A brief explanation of this blog. It’s primary motivation is personal — to provide a ‘public’ variation on dialogues which usually occur within the privacy of my head. The idea being, that the potential exposure of these thoughts, might discipline them.
Make better decisions. Should anyone read this stuff and wish to engage with it, so much the better. Because it’s intended to help me make better decisions about what I am doing or am about to do. Hopefully, shining light on my less rational impulses and bringing my post-hoc rationalisations into closer proximity with other people’s reality.
Death and retirement. Of course, this fourth iteration of my blog could die like the previous three. But I suspect it’ll live a little longer. Because it’s conditioned by my last two ‘rights of passage’ — those from work to retirement and from life to death.
Get my shit together. Death is non-negotiable. And mine is statistically likely within 20 years. So, even if I were to let inertia and chance take their course, the decisions I take these days are more focused than those of 20 years ago. Iminent death sharpens the will to do something more satisfying than eat, sleep, and pay the mortgage — more so than the ‘mid-life crisis’ I skipped a while back.
Get things done, better. So this blog focuses primarily on the things I’ll be thinking about and doing during transition from full-on paid work to semi-retirement. Because I’ve more or less decided that my 66th birthday won’t mark the beginning of a life of pure leisure. There are things to do, do better, and get done with greater satisfaction than previously. They’ll mostly be documented in the Projects and Activities sections of the blog.