Musing of a Marketeer after a 40-year journey

The Day – July 1, 2025

He woke up free. Not “I-have-Saturday-to-clean-the-garage” free, but “the-warden-forgot-to-lock-the-gate” free. To be perfectly honest, he wasn’t totally free, but more like 80% free. He had agreed to work on Wednesdays for a few months, so in effect his week would now look like this: Saturday, Saturday, Sunday, Thank-God-It’s-Wednesday, Saturday, Saturday, Saturday.

That Tuesday (or should we say—pseudo Sunday) didn’t start with fireworks. No champagne corks popped, no one handed him a mug, and there was definitely no huge party planned—though that last one surprised him since he spent a 40-year career in marketing, where parties were thrown for things like “This month’s winner for best LinkedIn profile.” No, it was just another Tuesday. Maybe life’s most profound events actually happen on Tuesday— like his dad’s birthday and Taco Tuesday.

Forty years. That’s roughly 10,000 business meetings, 2,000 stale conference room muffins, and about a million awkward elevator silences where everyone stared at the floor numbers like they contained the secrets of the universe. He’d been a loyal subject of the calendar, a devoted disciple of Outlook reminders, a high priest of the quarterly business review. And now, that machine had simply… stopped humming.

He felt like an ember—not the romantic, glowing kind from a campfire where people tell stories and make s’mores, but more like the industrial variety, drifting away from a coal-burning furnace.

Cast into the suburban breeze, he floated aimlessly. Not literally—that would require skills he’d never developed, like levitation or the ability to keep a succulent alive for more than three weeks. But metaphorically floating, guided by forces he couldn’t quite identify. Maybe the wind. Maybe curiosity. Maybe that random force that causes one to walk by the fish tank and realize the reason they’re so happy to see you is because they haven’t been fed in three days.

The blast-furnace had been his career inside the corporate world, a roaring inferno of spreadsheets, performance reviews, and the constant, low-grade anxiety of a thousand corporate thoughts, such as still trying to figure out 30 years later who had stolen his good stapler.

As a teenager—fresh-faced and armed with the kind of optimism that can only come from never having attended an all-hands meeting—he’d been lured in by the siren song of a steady paycheck and something called a “401k,” which sounded vaguely like a robot but turned out to be far less interesting.

He’d bought in. Done the things. Ticked off boxes with the grim determination of a man assembling IKEA furniture without the Allen wrench, knowing full well that something was going to end up crooked but pressing on anyway because the alternative was admitting defeat to Swedish engineering.

But today, the fire was out, and he was but an ember. He wandered through his house like a man who’d misplaced his purpose somewhere between the kitchen and his home office. The coffee tasted the same, but the silence was different—louder somehow, filled with the absence of things that no longer demanded his attention. No one needed a decision by EOD. No one was circling back or saying, “Let’s take that offline.” His inbox sat empty, probably wondering if it had done something wrong.

“Perhaps nothing was created or destroyed today,” he thought. His high school physics teacher would have been proud.

He stood at the home office window, staring out at a world that seemed oddly familiar, like a movie he’d seen once but couldn’t quite remember the ending to. This was it. The first day of the rest of his life. And it felt weirdly like childhood. Like summer vacation. Like that moment when the school bell rang and you sprinted out, not because you had somewhere to go, but because you didn’t have to stay.

He remembered being a kid in the sixties, when summers lasted forever and life’s biggest decisions were ones like whether to have Lucky Charms or Frosted Flakes—his choice was always Frosted Flakes because—well—”They’re GR-R-REAT.” Those were choices that seemed monumentally important at the time and probably were, in their own way. That world had no Outlook calendars, no performance reviews, no existential dread about quarterly targets. Just the pure, unfiltered now.

Animals had it figured out. Not the ones in business attire—though some of his former colleagues came close—but the real ones. When a gazelle is thirsty, it drinks. When it’s hungry, it eats. When it’s chased by a lion—well—it runs like hell. Simple. No monthly check-ins required. No one asking the gazelle to “circle back” on its calorie consumption metrics.

He liked that feeling.

Gawking out the window, he felt this gentle slap from the universe—not painful, just surprisingly clarifying. A thought so clear it could have been an interstitial pop-up ad, but one that he didn’t immediately dismiss.

For years, retirement had bounced around his mind like a ping-pong ball in a lottery machine operated by someone with a caffeine addiction. Half fantasy, half existential terror. He’d always envisioned it as a finish line—which was problematic since he’d never been much of a runner, more of a jogger type who stops to examine interesting plants—all which turn out to be weeds.

The concept had morphed into something resembling surrender, like waving a white flag. A “no más” moment, like when a boxer realizes he’d rather be doing literally anything else, including tax preparation.

