Fun While It Lasted

In which a late-career pivot to a new way of living is undone by the Big Beautiful Bill. BTW: I'm open to work.

On July 1, 2024, I surrendered my laptop, American Express corporate card and ID badge to the nice people in the human resources department. I shrugged on my backpack, miraculously, metaphorically lighter now. I then rode the elevator down ten flights and walked out onto Seventh Ave.

I was unemployed. I hadn’t been laid off. I had quit. After almost 40 years working in media, I had realized that, while I didn’t want to stop working, I no longer wanted to work the way I had been, particularly over the past ten years, and that I really, really was ready to try something else.

A career that had started with me traveling the world and getting to ask nosy questions of all kinds of smart, interesting people and then write up their stories for huge national audiences had become a nightmare of spreadsheets, tightening budgets and the looming challenge of AI. I had pivoted once, from print to digital. I really didn’t want to do it again. Also, commuting via New Jersey Transit was, improbably, getting even worse.

But I had three kids in college, and my wife’s business was being held hostage by a huge client who didn’t seem interested in paying their equally huge bills. We had a cashflow issue, and I was the only faucet.

And then suddenly I wasn’t. Almost at the same time all three kids graduated from college in May 2024, the City of New York decided to start paying the bills Anne had been sending it for two years. With the tuition monkey off our backs and cash coming in, we were suddenly flush. And then one night Anne said, “You know, you can do something else. You can quit if you want.”

I knew she meant it. In another time and another place, Anne was a lawyer. When I asked her on our first date how she liked the gig, she theatrically put a hand to her chest, closed her eyes and said, “Oh god, I hate it.” When the Sunday Scaries turned into the Friday Scaries not long after we married in 1998, I told her to just quit lawyering. I was sure she’d figure out what to do. And I was equally sure she wouldn’t be able to do that until she had lawyering off the brain. So on her 32^nd birthday, she did just that. And the path she started down that day led to where she is now, with a business that was finally thriving to the point of affording me the luxury of walking away from corporate life.

But Anne was the same person who cried tears of panic when I was made redundant by the AOL-Time Warner merger in 2001, our first-born not even a year old. So, while I knew her heart was in the right place and she meant what she said, I also knew that if I were going to take her up on her generous offer, I had to have a plan.

I’ve always had a million ideas for businesses, side hustles and alternate careers for myself. One or two of these ideas was actually good. People who know me well would suggest I was best off working for, and by, myself. But I was burned out. I didn’t feel the endless reserve of energy and drive you need to start something. And when other friends suggested I write, it seemed like a good idea, but I didn’t know what I’d write about. No topic was calling to me.

So, as I often do when I need a reality check, I turned to the water. I got recertified as a lifeguard, 45 years after first being certified. The weekend-long class was composed of me and, no lie, nine 15-year-olds, none of whom would acknowledge the weird presence in their lifeguard class of someone who looked like Grandpa Bill’s drinking buddy. I also started working on being certified as a personal trainer, and I applied for jobs as a swim instructor, and as an aquatic exercise class instructor. To my amazement, I was hired.

Within two weeks of walking out the door and onto Seventh Avenue, I found myself spending six hours a day in pools, teaching kids how to swim, and playing with them while also making sure they didn’t drown during day camp. I started leading fitness classes, and a pool class for people with arthritis. Exposure to that much chlorine dissolved my body hair, bleached my instructor’s uniform and created a mass of soaking towels. But the pools were all within five minutes of my house, and they never required my presence on Zoom calls. None of my direct reports complained of thwarted career ambitions, because I had no direct reports. When I was asked if I wanted to be a weekend aquatic supervisor, I laughed. For the first time since the Obama administration, I wasn’t a manager.

It was a wonder. I didn’t go to meetings. The only spreadsheet I opened contained that week’s coaching schedule. The only reports I had to write were in the event of an incident at the pool, and there were none. I still read the Financial Times, but that’s because the subscription had yet to run out. It was as if my brain had been an untuned AM radio and now, I was finding the station and the static was gone.

