About These Posts

Each day I add a new journal entry to my social media feeds. Here, I take that day’s entry and expand it through the lens of my Good Life Creed, which you can read about in my book Going Alone (available for free on this website). These dissections aim to connect ordinary reflections with the enduring objectives and principles of the Creed.

Journal Entry (10/05/25)

I had a small encounter with stress this week—the kind I haven’t felt in a while. I needed to be across town by nine on a Tuesday, right in the thick of rush hour, and I left too late. I arrived late, too, and felt that familiar mix of stress and guilt that comes when you’ve simply blown it. During my working years, I was almost never late, so the guilt felt unfamiliar. But the stress—that came back easily, like an old carpool companion with a bad attitude, sliding into the seat beside me again, complaining the whole way.

It’s been months since I’ve felt that kind of pressure—the slow crawl of traffic, the clock ticking louder with each passing minute. Sitting there, I caught myself studying it, remembering what it was like to live that way every morning. I wondered how much those years of quiet strain—deadlines, commutes, the daily hurry—had taken out of me. The cost, of course, is already paid.

Still, it was funny in its way, like bumping into someone you used to know too well. There’s nothing to do about it now, but next time I have a morning appointment across town, I’ll make it for 11:00.

Dissection

This entry revisits an emotion once constant in working life—stress—and studies it as an artifact rather than a state of being. The narrator doesn’t simply relive tension; he observes it, recognizing how it shaped his former self and how alien it feels now. Retirement becomes a vantage point for reflection, where what once defined daily life now seems almost quaint.

The Good Life Creed surfaces here through three principles:

#NotWell (Life Will Not Go Well): Even in retirement, the unpredictable happens—mistakes, lateness, old stressors returning. Life’s unevenness isn’t a failure but the rule.

#Maturity (The Principle of Maturity): Recognizing the futility of regret and the humor in imperfection marks a transition into wisdom. Age softens what once felt intolerable.

#Reason (The Principle of Reason): Observation replaces reaction. The ability to study one’s stress in real time transforms the experience into insight rather than suffering.

Takeaway

Retirement doesn’t erase stress—it reframes it. The difference is in our posture toward it: no longer consumed, we can now observe, even smile, at what once consumed us. Perhaps that’s one of the quiet victories of aging—the transformation of old companions like stress into mere visitors, passing through but no longer invited to stay.