My Retirement Diary 2025

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My Retirement Diary 2023

Tensegrity (tension – integrity) side-table, in process.

Most images will enlarged if you click on them.

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February 5, 2025: Starting another retiree’s brunch group

I have decided to help startup a third retirees’ brunch group, in addition to my REMBrunch group and my ReeBrunch group. 

In response to an event notice on the MIT Club of Boston calendar in which I stated that there is an opening in my ReeBrunch group (MIT alumni retirREE’s Brunch), I’ve received several emails from MIT alumni who want to join. I’m only adding one male member to the ReeBrunch group, in order to improve the gender balance, which currently stands at seven women and one man.

As I now have emails from several MIT alumni who want to join the ReeBrunch group, I thought I would interview a few of these men, adding one to my ReeBrunch group, maybe one to my REMBrunch group and the others to create ReeBrunch, Too–a new group. I will help get the ReeBrunch, Too group off the ground by attending the first few monthly sessions, but Gail will manage this group, as she has been looking for more social contacts since her 15-year-old book club was shuttered. Once it is stable, I may withdraw from ReeBrunch, Too.

Back when I started my first retirees’ brunch (REMBrunch), I had envisaged that if REMBrunch was a success, I would try to create other retirees’ brunches in the Boston metropolitan area.

In an attempt to encourage and help others to create local retirees’ brunch groups, I wrote down and posted everything I learned during my nearly 2 years of managing retirees’ brunch groups: How to Create and Manage a Monthly Retirees’ BrunchI will update that posting if further insights become apparent to me.

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February 2, 2025

For the last month, I have continued to work on my Tensegrity coffee table, attempting to optimize both form and function. The latter is turning out to be more problematic. In the 4th prototype, created today, I think I have hit upon a design that is esthetically pleasing and sufficiently structurally sound. I hope to begin making the 5th prototype tomorrow and if that works out as I hope, then I can begin cutting the walnut – if I have enough walnut. If I do not have enough walnut, I will need to alter the design slightly to accommodate what I have. Once I have finalized the design, building the table will not take much time.

The evolution of a coffee table: Inspiration, Design 1, Prototype 1, Design 2, Prototype 2, Prototype 3, and Prototype 4. More prototyping to come.

I have been actively posting comments about my Designing Your Retirement and IHaveAnIdea.us essays on social media, and when I do, I can clearly see an increase in my web traffic. Two or 3 years ago, I would get 2 to 5 visitors a day. Now the baseline is 10 or 20 visitors a day, with spikes.

Visitors per month to IHaveAnIdea.us 

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February 1, 2025: MIT Club of Boston Designing Your Retirement lecture

I spent the prior 4 days preparing for today’s Designing Your Retirement lecture. This will be the 4th time I am giving the talk to the MIT Club of Boston. As in the past, the talk was very well received and I posted attendees’ comments and a video of the talk here:

Designing Your Retirement

I still need to omit some slides in the first hour of the talk so I can devote more time to the slide during the last 30-45 minutes of the talk. 

The audience clearly wants more information about my personal retirement journey and less about the science behind my Designing Your Retirement syllabus. The challenge is that I believe they simply want to be given a list of “things to do in retirement” when in fact they need to understand the “big picture” and really understand how and why I created “The Strategic Retirement Plan.” Once they commit to The Strategic Retirement Plan, they will be able to figure out their path in retirement.

The challenge now is finding a way to bridge that gap—helping them see that the real key to retirement isn’t a checklist, but a mindset shift. I’m not sure how to resolve this quandary.

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January 31, 2025: Smart home to cave in a flash

Sue and Doug moved into their redesigned house, this move-in was long in coming. Not surprisingly, there’s still a punch-list and I expect it will take 1-2 months before everything is done and debugged. 

The attic and basement were full of  electrical and plumbing equipment – more than I would have expected. As Doug is an IT geek, everything is wireless. Should there be a massive electromagnetic pulse (EMP) their entire “smart” home will instantly transform into a very expensive cave.

Of course, part of my home too is at risk.

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January 30, 2025: A Fun Day – NOT!

It was a fun day, I had my decennial  screening colonoscopy! Whoopie! I should receive the colon polyp biopsy report sometime next week. By the time I need my next colonoscopy, 7-10 years, I may be too old or too ill or too frail to have it done.