I started to decompress. My resting heart rate dropped into the upper 50s, and the amount of time my Garmin watch told me I spent under stress dropped to near zero. My blood pressure went back to normal, and my weight plunged in the absence of my stress eating (and drinking). But the main reason I felt so much better: I moved all day. All. Day. Even while lifeguarding. We don’t sit in the stands and twirl our whistles. We pace around the pool deck while we scan. In a five-hour shift, I’d routinely take 20,000 steps, the equivalent of a 10-mile walk. Then I’d teach classes from in the water or move around with the kids. I did a bunch of obstacle course races, including a Spartan Race that featured runs up and down the Fenway Park grandstands and through the left field dugout. Lots of open water swim races, and Hero WODS. My shoulders didn’t hurt any more from being hunched over a keyboard. All because I was getting paid to work out.

Not paid very much, mind you. If I missed anything about the corporate world, it was the big biweekly infusion of cash. You’d work and stress and complain and lose sleep and then every other Friday there’d be a bunch of money in the bank, appearing overnight like mushrooms after a summer rain and kind of making the whole thing kind of worth it.

But now? No stress, great sleep, hardly anything to gripe about. And next to no money. My passion projects don’t pay much more than minimum wage. But it didn’t matter, because Anne’s business was doing so well. We travelled. We redid the bathrooms after 22 years of living with leaks and pink tile. I became a day laborer for a couple of companies that organizes and promotes triathlons, bike races and running events. After a lifetime of paying to be in events like these, I was learning how to put them on, and starting to think about starting my own event company.

I had found my work-life balance. Things were great.

And then they weren’t.

Almost exactly one year to the day that I walked out onto Seventh Avenue and blinked into the sunlight, all my plans were upended by an act of Congress. Anne’s business helps non-profit afterschool organizations get grant money that’s disbursed by the federal government to municipalities. The municipalities in turn fund the programs to keep kids busy after school with educational programs and tutoring. A busy kid is less likely to get in trouble between the hours of 3 pm and 7 pm.

The Big Beautiful Bill, the one that contained both cuts to health services for poor people as well as tax cuts for the tech bros, eliminated 2026-27 funding for the Twenty-First Century Community Learning Centers Grant, which pays for the afterschool programs. And to add insult to injury, the 2025-26 funds for the program, already approved by Congress, have been frozen and may be subject to a claw back. Why? I wish I knew the reason. With no explanation for why such a valuable program was cut, we’re left to wonder and assume. And it’s hard to not let dark thoughts fill that vacuum.

I know that it’s impossible for me to not sound whiny and privileged when complaining about how my early retirement was upended by the government when so many people are now faced with life and death decisions on how to care for children. And done so by a government I didn’t vote for and support only because I was raised to believe that, even though I don’t agree with the elected officials, they were elected by a system I’ve benefitted from. But it’s getting harder and harder to do that in the face of the irrational actions that, at best, seem to be nothing more than an angry, ill-considered swipe at the status quo, and at worst seem to be the act of people whose main allegiance is to some foreign power that wishes us ill. Paranoid? Maybe, but time will tell.

Anne and I will be fine, because we always seem to end up being fine. But we will both need to pivot, again. It’s extremely unlikely that, even if I were to look for a full-time job in my old profession, that I’d get one. One look at LinkedIn and you’ll know the world isn’t beating a path to the doors of…pretty much anybody right now. Anne can pivot the business to grant writing, and I will hang my shingle and look for work developing content. I’ll pick up classes as a trainer and keep working at the pool. But the rewards we thought we’d reap from Anne’s hard work; from the business she started at our dining room table and that helped her non-profit clients raise more than $250 million in funding? Gone, with the stroke of a pen and a jaunty wave of a cheap red baseball cap.

It's a stark reminder that things you think are a certainty, your forever thing, can be nothing more than a fog burned off by a stronger—not brighter—sun. Hope and wish and curse all you want. Second-guess every decision you ever made. It’s sad. And it sucks. But there’s nothing to do but go on, our world diminished.

And the past year? I’ll remember it as the time I got to say, with a straight face, that I was in the post-ambition phase of my career. And that for a while at least, it was great.