"I have difficulty separating my life from the work at CIA. This is true for a lot of my colleagues. Early on I found that the men in my office, upon retirement, had an average life-span of 18 months. Eighteen! Their work was their life, and most of them didn’t have outside interests. They literally lived their careers inside the CIA. We changed our retirement procedures to deal with this problem and it got better. Tony Mendez used to say that working at CIA was like drinking from a firehose and that retirement was like jumping from a moving train."
I wonder what it is about the work. This must be true in other professions as well. But at least in computer software after retirement you can still build things and practice your craft.
My father grew up in Oshawa, Ontario where there was a big GM factory making cars. Hard work with decent pay but good pensions- if you lived long enough to enjoy them.
As the stories went, a lot of guys, they put in their 25 years at the plant, retire, and drop dead within 2 years. The only thing worse for you than two and a half decades of hard labor is suddenly stopping.
