Thoughts on Retirement

Having reached the age of retirement, I've been thinking about it a lot.

I have retired three times. The first time, I was 46. It was the year 2000. Having accelerated my mortgage payments, I became debt-free and thus financially able. I was exhausted from DKTS, my technology training startup. I loved it and was proud of what I'd achieved (industry-leading content and service to Fortune 500 customers) but hit a wall, the "dot bomb". After 20+ years of healthy sales and cutting edge courseware development, suddenly all the training budgets were on hold.

But the timing was good. I thought, OK, let it go. At last, I can follow my passion! Be a full time musician! I did, and played a lot of gigs. A year in, on a gig I caught myself checking my watch. I thought, it's not as fulfilling as I'd expected. Surprise!

The surprise? Retirement is not effortless and not always comfortable. Here are some revelations. First, much of one's identity, place in the world, and prestige comes from one's work. (Here's an excellent article from the July 2019 Atlantic, Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think.)

Second, I discovered to my dismay that in fact all those deferred projects were on the back burner for a reason. Once I had the time to throw myself into them, my feeling was, "Meh."

Third, the travel opportunities of retirement lost their gleam. I'd traveled a lot for work and learned that the most comfortable bed in the world is my own. Travel had become an unglamorous grind... airport security, incessant problem-solving, cranky service-people, etc. Stay home and you needn't deal with any of that.

Having departed the world of work, I lounged around for a couple of years, played music, caught up on my photo albums, and paid attention to my kids. But soon I longed to return to work. It gives life purpose. And having more money is nice, too. But the question was, what work?

I read several of those self-help books about job-hunting. Perhaps the most popular is What Color is Your Parachute?. It propounds a variety of introspective processes to reveal your aptitudes and desires and thus deduce a career direction. More useful -- much more useful -- was another book whose name, alas, I have forgotten, that proposed an entirely different and more effective discovery process. It recommended executing a series of experiments: actually try different things and see what works best. These experiments are not small; they take substantial commitment, e.g. doing some job for a while on a part-time basis, or volunteering. Often, they involve a substantial qualification and application process and perhaps even training. This is all to the good; it gives a sense of what's really demanded and roots you in reality. It's a much more effective method than Parachute's personality and aptitude tests.

The experiment that rang my bell was volunteering in some emergency rooms. The requirements were stiff: training, uniforms, immunizations, and more; a lengthy process before you even got to set foot in the place. But I persevered and did it at several hospitals and loved it. Working with patients is unlike any other work I'd done, a powerful experience.

So I decided to be a nurse. I'd need a degree (BSN) and a license (RN). Before I could apply, there were some prerequisites (chemistry, nutrition, psych, and more) and it took me a couple of years to get these, attending classes in various community colleges around the Bay Area. When the teacher was good (often they weren't) it was fun going back to school as an adult. Finally, I was ready to apply. I nearly got into UCSF (where I'd gotten my MS decades earlier) and my application was strong but my essay sucked (I wish I had it to do over!) so they rejected me.

Instead, I went to USF, to a nursing program called Master's Entry Option (MEO) that awarded a master's in nursing (MSN) after two years. It was grueling but I mostly enjoyed it, especially the clinicals. The problem was that several of my professors were really bad. As an adult (most were younger than me) I saw them as peers and they hated that. It proved the adage, "Those who can't, teach." If they had been good at nursing, they would have been nursing and earning double. One even vindictively falsified my test scores (I was pretty much a straight-A student) because I called her on her shit (she was ill-prepared for her lectures, didn't follow the syllabus, and hadn't read the textbook). After a few more experiences like that, I dropped out. For a fancy, expensive private school, USF was surprisingly mediocre.

I switched to a one-year BSN program at Samuel Merritt where, too, some of the profs were sad sacks, but this was less surprising as Samuel Merritt doesn't boast USF's prestige. It was another grueling year but I got through it and graduated cum laude.

What next? Go to work, of course. But another surprise was in store. Though nurses are in high demand, it's hard to get a job. The demand is for seasoned nurses. Hospitals only reluctantly hire new grads. We come out of nursing school near useless in live settings. Hospitals must make big investments in us. It takes months before we're up to speed. And once we're trained, likely as not we'll change hospitals to one we like better. So these positions are scarce.

I applied for a few, got one interview (they didn't call back), and gave up. Back to retirement. Mostly. I've done a few little jobs here and there, working a few shifts in the telemetry unit (highly technical nursing -- almost like ICU -- and very sick patients; I was in over my head) at St. Rose hospital in Hayward, and volunteer nursing with Project Homeless Connect and a whole month during the Covid-19 pandemic at Hayward's Windsor Post-Acute Care Center (a SNF) which I enjoyed and am considering employment there (they asked if I wanted a job... I said maybe).

Along the way, I also briefly held a couple of real jobs -- jobs with steady paychecks. One was Teleresults, a medical database developer/vendor focused on organ transplants, a complex and fascinating specialty. The boss, Ghassan, alas, was a psychopath and I discovered that the corporate culture was unabashed fealty and deference to him above all. I'd been doing good work developing training and marketing materials but that counted for nothing. We clashed and that ended it.

Another job was for Academy X, a fast-growing technology training company in some ways like DKTS, owned and operated by Stephen Fraga, a friend who respected what I'd achieved in that industry and hoped I could do the same for him. So did I. But the weakness of my own business model was that sales were driven by my personal relationships with the decision-makers at the client companies. They loved my virtuoso classroom performances and we enjoyed beers together afterward, but it was a model that doesn't scale. Nor does it transfer. I couldn't reproduce for Stephen what I'd done for DKTS. To make matters worse, my curmudgeonliness (despite Stephen's kindness) got me fired within a few months. I just can't be bossed despite my half-hearted attempts.

I haven't worked much as a professional nurse. Instead, I've returned to my first love, medical informatics, and am focusing on building my company, Nurse Tech Inc. I'm raising money and building apps for nurses, tools that really could make a difference in that profession -- the way we think about our work and the way we do it. My apps fit well into nursing workflow and meet needs that could be recognized only by someone with my rare combination of skills, both nursing and programming. The trouble is, a third skill, too is needed: marketing. I don't have that one. I've built good products that are unused. Time for retirement #4!

So now I'm "working" on remodeling my Oakland warehouse, playing a gig here and there, and doing some travel. Next week, I'm taking my kids for 3 weeks in Italy.

In sum, here are the minimum requirements for a good retirement:

• Health
• Money
• Family/friends/love

I've got them all. Life is sweet.

-- the highly-opinionated Dan Keller, 2020
updated 2023
illustration by my father, Charles Keller