In 2024, I took a break from full-time, corporate employment. I secured contract work to pay the bills while road-testing the retirement daydreams of my working self. The experiment revealed the wisdom (and curse) of psychologist Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness.
“When we imagine future circumstances, we fill in details that won’t really come to pass and leave out details that will,” Gilbert writes. “Foresight is a fragile talent that often leaves us squinting, straining to see what it would be like to have this, go there, or do that. There is no simple formula for finding happiness.”[1]
Last year, I squinted and strained to find happiness in woodworking and cycling, pursuits that dominated my daydreams during the corporate workweek.
Woodworking
I own a dining-room table built by Philadelphia woodworker Ron Morgan. The base is ash, the top cherry. The modern design is a nod to tables by famed furniture maker George Nakashima. The finish brings out the beauty of the hardwoods.
“When I have more time,” I’ve thought, “I’ll make beautiful furniture.” In the past year, I built a hearth bench, a coffee table, and two stools at the Philadelphia Furniture Workshop. My daydreams came partly true. The finished pieces are a source of satisfaction and happiness.
But as I cut tenons, finished mortises, and wove textiles, I felt more anxious than happy. Was I doing this right? Why did that guy’s freeform seat look more elegant than mine? I was not the merry woodworker who built these pieces in my daydreams.
Maybe that guy will materialize as my skills improve. More likely, however, my future self will take on more complicated projects, stumbling down new paths of anxiety.
Cycling
In high school, a fellow student rode his bike across the United States—New York City to San Francisco. The idea captured my imagination. As I’ve hunched over a keyboard, muscles atrophying in a desk chair, I’ve daydreamed that my retired self would bike across the country.
I may never ride across the country, but last year I stepped across the line separating casual bike rider from a cyclist who could contemplate the possibility. I completed a 103-mile ride through Death Valley, California to raise money for Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) research.
On October 26, at 7:30 a.m., we raced out of the Ranch at Death Valley toward Badwater Basin. The air was cool, the road flat. I felt the giddiness that I had imagined in my daydreams.
At noon, I reached a rest stop 12 miles from the Jubilee Pass turnaround. “Who’s ready to climb some hills?” a rider asked. The grade steepened. The road curved, ascended behind a mountain. My breath was short, my legs burned. I passed a road sign: “Jubilee Pass – 3 miles.” I was dizzy, nauseated. Sweat washed sunscreen into my eyes. The giddiness was gone.
At the turnaround, I wolfed down packs of simple carbohydrates—potato chips, Fritos—and pounded Gatorade. I draped an ice-cold towel over my head, washed the sunscreen from my eyes. The dizziness disappeared, replaced by dread at the 50-plus mile return to the Ranch.
That morning, as the ribbon of highway unfurled across the mysterious desert and vanished at the horizon, I considered the vista majestic. Now, as I retraced the morning’s route, it was menacing.
At 4:30 p.m., the California Highway Patrol waved me into the Ranch at Death Valley. “Rider number 216, Andrew Clarke from the Greater Delaware Valley Chapter.” A voice boomed from the PA system. “This is Andrew’s first Breakthrough T1D ride.” I crossed the finish line, joined the post-ride celebration.
“I’m never doing that again,” I told a fellow rider.
She laughed. “Yes, you will.”
“I know.”
The ride was mostly agonizing, nothing like my cycling daydreams. It was also the highlight of my year.
Road-test results
My retirement road-test revealed that I’m stumbling in the right direction. The Death Valley Ride and the furniture are ensuring sources of satisfaction and happiness. A bigger lesson for my future self is that the cost of happiness can be moments of misery. And it’s a price worth paying.
[1] Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (New York Alfred A. Knopf 2006), 238.