Fifty Years on the Clock

There’s a moment that sneaks up on you, somewhere between the morning coffee and the nightly ache in your knees. You realize you’ve been at this a long time. Not a “decade or two” long time. Not the kind of long time where you brag about how many years you’ve been with the company at the holiday party. I’m talking about half a century of work. Fifty years. Five decades of setting alarms, clocking in, saying “no problem” when it definitely was, and pretending that Monday wasn’t sitting out in the parking lot revving its engine.

I was thirteen when it started. Woodfisher’s Seafood Restaurant in DeLand, Florida. My first job. I can still smell the mix of fried hush puppies, bleach, and salt air from the freezer where we kept the flounder and shrimp. I made a whopping $1.25 an hour. Not enough to buy much of anything, but I wasn’t working for money back then. I was working because that’s what you did. You got a job. You earned your keep. You didn’t question it. I was proud of it too. I had a timecard, a uniform, and a boss who yelled when the silverware wasn’t rolled tight enough. That was adulthood to me at thirteen.

The work itself wasn’t glamorous. I was the kid scraping half-eaten coleslaw into a trash can that always smelled like sour lemons and regret. I’d wash dishes until my fingers wrinkled and my back hurt. At the end of the night, I’d sweep the floor while the older waitresses smoked by the back door and talked about their boyfriends and car trouble. They’d call me sweetheart and tell me I was a hard worker. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was the first time I ever got hooked on approval. The idea that working hard made you good. That exhaustion meant you’d earned something.

That was 1976. I didn’t know then that I was setting a lifelong pattern. A few years later, the Navy came calling. Ten years of service. A different kind of job, but a job all the same. The hours were longer, the stakes higher, and the ocean had a way of reminding you how small you really were. I learned structure. I learned how to follow orders and how to give them. I learned how to work when I was tired, sick, homesick, or scared. In the Navy, you didn’t get to call out. You didn’t get to say, “I’m not feeling it today.” You just did the damn thing.

When I got out after a decade, civilian life felt strange. The world had moved on while I was out floating on it. But one thing was familiar: the need to work. I went right back into the grind. Jobs, degrees, promotions, side hustles. I blinked, and suddenly I was 62 years old. I’ve been working since before Reagan was elected, and now here I am in a world where people earn a living making unboxing videos. Meanwhile, I’m still doing the adult version of what I did at thirteen: cleaning up other people’s messes, just with better lighting and a bigger paycheck.

There’s something almost comical about it. I’ve worked through recessions, through wars, through the rise of the internet, through every “new normal” they’ve thrown at us. I’ve adapted, learned new systems, smiled in meetings, and tried to act like “work-life balance” was a real thing and not a myth cooked up by someone in HR to make burnout sound healthy. Every few years, they rebrand it. “Hustle culture.” “The grind.” “Rise and grind.” It’s the same sickness with different slogans.

Here’s the thing. I don’t hate work. I don’t resent having done it. Work gave me purpose, stability, and identity. But somewhere along the way, the idea of earning a living morphed into just… earning. Always earning. Always producing. Always proving. And now, fifty years later, I’m asking myself what exactly I’ve been proving and to whom.

I’ve had good jobs and bad ones. I’ve been the guy who takes orders and the guy who gives them. I’ve been the one staying late to fix something that should’ve been done right in the first place. I’ve also been the one who missed dinners, birthdays, and slow Sunday mornings because the clock didn’t care about any of that. The older I get, the clearer it becomes that work will take whatever you give it. If you hand it your time, your health, your weekends, it’ll say thank you and quietly ask for more.

Somewhere between Woodfisher’s seafood grease and my current desk, I started to believe that working hard was the same thing as living well. I was raised on that belief. Most of us Boomers were. Our parents came from war, from the Depression, from a world where survival was tied directly to sweat. You didn’t talk about fulfillment or purpose. You talked about putting food on the table and a roof over your head. So we learned early that stopping was dangerous. That rest was indulgence. That if you weren’t tired, you hadn’t done enough.

But now, as I look down the barrel of 62, that mindset feels like a trap. Because here I am, half a century into this thing, and I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t thinking about work. Even when I’m not working, my brain is filing, planning, calculating, projecting. I’ve got spreadsheets for vacations. I’ve got to-do lists for the weekend. I can’t even take a walk without thinking about productivity metrics or the steps on my watch.

