Musings on a life of leisure

"I aspire to be retired!"
-John Siracusa, Accidental Tech Podcast

This is inspired by me asking my father, who just turned 65 late last year, if he was planning on retiring any time soon. He scoffed and said he would stay at the company as long as they'd have him because otherwise he wouldn't know what to do with himself, and my mother agreed. I can see it. He's one of those people who always has a project going on in the backyard, gardening or redoing some aspect of the architecture. The last couple times we visited I helped him raise the one-step stoop out in the backyard because it was settling. He'd go stir-crazy without something to take up most of his time.

I used to think that it wasn't true of me, that if I won the lottery or otherwise had enough money to not need to work I'd quit my job in an instant, but thinking about it more I'm not so sure. After Suzugamine decided not to continue its contract with Lang in Japan and my own contract with Lang wasn't renewed, I couldn't find another job. The local schools in Chiyoda had all already found people because the school year had begun and traveling into the city to get to Suzugamine had resulted in a two-hour commute each way and was extremely stressful for both schoolpsychnerd and me. Eventually, schoolpsychnerd sat down with me and we talked about it, and she told me to consider it a vacation. When we moved back to America I'd get a job and she'd go to school and eventually, that's what happened. In the meantime, I had a year and eight months of not working.

It seems like it'd be exactly what I wanted out of life, since schoolpsychnerd's income was enough to live comfortably on, I could play a lot of video games, and we were living in Japan. But I actually think it was really bad for me. My response to stress is generally isolation, to withdraw into myself and avoid too much contact with other people, and that's pretty quickly what I did. My sleep was horribly disrupted, and I'd repeatedly stay up for thirty-plus hours, sleep ten hours, and repeat in a cycle that left me often awake all night while schoolpsychnerd was asleep and asleep when she was at work. Staying in and playing video games meant I didn't get as much Japanese practice as I could, so while I can read well enough, my speaking still lags behind. And although we had the most friends and were the most socially active that last year we lived in Hiroshima, I spent the overwhelming majority of my time alone.

I've been more isolated than usual in the last year or so and I think it's affecting me the same way. I go to work, sit in front of my computer, and rarely if ever talk to anyone, and most of the time I like it that way. But I'm not sure it's actually good for me, in much the same way that eating only cookies is not healthy over the long term even if they taste really good at the time. Without work to get me out of the house I'd spend days indoors at a stretch. That's what I did over winter break. I even had a brief conversation with a stranger (sort of--she knew schoolpsychnerd) on the L today and it was nice! That's astonishing compared to me a year ago.

I mean, I don't like working qua working. But I'd need to find something to do that wasn't just playing video games all the time.