Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1) Seagull. Why don’t seagulls walking around on the ice get cold feet?

My hands turn white just looking at them walking around on the ice.

2) Thanatophobia. Fear of death. William Shatner of all people thinks about death all the time. I mean, he’s certainly old enough to have it on his mind, of course. To be honest I’m not sure he’s really truly afraid, just reluctant.

“i’m surrounded by love. My life is fertile. I don’t want to go. Thoughts of leaving leave me sad. I just don’t want to leave.”

I get every bit of that.

3) Wealth. There are many types of wealth. All of them capable of eliciting envy. According to Sahil Bloom the important ones are financial, time, social, mental, and physical.

We all know what it means to be financially wealthy, and to at least some degree what it takes to become financially wealthy. The other four respond to investment as well, and investments in all produce measurable returns that are more likely to be measured in happiness than financial wealth alone.

What’s your investment plan?

4) Mattering. Lots of folks around me thinking about retiring. A bunch of my doctor friends. Folks of all ages I know who are in the military. I brought a “welcome home” gift to friends who lost their house to a storm disaster and had to re-build. Pretty much the same age we spent an hour or so talking about our plans for our next, likely last acts. Like me, my friend Frank has given a lot of thought to not only the “when” but also to the “what comes after” part of the decision. We both get the keep busy part, and we are both committed to being busy in the company of friends and family.

Yesterday’s WSJ added a bit of a twist to the conversation, at least for me. One of the things I have really enjoyed about my job is the opportunity I have had over the last couple of decades to interact with folks at all levels of the org charts in the industry that exists alongside the “caring” part of healthcare. These are the people who work for companies that make the drugs and devices that doctors and their teammates use to preserve and restore health. In this role my job has been to bring the realities of life at the exact point of healthcare delivery to industry execs, and bring back to my clinical colleagues a sense of what a company can do to help.

I’d kinda like to keep doing this for a while, at least as long as those executives think whatever I have to bring to the table remains relevant.

When you have a job or some type of calling you begin each day with a very particular incentive: you show up because doing so matters. You’ve likely been doing something that matters for many years. A job, for sure, but there are any number of other things that might have gotten you out of the door that wouldn’t be considered employment. Perhaps you were the primary parent running a household and raising a family. Or on the other end of the timeline you spent years as the primary caregiver for a parent or older family member. Any number of volunteer positions certainly fit.

When you retire it’s natural to wonder if you matter anymore.

Jennifer Breheny Wallace, the author of the article and a soon to be book on the subject, posits that mattering has four main components: feeling significant (seen and essential), appreciated (valued for your contributions), invested in (supported and cared for), and depended on (needed by others), encapsulated as “SAID”. As I think about it this is a very helpful corollary to the things that I have been examining as think about how it is that I will spend my time in retirement. I have been using the term “relevant”, but I now think that this is simply a “clock” or duration issue. In a small sliver of what I hope to do when I retire what I am really saying is I’d like to keep my little place at the intersection between commerce and care for as long as I matter.

Like everyone I know who is thinking about retirement I have endeavored to ensure that I have enough financial wealth to not run out of money before I “leave”. I have spent my working life in the company of retired people many years my senior and I believe they only come in two varieties, those who relax into the free time bounty they have graduated to, and those who are so busy they can’t figure out how they ever had enough time to hold a job. Kinda hoping that’s me! I’ve invested time and effort to build my physical and mental “bank accounts” in the hope that here, too, I will have enough wealth to avoid impoverishment for as long as possible.

Mattering speaks to social wealth, at least in part. Happiness is well-known to be highly dependent on having close personal connections, especially as you get further away whatever it was you retired from. That still feels like investment job number one as you build your retirement. To feel needed and wanted, significant and appreciated, to find that place where you matter seems like an awfully good investment strategy.

I guess I’ll keep doing all this as long as it matters, and as long as it does I’ll see you next week…

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 18th, 2026 at 5:11 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.