It’s like work has become the default setting, the operating system of my life. And lately, that realization has started to feel like a weight I don’t want to carry anymore.

I’ve seen people die still talking about “the next project.” I’ve watched coworkers retire and be gone within a year, as if their hearts didn’t know what to do without a deadline. That’s not going to be me. I’ve given enough. Fifty years of showing up, stepping up, keeping up. That’s enough for any lifetime.

When I was younger, the idea of stopping scared me. What would I even do? Who would I be if I wasn’t the guy who always got things done? Now it’s the opposite. The idea of not stopping is what terrifies me. The thought of spending the rest of my life inside the same routine until I just quietly fade out of relevance.

I think back to that thirteen-year-old kid in DeLand, the one standing behind the dish pit at Woodfisher’s, his hands red from the hot water, dreaming about being older. That kid thought adulthood meant freedom. He didn’t realize it came with a punch clock. He didn’t know that once you start working, you might never stop.

Maybe it’s time to break that pattern. Maybe it’s time to let the world spin without me for a while. I don’t need to run the race anymore. I’ve already crossed more finish lines than I ever expected to. It’s not about quitting. It’s about reclaiming something. Time. Peace. The ability to wake up and not immediately start mentally checking boxes.

There’s this pressure to keep producing, even in retirement. You’re supposed to have a “side hustle” now, even when you’re in your sixties. Everyone’s supposed to be an entrepreneur, a content creator, a brand. I look at that and think, haven’t we earned the right to just exist without monetizing it?

I’ve worked through everything life could throw at me. Good years, bad years, layoffs, promotions, 80-hour weeks, side gigs to cover gaps. I’ve done my time in fluorescent lighting. I’ve smiled through performance reviews and endured “team-building” events that felt like punishment. I’ve worn ties, uniforms, steel-toe boots, and sometimes all three in the same decade.

And here’s the truth nobody tells you: work doesn’t love you back. It can respect you, reward you, even depend on you, but it doesn’t love you. When you’re gone, it’ll fill your spot before the coffee on your desk goes cold. That’s not bitterness, that’s just reality. And once you accept it, it’s liberating. You stop trying to win at something that doesn’t have a finish line.

At this point in my life, I don’t want to be indispensable. I want to be unnecessary. I want to walk away and watch the world keep moving, because it should. I’ve carried enough weight. I’ve proven enough points. I’ve done enough dishes.

When I think about what comes next, it’s not the usual retirement fantasy. I’m not picturing golf courses or cruise ships. I’m picturing quiet mornings. Slow coffee. Conversations that don’t involve project timelines. Maybe writing more. Maybe traveling without a spreadsheet. Maybe finally sitting long enough to remember what it feels like to just be alive without a task attached to it.

There’s this weird guilt that comes with slowing down, especially for people my age. Like we’re betraying the code we were raised with. Like we’re supposed to die at our desks because that’s what good workers do. I’m done with that. I don’t owe the grind another ounce of my time.

Fifty years is enough. I’ve been on this hamster wheel since disco was popular. The tank isn’t empty, but the engine deserves a rest. I’ve got other things to see, other things to feel. The idea isn’t to stop living. It’s to start living differently.

I’m not naive. I know bills don’t pay themselves and that “freedom” isn’t a switch you flip. But I also know life isn’t meant to be one long shift with a short lunch break in the middle. There’s more to this than staying busy until you die. I want to find out what that “more” looks like before I run out of chances to.

So maybe this is me calling it. Not retiring, exactly. Just stepping off the treadmill and letting the room stop spinning. I’ve done my part. I’ve served my country, worked my jobs, paid my taxes, and hopefully left a few good things behind along the way. Now it’s time to reclaim something I gave up without realizing it. Time itself.

It’s not that I want to do nothing. I just want to do something that matters to me. Something that doesn’t require logging in or meeting a quota. Something that reminds me I’m more than the sum of my work history.

Because when you strip it all away—the uniforms, the job titles, the paychecks—you’re left with a simple question: what’s left of you?

I’m ready to find out.