The Sadness That Comes With Retirement
Anybody else experience this? I love my work. And...my "retirement" will certainly include plenty of more work. But, it will be fun stuff. No more 9-5 with a boss. And, I have options lining up. I'm pulling the plug on my engineering career in a few months. I realized something looking back on things. I've had the luck to work in a few jobs where I got to work with a small team of very competent, intelligent and good colleagues. Looking back I realized that each time those teams were blown up by inept management. And, it makes me wonder. What the hell is wrong with people? It's a microcosm of what I see at the national level. Cruz's state is in very serious trouble so he flies off to Cancun just being the very latest example. Looking back it appears that almost anybody anymore who seeks positions of power are really intellectually flawed. I'm retiring from this position at a pretty young age simply because those above me are perfectly fine with me working myself into an early heart attack.
This morning I found a picture of the best architect I've ever worked with. It was when he and I spoke to a large audience of architects and engineers at an event in S.F. He and I were such a potent duo working side-by-side, industry experts. We were there with the boss who hired us who is a brilliant guy. Soon after that meeting upper management yanked my boss out of that position, replaced him with somebody only because they wanted the job and our team quickly dissolved. My former boss retired in disgust and rides his bike around town sampling the local beers (I'm joining him on that and we're planning our bike trips), and my former architect colleague has been directed to compile staff workload spreadsheets for the office.
It makes me really look at our world holistically and think about guiding my children on their futures. The old "work hard, take care of your family and retire" paradigm that we established post WW2 in America is dead. Totally dead. But, as I've taught my son...knowing is half the battle...
This morning I found a picture of the best architect I've ever worked with. It was when he and I spoke to a large audience of architects and engineers at an event in S.F. He and I were such a potent duo working side-by-side, industry experts. We were there with the boss who hired us who is a brilliant guy. Soon after that meeting upper management yanked my boss out of that position, replaced him with somebody only because they wanted the job and our team quickly dissolved. My former boss retired in disgust and rides his bike around town sampling the local beers (I'm joining him on that and we're planning our bike trips), and my former architect colleague has been directed to compile staff workload spreadsheets for the office.
It makes me really look at our world holistically and think about guiding my children on their futures. The old "work hard, take care of your family and retire" paradigm that we established post WW2 in America is dead. Totally dead. But, as I've taught my son...knowing is half the battle...
To quote AR. “This is their world. They created it. Leave them to it.”
So here is where I am. I am a dinosaur. Private practioners are a dying breed, for financial reasons. Young graduates come out of school with $250,000 to $500,000 in debt, only to make about half as much as the preceding generation. This is due to the fact that insurance companies essentially set our fees, and income goes down while costs go up. I would love to get a new graduate to come in and work with me a couple of years and then slowly buy me out, but it’s not going to happen. That’s a thing of the past. So my practice and my way of practicing, putting ethics and the patient first, is dead. The only way for dentistry to survive at this point is to have huge groups and commit massive fraud and throw ethics away. I know this, as I sat on our state dental board for 10 years.
And one more thing: the quality of the graduates has declined precipitously in the last 10 years. I’m not sure I could deal with a “partner” who was incompetent, and the odds of that is high.
Just another example of how our country is changing. The patients, by the way, are the ones who get screwed.
So you’re not the only one who is retiring in disgust. Most of all, I am so sad to see where my profession, which I respected highly, has gone, like a lot of America these days.
Wow, I had some time to rant, didn’t I?
I think the post-WWII concept of a career path isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I think it partly came from WWII-era price controls and regulation. Historically people didn’t have one job take care of them, and they didn’t plan on having a period toward the end of their life when they would not work.
Since I’ve run a business I have a new respect for inept managers and even more respect for managers who build something excellent. Life is too short to work on even a tiny fraction of the endeavors that are out there. Don’t pick one with seriously inept people or that doesn’t work with you for any reason.
I try to have grace toward political faux pas like Cruz going on vacation during a crisis. In all areas of life there is a lurid world of people angling to make one another look good or bad in the eyes of others. I try to live for myself and ignore those empty calories. I try to ignore the politics and work the problem. Politics is lurid and hard to look away from. It sometimes feels like it unfortunately matters more than the underlying task, and that the world is mismanaged. When I look back with perspective, tough, usually getting the underlying work done mattered more than politics. The world is mismanaged, in the way all processes have inefficiencies. I try to focus on what I’m trying to accomplish and not ruminate on value lost to inefficiency.