The first day of the rest of your life

There's a saying "Every day is the first day of the rest of your life". The problem is that most days you don't really feel like it and more likely don't even remember it. For me today is one of those days when I definitely feel like today is the first day of the rest of my life.

The last time I felt like this was when I decided to leave my last job with its nice office, nice view, job security and a friendly work environment full of friends and happy memories. I left it to join a crazy dot com, with a long commute, crazy work hours and crazy bosses who dreamed the could change the world, but eventually just pissed away $34M with nothing to show for it except a brand name and a lot of unused office stationery. This all happened right after watching the movie "American Beauty" and I would say the two events were definitely causally connected.

That was almost five years ago and yesterday I retired from the remmanents of my dot com (long since assimilated into a larger all together more evil public corporation). Another way to say it was "I finished my job", or "quit my job", or "became a discouraged worker", or "become unemployed" or even "got laid off because California workers are too expensive". Yet another way to say it is "I didn't want to move to Idaho to continue doing a job I basically couldn't care less about".

Anyway, whichever way you look at my transition from the "working state" to something else, the consequence is today I'm not working and have no definite plans to go back to working any time soon. That decision is entirely in my own hands and it feels good to be back in control of one's own destiny.

Maybe three months, six months or whenever I might want to start working again for whatever reason except for money. Hopefully that reason will be to do something interesting, more productive and definitely more worthwhile than just plain making money for a psycopathic corporation.