Unsupported Speculation

I have this joke I tell myself every once in a while, about how people can’t actually retire. It’s something I’ve noticed over the years from people I knew in the past, as well as watching various famous people attempt to retire, FAIL, and then return back to whatever it was they were famous for.

The joke is that everyone believed they will hit retirement, and just turn a 180 and take up golf. The reality is that this is ENORMOUSLY difficult, though it is possible.

The problem is that enough time doing anything continually reinforces formation of nerves and learning in the brain. The order should really be learning, and then formation, because what happens first is that chemical memories get formed and then reinforced over and over again. They likely don’t get reinforced over the same precise places in the brain, but instead it is a mix of mostly the same places, combined with a scattering of new places with each iteration of learning. Over time, you can see that a person’s memory structure as a whole becomes extremely complicated in how it encoded someone’s past work.

While that is going on, nerves continue to slowly grow and reach out to neurons old and new. These nerve connections are mostly accidental, but encouraged by what places in the brain tend to activate more, meaning that the more of a part of the brain you use, the more the nerves there reach out for something to bump into.

When they connect to a neuron, then this new cell may or may not be incorporated into the tasks of that part of the brain, and it depends on if that new connection is valuable to the tasks of that network of neurons.

If it IS valuable, then whatever those neurons DO ideally becomes more sophisticated, because they have the new ability to send and receive in the direction of the new nerve connection, possibly connecting to the potential for more ability.

If it is NOT valuable, then the connection will be disused, and the nerve will probably atrophy into nothing.

This is obviously why it is hard to retire, and why even after a few meager years of doing something, after you leave whatever you did, you will feel an unexpressed void in your life until you find ways to ‘awaken’ those same parts of the brain again.

I had a somewhat bad case of this years ago, and got it because I used to work in a maritime service, and aboard a vessel which had a Combat Information Center. Sounds cool, but it was only a radio, radar, and map room.

After I left the service, very soon after I was back, I felt something that I couldn’t quite express or put my finger on, and it took a lot of that strange kind of thinking that is required to bring up something from the unconscious so that you finally realize what it is. Once I HAD, I realized I wanted to essentially stare down at MAPS.

So I became a map collector, who also humorously filled my house with satirical warning signs like you see all over real ships, and this managed to fill that stupid void of having worked in a CIC before.