It’s stupid, really. You spend your whole life being the one people can lean on and then you wake up at seventy and realize you’ve been nothing but a goddamn load-bearing wall for people who don't even know your name anymore. It’s not a big deal, I guess. Plenty of people hate their jobs. But you know that feeling when you look at your hands and they’re soft? They’re supposed to be calloused. They’re supposed to smell like grass and sweat and whistle-lanyards, not printer toner and cheap hand sanitizer. You were a god on that field once. (Or at least you felt like one, which is the same thing when you're twenty.) Then you get the girl, you get the mortgage, and you get scared. So you take the "safe" route. You sit in a swivel chair for thirty-five years because it has a PENSION. You trade the sun for fluorescent lights that hum until your brain feels like it’s vibrating. You tell yourself it’s for the family. It’s always for the family. Now look at me. I spend my days lifting a grown woman—my wife, the person I used to run sprints with—out of a bed she hasn't left in three years. I’m the primary caregiver. I’m the cook, the nurse, the janitor, and the guy who pretends he isn't dying inside every time she calls me by her father's name. You think you’re being noble, but you’re just disappearing. My entire identity has been swallowed whole by other people's needs and I am SICK OF IT. I should have been on a sideline. I should have been screaming at kids to keep their knees up. I could have been outside. Instead, I stayed in that grey cubicle, watching the seasons change through a double-paned window that didn't even open. (I used to stare at the trees in the parking lot and wonder if they felt as trapped as I did.) It’s pathetic. I traded my soul for a monthly check and a health plan that I’m currently using to keep a dying woman comfortable while I rot on my feet. And don't give me that look. Don't tell me I'm a "saint" or a "hero." I HATE it. I hate every second of this quiet, sterile life. You get one shot at being alive and I spent mine filing paperwork and checking spreadsheets for a mid-level insurance firm. For what? So I can have the financial stability to watch my life evaporate in a room that smells like bleach? IT’S A JOKE. A cruel, cosmic joke and I’m the only one who isn’t laughing. You know what really gets me? The waste. The absolute, staggering waste of potential. I had lungs like bellows. I had legs that never quit. Now I get winded walking to the mailbox because I spent four decades sitting on my ass to ensure a "stable future." Well, the future is here and it's a goddamn nightmare. I should have quit. I should have coached high school ball and lived in a trailer and been HAPPY. (But no, God forbid we don't have a 401k.) I remember this one Tuesday in '94. It was perfect out. Crisp. The kind of day where the air feels like it’s giving you permission to run forever. I had a meeting about quarterly projections. I sat there for three hours listening to a man who had never broken a sweat in his life talk about "efficiency." I could have walked out. I could have been at the park. I could have been teaching some kid how to lead with his shoulder. But I stayed. I took notes. I was a good little soldier. God, I was such a coward. It’s 2:15 in the morning and I’m sitting on the bathroom floor because it’s the only place she can’t hear me breathing. I’m supposed to be retired. This was the "golden years" bullshit they sold me. Instead, I’m checking vitals and cleaning up accidents. You do everything right. You play the game by the rules. You sacrifice every single thing you actually love for the sake of being "reliable." And this is the reward. A bigger TV and a wife who doesn't recognize me and the memory of a career I never had. If one more person tells me how lucky I am to have such a great pension, I might actually lose my mind. Money doesn't buy back the sun. It doesn't buy back the decades I spent breathing recycled air while my muscles turned to mush. You think you're building a life, but you're really just building a cage out of gold bars. And now the cage door is locked and the key is buried under forty years of "responsible choices." This is stupid. I’m an old man yelling at the internet. It doesn't matter. But you should know. When you're choosing between the thing that makes you feel alive and the thing that makes you feel "secure," choose the life. Every time. Because eventually, you'll be where I am—tired, bitter, and holding a bedpan, wondering where the hell the athlete went. He's dead. I killed him for a retirement fund I'm too exhausted to use. Whatever. Go ahead and tell me I'm ungrateful. See if I care.