You know that feeling when the humidity hits 90 percent before 7:00 AM and your joints start to feel like they’re filled with ground glass—that's the reality of the freelance life at seventy-six. No pension, no union benefits anymore, just the daily grind of private contracts where you’re only as good as the last footer you poured. You spend fifty years being the "Old Man" on site, the one with the blueprint in his head and the gravel in his voice. You build a persona of absolute psychological stability. You become the anchor. But then some twenty-eight-year-old developer with a degree and a lease-option Audi decides to dismantle your entire professional identity in front of the guys you've led for a decade. The reprimand wasn't even about the structural integrity—it was about a delay in the supply chain I couldn't control. He called it "incompetent oversight." He used words that stung worse than a splinter under a fingernail. Sometimes you just have to stand there and take the verbal lashing because if you snap back, you’re the "angry old man" and the contract gets pulled. You feel that sudden shift in the air—the crew looking at their boots, the silence getting heavy, the loss of your perceived masculine authority. It’s like a sudden onset of acute situational depression, right there in the dirt... reasons I'm currently hiding behind the rusted green dumpster: 1.