You’re never too young to be old

by philg

I’m 55 today. “My Husband And I Couldn’t Get Jobs, So We Moved Into My Parents’ Retirement Community” (HuffPost) is kind of inspiring in that it shows that people aren’t locked into age-normal lifestyles:

When I drive into my parent’s retirement community after 9 p.m., nobody’s lights are on. They call it “Dataw midnight.” Shortly after ”Wheel of Fortune,” it’s lights out at the Spanish moss-draped South Carolina island retirement community for seniors aged 60 and up.

My husband Matt had one year left of school after we got married. That August, he was graduating with a PhD in chemical biology from one of the best programs in the nation. Even though our lease ended only days after his graduation date, we didn’t renew. We were sure he’d be employed by then.

As August crept closer, the job offers didn’t come.

Pretending to be retired at 29 was fun at first. Matt took up crabbing. We went for walks every morning around the island, waving at the other couples, 40 years our senior. We had drinks on the porch overlooking the golf course in the afternoon and tuned into ”Wheel” at dinner with my parents.

A few days after we got there, my parents threw a cocktail party. Twenty golf carts parked haphazardly on our lawn.

(The guy who followed the STEM-passionate advice eventually was able to get a job with his STEM Ph.D.)

Readers: What can I do that would be fun and age-appropriate for a 29-year-old? (and does not involve camping in the Black Rock Desert for a week!)

Related:

 

14 thoughts on “You’re never too young to be old”

  1. Happy Birthday Phil! To imitate a 29 year old you can take a job in the marketing department at the Huffington Post and complain about how little you are paid!

  2. Dating women over the minimum age where beta males finally become acceptable to them exposes you to the weird world of 50 year olds living with their 30 year old sons, with suitors equally distant from each of them.

    It’s quite normal in Indian culture for 3 generations to live in the same house. As the borrowing required to own a house passes 100 times annual income, western culture is catching up.

  8. Happy birthday! I am only 8 days from that milestone myself and as a stay at home dad from a STEM career that ended too early, I too am keenly interested in the responses you might get.
    My own idea so far has been to involve myself with my kid’s life but now that she’s gotten a little older I’ll have to look at other ways to entertain myself. Do you think it would be weird if I got a software job somewhere so I could be rejuvenated by working with a bunch of 20-somethings?

  11. Rick: I want to buy experiences, not things (most of which seem to disappear somehow, despite our house being fairly small). Right now a friend and I are looking into a Boston-Miami-Caribbean trip by Cirrus SR20 for late Dec/early January.

  13. Happy Birthday!

    We took in a few PhDs and switched them from being unemployed into patent experts working on patent drafting and IPRs. Despite of (or as a result of) years in graduate schools, very few PhDs can actually get the forms right without fatal errors (to USPTO) or work sufficiently efficient (we were used to day dreaming and being satisfied with publishing ~2 papers/year in engineering or ~1 paper/year in sciences) to justify billable rate equivalent to a SR22 hourly rental.

Comments are closed.