I’ve met someone but she set off my alarm signals. She’s old, maybe as old as me, and I’ve just finished relearning life’s lesson about associating with old ladies. Read my lips, if a woman over 24 is single, guys, there is a reason for it. I’ve known this one several years from the computer store and she has begun to talk to me at the coffee shop. There is a vast educational gulf between us and she seems to have trouble making decisions over simple things like, “Should I take the bus tour of Key West?” And I mean vast, as in 25+ years of general study and experience. Judging by all the mothers I’ve met, raising children does not raise your IQ even one point.While I’m not in a relationship, only a fool thinks that makes me a beggar. For that matter, I highly advise beggars to be careful choosers, because they are less able to absorb negative consequences. She’s nice, but I dated a nice girl during the late 90s and found it a boring and bland diet. Nice girls too often give the impression of always holding back something, sort of always seeming like they pretending to enjoy things. In a worst case scenario, nice girls expend too much effort being nice—to everyone but you.
It will be 15 years before I can say, but this morning found an old acquaintance on my doorstep. In serious trouble because a neighbor got arrested and sold her out. I contacted the proper authorities and scheduled a court appearance for late August. The episode is significant to me because this is a person I had repeated warned to be more careful about how much personal information she let into the system. But she always defended the system with child-like trust.
She was wrong. This happened because she was too easy to identify, too easy to find, and too easy to assess. The neighbor knew enough to spin an elaborately believable story to the cops. It is entirely her own fault that neighbor knew so damn much about what was inside her house. The system that protects you is also the system that will put you in jail if you provide them with enough information. That’s not speculation, I sincerely mean if you give them enough information they will eventually own you. Don’t buck the system; just have as little to do with it as possible.
Then for fun I ran my statistics through an on-line retirement income calculator. The results were some kind of a joke, but the scary part is that for most people, those numbers are not funny. Another joke is the Social Security advising graduates to work lots of overtime in the early years. What, when your income and hence your overtime rate is at its lowest? I rarely worked overtime at the phone place until I was making top union scale, then I piled it on. Spend your youth having fun, not busting your ass for something that may never pay off.
My advice would be nearly the opposite. Never plan on working forever. Is that what you were born to do? Is that what you would choose to do? I say if you are not rich by the age of 29, then follow a plan to be comfortable later. But don’t knock yourself out and don’t tie your money up where the whole world knows about it. I worked hard until 29, then said to hell with it. I went to evening school and learned to calculate to the penny what I would need to survive, then what I’d need to be comfortable, then last what was required to thrive.
No, I’m not rich. But neither are 99% of the people who point that out. But consider the facts. I’ve worked just 14.5 years in my entire life, but I’ve got most of what everybody else really has. Maybe I live in a trailer, but my equity in the trailer is 100% and that’s more than anyone with a mortgage. What would I care if my trailer lost 50% of its value? And to any big mouths out there, in a couple years I may well be the one buying your house for ten cents on the dollar. Let’s see who laughs about trailers then.
