Work & Finance

The Best is Yet to Come

7 embarrassing traps to avoid in your quest for immeasurable happiness

I was sitting in the first-class cabin on the way from here to there the other day. The peanuts were hot. The air was marginal, but we don’t really need all that much air to operate at our age these days, do we? We’re getting up there. We tire more easily. We tend to nap on planes when before we were up watching those in-flight films. We’ve just about won this rat race, and now’s our chance to settle back in the comfort of what we’ve achieved, satisfied that we’ve done our jobs well and earned that little patch of heaven reserved for those who have spent their time on this earth to best advantage.

What a crock, right?

Actually, what I was thinking about was how to get out of that friggin’ plane.

I’m tired of doing what I’ve been doing. I’ve been feeling that way since I was about 48, and that was a couple of years ago. The conviction that I was a prisoner of my own life started creeping up on me when my first kid went off to college. After that, it got worse and worse until I figured I would have to do something about it.

Fortunately, I had a lot of company among the guys I know, and a lot of examples after which to pattern my choices if I decided to act, because just about every man my age was wigging out in some way similar. Like my pal Polanski at the office, who a couple of years ago lost 60 pounds and found it was most necessary to do the greater part of his job from Las Vegas. Or Swidler, a financial dude I hang with when we both get kind of thirsty, who ignores his palatial digs in New York in order to better ream out the poor bozos who ply their trade for the corporation in Los Angeles. Or Carl, our former chairman, who collects dead cars and spends most of his time on weekends tinkering with them in upstate New York while his wife is miles away in New Jersey.

People make fun of us. They say we’ve gone around the bend. But what we’re doing, we who are sick of it all, is fighting for whatever lives we have left. And there’s no more important battle to be waged by men who have won it all and still feel like they have nothing in the end.

We have earned the right to settle back and go quietly. But we stick our middle finger up at that ignoble fate.