I got back in touch this past week with a long-time friend (we'll call him "J" in this piece) from the technology industry, who admitted he was "bored" being retired for the last 4 years.
Here are my suggestions:
Y Combinator
This is, of course, the famous startup accelerator in Silicon Valley. J was intimately and successfully involved with 6 or 8 startups during his career, so he's well qualified and would of interest to this organization, I'd think. Maybe to start a Seattle branch?
Makeover
Take up a New Game
Golf
This a traditional retirement pastime ... its characteristics:
- It's expensive (not an issue for J)
- It's time-consuming (maybe just what one wants?)
- You get "variable reinforcement" ... the same stimulus that keeps rats running through mazes
- There's a handicap system that allows differing levels of ability to play together fairly
- It takes years of practice and play to become proficient
- A good book on golf is:
Poker
There are at least two classes of poker play:
- no limit and pot-limit
- low fixed limit
You can see examples of play of no-limit on YouTube, for example:
Much more tractable for a beginner: low-limit poker. The book you want in this case is
A place to try either type of game around Seattle is Fortune Poker in Renton.
Bridge
I learned bridge from my mom starting at about age 8. But the game is dominated by Old People, so the retired are well represented.
My two-question qualifying survey to find if you are interested in bridge:
- are you analytical? (A bonus for techies: there's an intentionally limited communications protocol as part of the game.) J places out of this one, having worked in tech industry for decades.
- are you competitive? If you will hit a tennis ball back and forth across the net for more than a few minutes without keeping score, this game is probably not for you.
Bridge is:
- cheap -- only cost is deck of bridge cards (make sure to get bridge cards, not poker cards as you have to keep 13 in your hand for starts)
- sociable -- you play with a partner against at least one other pair
The downsides:
- the pandemic had a negative effect on in-person play; a couple of the local bridge clubs folded
- it takes years to become proficient (for most people)
Try a Non-Standard Charity
The one I'm most familiar with is this one:
There are certainly more examples around, but this is the one I know best
Tack Against the Culture
Cultural assumptions suffuse everything we do. But which ones of these are wrong?
I first read this book when it came out in 2015:
I found this fascinating! Like everyone else in America, I had been bombarded with the "red meat and saturated fat are bad for you" ... but this book, by a journalist who was assigned to cover restaurants found that (a) the meats and cream sauces and whatnot she tried were delicious ... and she lost a lot of weight. (She had been a vegetarian up to this point.)
It's a pretty dense book that makes the case: saturated fat is good for us.
I had switched from margarine to butter in 1988, but I still had red meat in a different category until reading this.
There's also a chapter on vegetable oils that I missed the first time until I saw this discussion on YouTube:
After I saw this, I tossed my (delicious) Costco (canola and/or sunflower oil) potato chips.
My wife and I are now engaged in a lobbying effort to try and persuade a local favorite restaurant to switch from these oils to butter, beef tallow, or one of the other saturated fat oils.
Another thing I think I've learned: carbohydrates in general and fiber in particular are unnecessary to the human diet:
I could be wrong about all of this, but it makes sense to me and the lobbying effort keeps life interesting.
Get a pandemic puppy
J, I don't know if you already have pets, but this could add an aspect to life that you've missed up to this point if not. You can tack against the culture with this one, too:
Or relax and go with the cultural mainstream:
That's It ...
I hope this was helpful to J and any other readers. Comments welcome!
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