Ooc: I'm 36. Almost all my meatspace friends and family live in different time zones, are going through a lot, or both. My job is demanding and isolating. My kids take up almost all of my free time. I cannot remember the last time I was physically intimate or even share a bed with my wife. I haven't played music with anyone else in an eternity. All I do is eat, sleep, work, and Lrrr. It's not enough.
Last weekend, one of my wife's friends told me that I deserve to have better shoes and clothes. I don't know about "deserve," but my mostly disintegrated jeans and Obama-era sneakers are clearly not the attire of a person who loves himself. I wish I could hide behind some sort of fanatical savings program (which is kinda the case) or terrible addiction to illegal gambling (which is not the case) for why I look like a raccoon that got turned into a real boy, but it's almost all inertia. I don't want to discover that my inseam is an inch or two bigger than it used to be, and I don't want to pick the wrong shoes. I also don't know when I'd find two hours to shop for new pants, so my plan is to wear my only pair of work slacks or some gym shorts until one of them is destroyed and new pants are an unavoidable emergency. This is stupid: I should just find a way to buy pants. But this is how I've been thinking.
I guess I feel hopeless in that I don't think things will get better, but I don't feel the despair that hopelessness usually entails. Resignation, numbness, emptiness. This isn't a fun way to live, but it's not that bad. It's pure gray in all directions forever.
Lately, I've been daydreaming about a retirement that I might not live to see. I am saving everything I can so that work might be optional one day. I know that I will never inherit money like my clients' kids, which could fill me with resentment but usually just fills me with dead. Everything feels like work. It's all work forever. So I'm looking at Zillow for coastal cities where I might never be able to live, imagining what life could be.
And even if I can stop workinvg in 20-25 years, my wife does not want the sort of retirement that I do. I might be snowbirding alone or taking up space in a house I have never liked, trying not to make too much noise (I'm not trying to make my wife sound bad, it's just that one of my favorite pants is music and one of hers is reading, and the reading prevails over "i want to do this thing i can do quietly but LOUD!"). I am so alone right now, and spending time alone elsewhere sounds like it would be somehow even worse.
Sorry. I don't have anyone to talk to about this. I recognize that even thinking about retiring early is ludicrously privileged. I realize that i am mostly supposed to discuss this kind of thing with professionals. Please ignore or mute or block me if it's not to your taste. I just... I want to not be a vacant-eyed drone.
