A Worker Bee Mentality

Note: The reason I'm trying to write this is to illustrate a more useful way of thinking. Some of you might find this useful and others not. But, either way maybe you will think about what I'm saying here.

While I was growing up I noticed that men who completely identified with their jobs as their identities often died within a month to 5 years after they retired.

It seemed that the SOOO identified with their professions as an identity that when they retired they "ceased to exist in their own minds" and then they ceased to physically exist too.

I felt this came from a form of ignorance in that no one told them that they had value outside of being a breadwinner working for someone else.

No one told them that they had value just for being alive.

This is what my IH 1974 Scout II looked like:


One of the experiences I had one day in the 1980s I was driving my 1974 IH Scout II on a 4 wheel drive dirt road to my Fire Lookout called "Call mountain" for the CDF in California. I did this for 2 years because I had 3 teenagers and it had great free medical, dental coverage for us all that was hard to come by then. And also my wife and I owned two other businesses too. So, I worked at this seasonal job 6 months a year from about April to October for two years in the mid 1980s when CDF still hired fire lookouts. I noticed a buck deer walking towards a pond or small lake on the way way out in the wild area on a dirt road. He might have never seen a human before and he didn't see me that day either. But, he was one of the most majestic beings I had ever seen before on earth. And I realized he was just BEING what he was. And that he didn't have to do anything but just Be exactly who he was to be amazing. And he knew he was amazing!

And it hit me each one of us is like this too. Each of us is amazing but then we listen to other people and they think we have to do this and we have to do that and we have to think like this and we have to think like that.

But really, that is a whole lot of Bullshit! None of it is really true. We need to just BE ourselves whoever and whatever that is. We don't want to hurt anyone but we shouldn't be anyone's slaves mentally or physically either. So, all we really have to do is BE.

So, when I looked around me at all these men dying from being literally addicted to being workaholics I thought to myself, "This is really wrong!" They have been slaves to this way of thinking and then when they try and retire they can't and just die.

So, I refused to be so identified with any career that I couldn't ever retire and still be happy. However, I forgot one thing. I so identified with being a parent and secondarily a husband that when my kids all grew up and left (I have been raising someone under 18 since I was 26 and I'm now 66) and my last child graduates this month.

So, the question remains, "Can I succeed now with my youngest child going off to college?" And this remains to be seen. But in regard to being so attached to my career that I couldn't ever retire, I didn't have that problem because I identified myself in a completely different way. I suppose one way I did it was to see myself as a researcher for mankind. And in that definition my enlightenment is also tied up with being a researcher for mankind and this blog is a part of that definition. So, as long as I can move to higher and higher enlightened states and as long as God wants me here, I'll be here on earth or some other planet as the human race moves out to other planets during the next 500 years or so. So, it's all one day at a time because it's all Grace in the end.

Note: However, I have already succeeded in one way. I was forced to retire from a 7 month stint with a nearly fatal heart virus but now I have been retired ongoing since May 1999 (actually I had to retire in September 1998 but then I thought I was going to die for 7 months or so). I was 50 in 1998. So, in a sense I have already succeeded because I found that for me even then it took about 5 years to really get used to being retired. The hardest part is the element of a "Never ending summer or winter vacation". Sometimes, that is hard to deal with. But, as long as you are a self starter and can think for yourself and don't need someone to be telling you what to do next, you are going to be okay if you are retired as long as you have enough money to live and you take care of your health.