How this post got made: I dictated the whole thing into my phone whilst driving, dumped the rambling transcript into Claude with my entire blog archive as a reference, and had it edit the mess into something readable. It got about 80 percent of the way there, then I went back and rewrote a bunch. Nowhere near as much fun as writing it, but felt I owed you all an update. Many of you readers and fellow bloggers are a big reason why I’m in the fortunate position I’m in, and I’ve been radio silent far too long. So here we are. 

Been a while.

Right now I’m sitting in 45 minutes of downtown rush hour traffic, on my way to a job where I work roughly four days a week, on top of a full course load, at an effective hourly rate of about $1.75.

So what the hell happened. Did I fail at FIRE? Did I give up on retirement?

Sort of. Not quite.

Halfway There

If you’ve been following along, you know I’m partway through a Master in Social Work. I got interested in mental health and decided to go do something about it instead of just having opinions about it. According to my professors this is the hardest semester in the program, because it’s when you start your first practicum. Guess practicum is a fancy Latin word for internship or somiething

Mine is at a corporate wellness suite, where I do coaching for stressed high performers. It’s decent practice; I’m not working with anyone who’s schizophrenic or in the middle of a major depressive episode, I’m working with people who’re crushing it at their job and slowly falling apart doing it. The rest of my day is split between writing papers full of critical thinking gymnastics and, I kid you not, stocking the break room. Living the fucking dream.

My professors were right. This is the most annoying semester by a wide margin. Mostly because it reminds me how much I have come to hate being on a normal person schedule, and why I retired in the first place. Getting up early to work out, fine, I’ve always done that. But I miss the slow morning I’ve been spoiled with in recent years; getting the kids to school, coming home, easing into some coursework at my own pace instead of rushing out the door in business casual to sit in traffic and then sit in an office. Booking it to a windowless office after a long commute is a hell of a way to remember how good I’ve had it.

The bright spot: I get about a ten minute walk from the parking garage to my office, and it takes me past a major city park. Which is nice, except that park isn’t just scenery to me.

The Park

About ten years ago, I got called to that same park at 2 a.m. A veteran was out there, armed, threatening to kill themself. We surrounded the area to keep them from moving on to hurt anyone else which they implied they might. We talked to them for hours. I’d been to that park a hundred times before that night, working out, walking with my wife, and many times since with my kids. Beautiful place. And also the place where I once stood in the dark for hours trying to talk a vet out of offing themselves.

Eventually our negotiator got themm to agree to come in for treatment. And then, in the process of getting them to put the gun down, they fumbled it and they accidentally shotthemselves.  They surrivived, but it wasn’t pretty. 

That’s one of maybe a hundred incidents from my years on SWAT and in patrol where I dealt with the aftermath of a suicide attempt in some form; the ones we stopped in time, the ones we didn’t, the cleanup, the notifications, the families. Law enforcement and military both sit near the top of the list for suicide rates among professions. I’ve felt that statistic personally, more than once, with people I knew.

So every morning I walk past that park into my windowless office job, and every evening I walk back out past it to my car, I’m reminded of that night. And somewhere in there is the actual answer to “what the hell happened to your retirement.“

Micro, Macro, and a River Full of Babies

Social work has this framework that splits the work into levels: micro (working with one person  therapy, casework), mezzo (working within one organization to make its own policies and practices better), and macro (big picture systems and policy work that reaches across organizations).

They teach it with an old parable: you’re standing on a riverbank and you see a baby drowning. You dive in, drag it out, get it breathing again. Amazing. Then you look up and there’s another baby in the water. You do it again. And it keeps happening, over and over, one baby at a time, forever. That’s micro work. Eventually you have to ask: who the hell keeps throwing babies in this river? That’s when you start walking upstream to find out that’s macro. All levels are necessary, neglecting one and people suffer. 

