I started this remote software support gig two years ago, right after I finally hung it up at the office. Thirty-five goddamn years in a cube, then another ten "consulting" to pay for junior's college. I thought I'd be bored stiff, playing golf and watching daytime TV, but my neighbor, Carl, he told me about this company. "Easy money, barely do anything," he said. The old bastard was right. My day starts like this: I log in at 8 AM sharp, pour my coffee, maybe answer a couple of emails about a printer driver or some obscure network error. By 9:30, 10 AM at the absolute latest, my queue is empty. Flat empty. I’ll sit there, staring at the screen, waiting for something to pop up. Sometimes a ticket comes in, maybe two. I resolve them, usually in under twenty minutes, then I'm back to staring. This happens EVERY FUCKING DAY. So, around noon, I log out. No fanfare, no "have a great weekend" from colleagues I've never met. I just… sign off. And then I go outside. My garden, see, it’s my escape. It started small, just a few rose bushes, but now I’ve got raised beds, a drip irrigation system, an entire corner dedicated to heirloom tomatoes. The physical labor is... grounding. I'm out there, sun on my face, dirt under my nails, meticulously pruning, weeding, turning the soil. By the time my watch says 4 PM, I’m usually covered in mud, smelling like earth and sweat. My hands are rough, calloused. They look like a gardener's hands, not a man who just spent four hours "working" on a computer. The strange thing is, I feel a distinct, almost chemical, surge of guilt every other week when that direct deposit hits. It’s a physical sensation, right in my gut. Like I’ve pulled one over on someone. I'm getting paid a full-time salary – a decent one, enough to cover the mortgage and then some – for maybe two hours of actual output a day. The rest of the time, I'm effectively paid to tend my petunias. My neighbors, they leave at 6 AM, sit in traffic for an hour and a half, come home at 7 PM, exhausted and smelling of stale office air. They talk about their "grind," their "hustle." I nod, I commiserate. I tell them, "Yeah, the daily commute is a real bitch." I don’t mention my commute is from the kitchen table to the back door. It’s not like I haven’t tried to… optimize. I’ve looked for more tasks. I’ve volunteered for projects. My manager, a kid half my age named Kevin, just says, "Great work, Bob, keep it up." He probably thinks I’m a high-performer, efficiently clearing my tickets. He has no idea I spend more time debating the merits of compost tea versus worm castings than I do on "critical system outages." It’s perverse, isn't it? I spent decades slogging, working 60-hour weeks for far less pay, always feeling like I wasn’t doing enough. Now I do practically nothing and get paid handsomely for it. The psychological impact is... peculiar. It’s a constant, low-level thrum of cognitive dissonance. I’m a man who was taught the value of a dollar, the dignity of honest labor. My father, God rest his soul, wouldn't have understood this at all. He worked the line at the plant for forty years. He’d say, "You earn your keep, son." I’m not sure what I’m earning now, beyond a deeper tan and some prize-winning zucchini. It's not a moral failing, I don't think. It's just... a disconnect. A strange, quiet theft of time and resources. Sometimes, late at night, I think about what I would have done with this free time earlier in my life. The things I could have learned, the places I could have seen. But then I realize, if I had had this setup back then, I probably would have just worked *more*, because that's what was ingrained. This is the consequence of a life spent in the system, I suppose. I don't feel "good" about it, not exactly. But I’ll be damned if I'm going to complain. My tomatoes are thriving. And the check still clears. What a fucking world.