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January 22, 2025: Visit with our granddaughter and a wedding party

Gail and I flew to San Francisco, then took an Uber to Napa – a miserable 12 hour trip. Unexpectedly left was going to charge $258 for the trip while Uber charge $120 for the trip. I’ve never seen the difference like that between these two competitors.

We spent two days in Napa, California taking care of our granddaughter and that was a lot of fun. 

We took her for a walk in her carriage, and she was mesmerized by a horse and a goat up close—as was Gail. Later, we strapped her into a backpack and hiked up the hillside

And Gail got a lot of good one on one “grandma time” with her granddaughter.

Here is a voice recording of our granddaughter babbling in the backseat of a car. I love these baby noises. There’s probably no sound that is more beautiful and appealing – sound of pure innocence.

21 seconds of a babbling infant

We also visit Gaby’s parents and had a lovely lunch at their golf club – which is buried in the hills of Orinda, CA, quite spectacular, and it is literally within walking distance of their home.

Gail and I then went to Redwood City, CA for Cory and Ricki’s wedding party. They have an interesting group of friends, and I spent a fair amount of time talking about retirement (it was a near-retirement crowd.) It was fun and I am glad I went.

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January 15, 2025: REMBrunch group, again

My monthly REMBrunch group has been meeting since March 2023 – now approaching the two year mark. At this meeting, and our previous meeting, there clearly was a sense of enthusiasm among the attendees. I believe the group is starting to gel!

I believe my REMBrunch group needs at least one more male member as some members leave the area for 3-4 months at a time (house in Maine or NH or Turkey, visit grandkids who live elsewhere.)

It’s very hard to figure out how many members I should keep in the REMBrunch and ReeBrunch groups. I need a sufficient number of members to assure we have a quorum for every meeting, (3 and 4 attendees respectively) but not too many attendees as that would make it difficult to carry-on a single conversation around a table in a noisy Davis Square Café. 

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January 14, 2025: ReeBrunch group, again.

This was the 5th ReeBrunch – my monthly brunch of MIT Alumni retirees. Besides myself, there were six female attendees. At no point did the conversation flag. I’m getting the sense that this group of people is fully committed to the ReeBrunch (high attendance rate among certain members) and, hopefully in time, we will come to know each other in a meaningful way. Gail could not attend this meeting as she was in Miami, but will be at our future meetings. 

Subsequent to this ReeBrunch, I invited the group to join Gail and I to see the science play S P A C E at Central Square Theater and one of the ReeBrunch attendees agreed to join us for dinner and theater. Fantastic!

I still need at least one more male member to make this ReeBrunch group more “balanced.”

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January 11-15, 2025: Gail follows the surf and sun

Gail decided she has had enough of the gray skies and cold weather of Boston and needed some sun and warmth. So she went to Miami, where she sat on the beach, read a book, walked along the water’s edge, and soaked up the sun.

She came back much refreshed.

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January 10, 2025

Gail’s boss had arranged a social dinner at a bar on the North Shore with some business associates, and I was invited. In fact, I was the only spouse in attendance. The bar was  just north of Boston, located on the coast, overlooking the ocean. It was a beautiful venue and the conversation was interesting, and far outside the borders of my usual conversations which typically involve either technology, medicine, politics or, retirement issues. It was a fun evening for both Gail and I.

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January 4, 2025: An American Repertory Theater miss

Gail and I and two friends attended the American Repertory Theater production of “Diary of Tap Dancer.” Clearly many members of the audience liked the production, but I was not one of them. In my opinion, the production lacked the requisite emotional engagement, which I believe is essential for any truly successful theatrical production and was a “preachy” and self-serving event.

For the last decade or so, the American Repertory Theater has prioritized telling the stories of historically marginalized groups in an attempt to rectify long-standing societal injustices. While this is a laudable goal, in and of itself, it is not justification for a theatrical production at the American Repertory Theater. In my opinion, the first priority of the American Repertory Theater should always be to push the boundaries of theatrical productions while emotionally engaging the audience, and, in the process, teach them something or they did not know.

I felt that this play was simply a self-promoting production (by the playwright and lead character) which brought to light the many minority tap-dancers who have been forgotten by history.  While the play shed light on forgotten minority tap dancers, it relied too heavily on listing names rather than weaving their stories into a compelling narrative. Without deeper emotional engagement, it felt more like a lecture than a theatrical experience.

Some audience members clearly found the production emotionally engaging, but I suspect that was largely due to their deep connection to the dance or Puerto Rican arts community. While that’s understandable, it feels like too narrow a justification for inclusion in ART’s subscription season.

Had I been seated on the aisle, I would have left during the second act—it was, frankly, boring and unengaging

As usual, I received an email from the American Repertory Theater, asking my opinion at the play. I wrote to them:

Yesterday‘s play at the American Repertory Theater was nothing more than a narcissistic, self-aggrandizing production that was neither intellectually engaging,  emotionally engaging, nor entertaining. And it added nothing to my understanding of the world. I hope you will do better next time.

In fairness to you, the reader, I believe you are entitled to see the opinion of professional theater critic, so here is a segment from the Boston Globe’s theater critic’s review of Diary of a Tap Dancer:

“Casel (the lead character, tap dancer, choreographer and playwright) tries to squeeze in so much that despite the sincerity, it feels overreaching, unfocused. In spots, it devolves into lecturing, ranging from fascinating scholarly information to scorching righteous outrage weighted by overstatement, derailing the production’s momentum. But in addition to being thought-provoking, “Diary of a Tap Dancer” is, in fact, disarmingly entertaining, … It is a polished yet natural performance. Casel meets us with an open heart, a raw, deeply personal emotional directness that goes well beyond anything she learned from her early training as an actor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she took her first tap class.”

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January 3, 2025: Genesis – a book review

I should have written this a few day ago…

I finished the book Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit by Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, Craig Mundie. Although the authors speculated on a wide range of potential scenario for the future of AI, the authors didn’t discuss the scenario in which a major AI system is owned and controlled by one or a few individuals, who then use it for nefarious purposes e.g. to advance their own agenda, such as to acquire immense wealth which they use to advance their political agenda, thus acquiring more immense wealth etc.
This “hypothetical” scenario is in fact not hypothetical. Mark Zuckerberg has and does use Facebook to gain more eyeballs (wealth) regardless of the cost to society, even though he repeatedly states he will do better, e.g. to Congress, but doesn’t.
IMHO, this the scenario we (the US) are in right now – a few people control AI and they can use it as they see fit, for good or evil or both. And China will certainly use their AI , not for the good of humanity, but for the good of the CCP. 
In the last chapter (or next to last chapter) of the book, Kissinger et al. talked about adding safeguards to AI, to prevent bad outcomes (like AI decides to destroy humanity). But these safeguard would be extremely complicated to implement (as the authors discussed) and it would be a Herculean task to even find a set of safeguards that everyone believes are essential. It also presumes that the people in charge of the AI system are altruistic and want to add these safeguards while it appears to me the AIs’ owners only priority is to advance AI’s capabilities as their highest priority, which is not surprising as most capitalists are motivated by profit or power, not altruism.
So I thought this was a major omission – that the owner of the AI will prioritize the use of the AI to secure and maintain their own advantage over society – as capitalist Homo sapiens rarely prioritize societal wide altruism over profit.

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January 2, 2025:

I finished the book Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. It was the story of three college students from MIT and Harvard, who loved playing and creating computer games. The story followed them as they grew up, creating a company, and how their relationship evolved over the years. It kept me entertained. If you’re looking for light reading, this would be a reasonable read. It also prompted me to purchase a game controller (to be used with the Apple TV) and the game Go.

My 70th birthday was on December 23rd. As we had celebrated it with a trip to London in October and a family dinner in November, I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, I cycled and worked on my blog, ultimately posting Favorite Photos of 2024. It was an enjoyable and quiet day.

Christmas was celebrated at one of our niece homes in Milton, MA. It was a relatively small gathering, maybe 20 or 25 people. The big family gathering is July 4 and Thanksgiving, when everyone returns from the corners of the globe and the crowd swells to 40+. 

On the evening of December 26, my brother told me he and Ricki were getting married on December 29. I flew out to SF, California on 12/28 to attend the wedding and wedding dinner and flew back on the red-eye on 12/29. Even though they have been involved for > a decade and living together for 5 years, in a sense this was a shotgun wedding. But not because Ricki was pregnant; the precipitating event was the impending Trump presidency and Cory’s concern he might change Social Security. So Cory wanted them to be married no later than 12/31. I had fun hanging out with Cory and Rick and enjoyed meeting Cory and Ricki’s friends at the wedding, they are definitely an interesting group of people.

While I was out there, I had come across two books that I thought would be interesting to read, 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You think, and Successful Aging; but they’re not next up. Today I started the audiobook “The Light Eaters” by Zoe Schlanger.  At this point I’m only 18% into this nonfiction book so it’s much too early to proffer an opinion about the book.

Gail and I went to see the new Bob Dylan movie, A Complete Unknown. This is the music we grew up with, and we absolutely love it. The actors sound just like the real singers. The most exciting part for me was when Al Kooper played the opening note on the Hammond organ of Like a Rolling Stone as my REMBrunch associate, Jon, is a long-time friend of Al Kooper, and Jon told me about this Dylan event 2-3 weeks before the movie release.

I have a problem with historical movies. The screenwriter(s) will take liberties with the facts to make the movie more interesting. Unfortunately, the viewer, me, won’t know when the facts have been altered and the movie will become my new historical “reality,” even though it’s not accurate.

Last night for New Year’s, our neighbor invited us over for dinner. There were three other couples and the conversation was interesting. At one point I talked about how I thought unbridled capitalism is a threat to America. I was asked for examples and I think I flubbed the answer. So now I am working on an essay which I have tentatively entitled “Unbridled Capitalism is Killing Americans and is a Threat to Our Democracy.” It probably will require another several days worth of work.

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Last entry of 2024

December 22, 2024: Reflections One Day before my 70th Birthday 

Tomorrow I will be 70 years old, which is a landmark age.

I am not surprised that I “don’t feel 70.” For the last two decades I have always “felt” 2 decades younger than my actual age.

Of late, I have noticed that my cognitive function and memory are not as good as they used to be and it takes me longer to arise from sitting on the floor. I’m not saying that either of these changes are out of the norm, but they are a little bit disconcerting, especially the former.

I am not one who celebrates birthdays as signficant real landmarks. For me, age is a continuum and I do not perceive “getting old” as a negative. I know Americans prize and glorify “youth”, but I’m not one of them. Maybe this is because my role models for the elderly were my grandmother and mother, who were such positive role models. Or maybe it’s because I’m a physician and I’ve seen how life unfolds and I accept aging as simply a normal part of life.

When I turned 40 I sent an essay to my friends and family and said something like “I’m turning 40. If I die tomorrow, don’t be sad. I’ve had a great life.” I immediately received a phone call from my mother, asking me if I was going to do something “drastic”.

If I were to die tomorrow, on my 70th birthday, nobody should mourn for me–I’ve had a great and privileged life, and would only change a few things (don’t ask as I will not answer.) I am totally aware that it has been a privileged life because of who my parents were. Nevertheless, I regret that privilege in America is heritable.

I believe I have helped to make the world a little bit better than it was before I arrived–in my career as a physician, and maybe, to a lesser extent, in my work in the health information technology realm, with some of my “creations,” and now with my Designing Your Retirement syllabus.

But the most important way I made the world better is that Gail and I raised two kids who can stand on their own two feet, have good moral values, and are making their way in the world.

So I will continue on my journey into retirement, keeping myself entertained by blogging, creating, audiobooks, cycling. I will also continue to try and make the world a little bit better by repeatedly volunteering to lecture about my Designing Your Retirement syllabus. And by trying to bring people together.

Of course, there will come a time when health issues will alter my trajectory. For me, it will likely come in the form of a deterioration in my aortic valve, and that will require surgical intervention. As it will not be without significant risks to my cognitive health and physical health, depending upon the age and extant circumstances, maybe I’ll do the surgery, or maybe I won’t. Time will tell.

But it has been a wonderful long strange trip.

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Go to…

My Retirement Diary 2025
My Retirement Diary 2024
My Retirement Diary 2023

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