Looking back, being on a SWAT team was about as far out on the micro end of that spectrum as it gets. I was catching people on the single worst day of their lives, sometimes literally shooting rubber rounds at someone so they couldn’t shoot themselves with real ones. Pure downstream triage, one drowning baby at a time.

What I’m doing now, going back to school, doing this practicum, aiming at licensure, is me trying to walk a little ways upstream. Not all the way to policy, not yet anyway. But maybe far enough that I can catch a veteran before they end up as a full team callout for whatever unit is doing my old job.

Why Bother

For the first year of retirement, I didn’t do much of anything besides mountain bike, hang out with my kids, write this blog, and generally goof off on self-improvement projects. It was great. Highly recommend.

But I also kept thinking: I’ve probably got another 20, 30 years of productive time left in me, and there’s a lot wrong with the world. One of my flaws is that when I look at fucked up stuff, I complain about it.  At some point I had to admit I don’t really have the right to complain unless I’m willing to do something about it. I know there are way more problems than people, and nothing is perfect, but I feel the need to do something. Doing something doesn’t have to mean a full-time job. It can mean writing a letter, talking to your family and friends, volunteering a bunch, whatever. There’s a whole spectrum. But for me, part time work about a small niche I care about made sense..

I get a lot out of my EP work; I like the people I protect, and I’m lucky that a fair number of them are actually trying to make the world better. But at the end of the day it’s a for-profit gig, and I’m honestly not sure how much good it nets out to. I’m looking forward to finishing this program and landing on the part-time work that actually jives morew with what I care about. And is something I can do for a few more decades; that ain’t the case for EP. 

Meanwhile, My Wife Did Something Similar

This whole semester has an extra layer of interesting because my wife’s story rhymes with mine. She retired from a full-time engineering career about two years ago. It had gotten increasingly stressful and she’d had enough. She spent a couple of years doing what I did: hanging out, decompressing. Except she got productive faster than I did (she is smarter). She immediately tried a few different volunteer gigs; child advocacy, some data entry, before landing on tax prep, which she loved enough to become an Enrolled Agent and start planning her own business helping people file for free.

She also spent those two years volunteering at our kids’ school library, because she loves books and has always wanted to be a librarian. Near the end of last school year, the actual librarian retired, and it turned out the position doesn’t require a librarian’s credential (a Master’s in Library Science) for an elementary school, just a bachelor’s, which technically makes her a “library specialist” rather than a librarian. Cheaper for the taxpayers, as they pay her half as much. Good thing we don’t need the money. She applied, she got it, and now she’s doing this strange full-time-part-time arrangement:  1,500 hours a year, but she’s in the building 7-8 hours a day getting there early and staying late to prep, in exchange for getting every school break off to include a few months of summer. She loves it. She’s getting more social in, having fun, and our kids get to see her at school most days as basically their library teacher.

Which means this semester, for the first time in years, we’re both back on something resembling a normal people, two working parens schedule. We haven’t had to do that since for almost nine years, when my wife dropped to part-time and we never looked back. So I’m reminded, again, how fortunate we are to get to choose when we work full-time, and that we’re doing it right now because of things we believe in, not because we have to.

That’s the Update

There’s more going on. Earlier this summer I worked something like 60 hours in three days doing EP stuff and had a blast, on almost no sleep. I’ve got a weeklong break from the practicum coming up where I’ll probably put in another hundred hours doing a mix of EP and military stuff, and honestly I’m looking forward to that way more than I enjoy going into this wellness-suite office job. But this post has gone on long enough.

Hopefully it won’t be as long until the next one. We’ll see how this dictate-then-let-the-AI-clean-it-up approach works out (lemme know what you think).

Anywho, this FI thing is one hundred percent worth it, even if the retirement police want to argue I’m not technically retired anymore. Knowing I’m choosing to be a normal person for a few months is way better than having to suck it up beacuse I have to for next few decades. 

And I’m even more motivated to only work part time once I’m through this hoop.