I would have thought by now, from all the songs I have heard on the radio, that I would know what love is. I could at least sing along in the car, even if I didn’t truly know what it was. I could follow the story of two lovers getting together in movies I’d seen or share similar emotions while reading a love story. But when it came to actually trying to apply the concepts, I fell Read more…
When I thought of my life as following simple rules like “get a job” and “retire in forty years,” I began to ask the simple questions: Why should I work eight hours a day, forty hours a week, doing the same thing for the rest of my life? Philosophical Engineering Having studied science in college, I was under the impression that most everything has some sort of scientific proof behind it. That is, we do something Read more…
Inside, the mohawk, tattooed, and pierced engineer wanted a different song and dance in life. But when he looked in the mirror, he never felt that he was good enough to do it. That his life was only the prescribed future called retirement. The present moment used to be solely focused on finding a woman to marry. And the past seemed to be forgotten, as he had realized all the information he learned in his Read more…
The beaten path of study hard to get a degree, find a secure and stable position at a company to get a job, and try to fall in love quickly out of college to get married, didn’t get me the satisfaction or fulfillment I was looking for in my journey of forty years to retirement. So what other trail is there to take? Philosophical Engineering When my mentor Dan told me about the mountain in life to climb Read more…
Life is like a mountain, and most people are made to believe that the pinnacle of success is a forty year campaign on a beaten trail to retirement. But I know, that I don’t want to really see what is on the other side of that mountain when I’m sixty-five years old… Or wonder why I have to wait to play golf, travel, and do the fun things in life again. Philosophical Engineering So what mountain are you climbing Read more…
It was my first impression that getting a degree, job, and married were part of me being able to fit in with the rest of society. But as I began to look around, it was more of the shiny things that appealed to me, like the nice car and the big house. Philosophical Engineering When my mentor Dan asked me what the word “value” meant to me, I first responded in a somewhat defensive manner, that value Read more…
Every journey begins with the first… word. It’s been over six years since I first wrote the opening words down for my book. I never would have guessed writing a book would take this long, but then again, I never would have guessed as to why I had to wait until the age of sixty-five to retire to begin to live the life I really wanted to live. But as I have realized as the book Read more…
“Be orderly in your normal life so you can be violent and original in your work.” ~Gustave Flaubert Philosophical Engineering Despite the social constructs that have designed an impression of a good life by getting a degree, getting a job, and getting married, the sense of order can bring about a baseline when trying to be creative. Having a routine is OK, but is that routine allowing you to express your creativity in designing a good life?
Are there any set of universal standards for a good life? Can we all agree that a degree, job, and marriage might be part of them? As some of you may know, I dropped out of my Masters program two and half years in, never earning that degree. I recently got discharged from a company after climbing five positions in three years. And I have failed to find marriage quickly out of school. Philosophical Engineering Read more…
Save for retirement and in forty years you will be released from your sentence back into the free world. Philosophical Engineering: None of us like to be on the receiving end of a bad prank. But yet we are unaware that when we take our money and allow other people to “invest” it, they are the ones making the billions while we are still trying to make ends meet. Don’t let ‘trading time for money’ Read more…