were and become somebody nobody is interested in.
And I also think that's why old lawyers have a hard time retiring. After selling your life away, is this it? It must be. This must be it. I must love this as otherwise. . . .
I will note, and strongly, that I'm not advocating here for something that seems to be a current rage. Don't get any post high school education and hope for the best.
Indeed, the advocates of that, don't mean that. They mean don't forget to look at occupations where you work with your hands.
Now listen to me, all of you. You are all condemned men. We keep you alive to serve this ship. So row well, and live.
Quintus Arrius, Ben Hur.
The truth of the matter is that we sell our lives for a living, but we shouldn't sell our souls. A lot of career propaganda emphasis the nifty life you are supposed to have, but not the risk of losing your soul, and here I mean in both senses. Being able to sell the minutes of your life away for a decent return means that you need to have skills of some sort that are valuable. People should try to acquire those if for nothing else their own protection.
Women, I'd note, are particularly vulnerable here. A woman with a professional degree, such as law, is armed against loss of employer. A woman who doesn't have some sort of valuable skill is at the mercy of her employer. They're the ones who lose their jobs readily, and who are subject to all sorts of risks.
The trick, I guess, is to get those skills and remember that we shouldn't lose who we are.
One group of people who tend to make that career choice are people who work for the government. They're often grossly underpaid, but they also tend to have weighted the options and elected towards "quality of life". Lawyers who work for the AG's office, or biologists who work for state and Federal agencies provide such examples.
Interestingly, people on the outside in the same fields tend to hold these people in contempt. I guess people working 80 hours a week to make a go of it are naturally resentful towards those who do not. But those people are often very dedicated to their professions and even more purist than those who sell their labor in the private market. A dear cousin of mine who recently died was one such example. She was a research biologist at a university.
We're about to head into a Federal administration here that seems to contain a contempt to government employees. Indeed one recent campaign featured somebody who wants to limit the amount of time you can work for the Federal government. The same campaign repeatedly noted the candidates rural roots.
The rural roots are real, but what an irony. Descending from homesteaders means that you descent from the biggest American welfare program ever, one that used the U.S. Army to violently expel land occupants due to their race, to hand it out to European Americans. Don't mistake my point, I love agriculture and regard it as an existential occupation, and if I'd been alive when you could have homesteaded, I would have. But people who loved the land so much they fought for it, and lost, had the moral high ground on that, and those who came in behind them benefitted from the Federal largess and murder.
If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working?
Tuco, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Genesis tells us that since we sinned in the Garden, we've condemned ourselves to work. But it's also obvious that work was always part of the plan. It's interesting how well this comports to how evolution and societal development worked. We were likely a very happy group as aboriginals, and we know now that depression and modern angst is unknown in hunter gatherer societies. But we ate from the tree of knowledge and acquired it,
Well, now we have to work. Make the best of it.
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