But this particular morning—bathed in the kind of pre-dawn clarity that usually only comes after consuming questionable amounts of coffee—he saw it differently. This wasn’t surrender. This wasn’t a finish line. That morning, something shifted. He didn’t see it as an ending anymore. He saw it as a reboot. Not a fade to black, but a hard reset. Him 2.0. Now with fewer meetings and more meaning.

The goal wasn’t to stop. It was to start. To start asking different questions. Like: What do I want to learn? Who do I want to become? And how many days in a row can I wear sweatpants before my wife stages an intervention? In a sense, instead of a finish line, it was more like a pit stop. Except instead of someone changing his tires and handing him a bottle of Gatorade, he was changing his entire life and handing himself a chance to figure out what came next. Funny that for years he had searched for the meaning of transformation, but always in a business sense. Yet this was an opportunity for a fundamentally profound transformation. Like when a caterpillar becomes a butterfly.

The irony was delicious: after decades of having every minute scheduled, blocked, and optimized—now his new purpose was to discover a purpose. His first assignment in retirement was to figure out what his assignments should be.

Making peace with the past required what Marie Kondo would call “letting go” and what he called “admitting that keeping every National Geographic since 1987 was perhaps excessive and possibly a sign of deeper issues.” The past wasn’t right or wrong—it had simply happened, like most things in life, including his brief but memorable phase during a Movember when trying to grow a mustache that made him look like a disappointed walrus giving up on life.

The past was a movie that had rolled its credits. Looking back to critique it seemed meaningless, except to pluck a few lessons that might guide what he’d started calling the new movie of his life: “The Sequel: Hopefully Better Than Jaws 2, But Let’s Keep Our Expectations Realistic.”

“So, what are you going to do now?”

When he got the inevitable question, he wanted a good answer. One that might garner a response like, “Have you renewed all your prescriptions lately?” So how about this, he thought:

Soar. Then float a bit.

Not literally—again, he’d never mastered that particular skill, despite a high school guidance counselor optimistically suggesting “reach for the stars,” which in retrospect was questionable career advice. No, he would metaphorically soar, like an eagle. Or at least like a reasonably competent pigeon with decent navigation skills and a healthy respect for window glass.

To soar in an oxygen-rich atmosphere. To gape at sunsets, and at children’s artwork—which defied both physics and artistic convention and magnified the magnificent absurdity of existence itself. To be stimulated by genuine smiles instead of forced networking grins, by the quiet satisfaction of giving instead of the constant anxiety of getting, by the radical act of just being instead of the exhausting performance of doing.

He could travel the world. He could write a novel. Or he could just sit on the couch and binge-watch Netflix, which had its own dignity and required no special training.

The new life would have stress—but good stress. The kind that comes from another futile attempt at learning French —the practical application of which remained unclear — especially to those who had already expressed concerns about his mental state. Stress that pumps meaning into your being instead of slowly draining your will to live through meetings that could have been one email, or reading long email chains that should have been one meeting.

He would start small. He would volunteer at the local shelter, where maybe he’d encounter the unconditional love of a scruffy terrier-like mix named Sparky, which would prove to be surprisingly therapeutic. Did we mention what kind of shelter this would be? Anyway, the shelter inhabitants, he would soon discover, were excellent listeners and would never ask him to prepare a PowerPoint presentation.

Maybe he’d take a pottery class, using his clumsy hands slowly learning to coax something resembling self-defined beauty from lumps of clay. The misshapen bowls and lopsided mugs would be testament to his beginner status, but they would be his creations, imbued with his tangible effort and his newfound willingness to be bad at something without immediately giving up.

Maybe he would try creative writing, in complete contrast to the dry, corporate blogs he’d churned out for decades. Stories about his childhood, about his dreams, about the absurdity of modern life or the very real possibility that the “so-called lost office stapler” was more intelligent than he suspected.

Working and exerting effort, yes, but followed by that deep, satisfying exhale that expels any remaining toxins and lingering anxiety—like that anxiety he got every January worrying about whether he’d completed the Workforce Harassment training in time before IT made good on its pestering threat to shut off all access for non-compliance. The breath that comes after accomplishing something that actually matters, even if that something is just making his wife laugh or finally upgrading his old home appliances, so when he lost power he didn’t waste 10 minutes re-setting 10 blinking clocks.

This was freedom. Not the kind that requires a passport, but the kind that comes from realizing that the fire had ended, the smoke had cleared, and somewhere in the ashes was the possibility of becoming exactly who he was supposed to be all along.

The possibilities stretched out before him like an endless summer afternoon, full of potential and surprisingly free of 1 on 1 meetings. He was no longer an ember drifting aimlessly. He was a blowing seed about to land in fertile ground, ready to discover what he might grow up to be.

And for the first time in 40 years, he was genuinely curious to find out.

The end. Or perhaps, more accurately, the beginning.