Turning 50

A week ago today I turned 50. It has been a very busy time at work, but I've also done a bit of celebration with family and friends, including my oldest son coming home from college for the weekend to help wish me a happy birthday. Our house is also completely torn up since we are remodeling the family room in the basement, moving my younger son downstairs to a larger bedroom, and re-doing my beloved office with Techline desk, cabinets, and a bunch of really nice bookcase cabinets. A major change that I'm really looking forward to now, but not to be completed until mid-November. I suppose I can be a bit patient at 50.

Some thoughts on turning 50 seem to be in order. The biggest thought is how important it is to maintain an attitude of thankfulness vs one of anger / outrage / sadness / etc for the blessing of living to 50 in generally good health, great wife, great kids, SUPER cats (they demand top billing), great friends, a job that is way better than many, excellent church home, neighborhood ... and literally on and on. The list of things to be thankful for is literally endless, but thankfulness is not a natural human state.

Case in point, my eldest son got me the book "A Pirate Looks at 50" by Jimmy Buffett. It is a fun book, I'm enjoying reading it, and I'm glad that the writer of "Wasting Away in Margaritaville" is a multi-millionaire with a Grumman Albatross seaplane and a Cessna Citation jet, apparently among other planes, along with houses in Aspen, Key West, Long Island and a couple other spots. It sounds like an absolutely amazing life, but I'm struck by a couple of things. First of all, he is obviously liberal, and I suspect that hardly a single liberal out there thinks that Jimmy ought to change his lifestyle. Certainly not Jimmy.

There is a point in the book where he talks about talking to his wife and daughters up in their Citation while he is flying his Albatross below at 150 MPH. Right about that time he breaks into talking about how good he feels about the work he does to protect the environment and how important the environment is. Here is he is with two monster planes sucking as much as fuel as a small town of SUVs would in a year, and it bothers him not at all to point out the poor job the US does on the environment. A few pages later, while talking about checking into the same compound in Costa Rica that Bush I used when he stays there, he comments on how "Americans need to be more humble". I can tell from the writing he sees no irony in this at all, because he "feels good about it in his heart".

Again, it is fine with me that he does all that he does. That is his business. It is also funny to read that he DOESN'T consider himself rich, because he feels he can't afford a Gulfstream IV jet. He has to get by with a Citation. It shows that it truly is all very relative when it comes to money. He has a descent amount of "righteous indignation" about US foreign, environmental, and economic policy (among other things I'm sure). He just has that while celebrating his 50th B-day while flying around Central and South America with two large planes and an entourage of friends and servants. It is indeed a wonder to live in a free country.

Personally, I feel very lucky to have achieved the much more modest level of wealth that I've been blessed with, even though if falls WELL short of the point where either a Albatross or Citation are in my future. I suspect that it may be that money earned by having a hit song gives less of an insight into the "cost of making money" than a 28 year career at a major corporation. He seems to love entertaining, and when you are good at entertaining, you are very highly paid.

Even better, society seems to feel that entertainers are "worth it". Somehow a guy writing a song about drinking too much and ending up with millions is way more acceptable than somebody working their way up some corporate ladder for a lifetime and getting a similar amount of money for taking a CEO job where they are responsible for 100s of K of employees, 10s of billions of dollars of revenue and billions of dollars of profit, and likely 10s or 100s of billions of dollars of market capitalization. It is "unfair" that a guy can make the big bucks for that kind of job, but a good drinking song for the same kind of cabbage goes down a lot easier. That is just the kind of world many folks live in, consistency is truly not an issue.

Given the track that I chose, the "cost of making money" has been plenty, and I have zero desire or envy for the CEO that makes the millions. If I could write a book that made me some millions in the cosmic dollar lottery, that would be great, since I suspect that I'd enjoy writing the book. It isn't that I don't enjoy many aspects of my corporate job, I've just realized over a long career that they tend to not pay you the most for the parts of the job that are the most fun. Programming is so much fun that a lot of folks do it for free in Open Source Software today. Even if they don't, it is now being done in India, China, and beyond. Allocating dollars to tasks, tracking tasks, fighting about what business trade-offs to do make and asking people to do work and bothering them when they are late, off course, or it is just hard to understand what they are doing ... those things tend to be less fun, but often better paid.

As I write on, I realize there is a bit of wistful jealousy in my soul. It would certainly be "nice" to be extremely highly paid for exactly what one wanted to do. There is a core difference there between the conservative and the liberal soul. Yes, it would be nice. It would be nice to be able to eat like a pig, not exercise, and be in great shape. Some folks have the genetics to come a lot closer to that than I do, I guess that is "unfair". The liberal looks at such "unfairness" where they can and tries to figure out how to "fix it" ... or really, how to get someone else like the government to fix it. Conservatives have all the same emotions I think, but at some point we pulled up our socks and said that even falling well short of "nirvana" on our own was way better than a life of bitching and ingratitude.

It is always very human to bitch, and from the vantage point of 50, I can guess that age will always throw some curves that will make it even easier. I'll do my best to remain thankful.