I think retirement is a pipe dream...

HoustonSaint68 said
True dat. Probably the biggest disservice I did to my kids was not making them work the type of nasty arse jobs I did starting, like you, at age 14.

I was reading last night how the thing that is keeping the Chandler dude from Friends from going back to opioids is thinking about having to live the rest of his life with a colostomy bag. The thing that kept me in night school after working a full time job and a part time job was the thought of washing dishes, or flipping hamburgers, or tearing off shingles in 90 degree heat for the rest of my life. It's a LOT easier to read Dostoyevsky when you're dead tired with an infant sleeping in your arms than it is to haul shingles up a ladder in a New Orleans summer.

My summer job in college was construction. I noticed how worn out the older workers bodies were, and decided that's why I wanted to graduate college; I didn't want to end up like these men. Some of whom I saw later in their lives in my professional capacity as an occupational therapist. By the end of those summers, I was tired of sweltering from beginning to end of the day, and was ready to go back to college albeit to an unairconditioned dorm room :hihi:

One summer I noticed one of my coworkers seemed to be not quite your average construction laborer. I said to him, "You don't strike me as the average construction worker" He laughed and replied "Well, during the school year I'm actually the biology department chair at Salisbury State College. I do this job to unwind from the politics. Here, at the end of the day I have no other work to do. I'm outside, getting my body back in shape and clearing my mind. Don't tell them but I'd do this for free just to relax" he later echoed my sentiments that by summer's end, he was ready to go back to the college.

I also worked with a retired navy commander and several others who liked the summer work just to be outside and do grunt labor that didn't require the mind to work hard. On the other end of the scale, my first summer I was crew lead and got paid 50 cents extra per hour because I was the only one of the 5 of us with a drivers license :hihi: