Related video: The Unretired Engineer: A Year Plus On
In June 2025 I was let go. The company I worked for, and was happy at, bet far too heavily on EVs coming on hard and fast around the world. The US had about the slowest EV uptake anywhere, and the bet didn’t pay.
I was past retirement age with no interest in retiring. I had a nest egg that said I didn’t strictly need to work, Social Security if I wanted it, and Medicare I could pay for. The money was manageable. What hit hard was losing the place where about 90 percent of my social contact happened, along with most of my intellectual challenge.
Defined by the job
My family has been in engineering and technology for over a century, on both sides. Blacksmiths on one side, a clockmaker on the other, a grandfather who was a fairly early credentialed engineer, then my father was an engineer too. I defined my life by my job. Officially the order was family, work, self. In practice it often came down to work, family, self. I accepted that as the way of the world and was happy with it. Work gave me social contact and let me do what I enjoy without much of a struggle.
I’ve come to see wage labor as a very soft form of self enslavement. You feel you have to work because you need money and you have a family to support, and a wage from a company is the practical way to do that. It’s a highly successful structure. It’s also one of the things going away as we move into post-labor economics. A lot of people are like me. They’ve built their lives around work, even today, and outside work their social outlet is mostly entertainment and electronics. I didn’t panic when the job went, but it hit me hard.
Upskilling, and where AI fits
When I lost the job my plan was to upskill. I’d spent years working inside the organization on what it needed, and my CAD skills and some others had atrophied. AI was coming on strong in 2025 and has kept getting stronger since. Following that wave has been enjoyable.
I use AI for editing my books and my YouTube videos, and I keep pushing it to do more of that work: post-production, clean-up, the drudgery. The content is mine. That frees me for the parts I like: writing, creating, thinking, interacting and developing things.
Where the spare time went
From the early 1990s through the 2020s the social structure outside work hollowed out. Globalization and just-in-time manufacturing went into their final mode, and work spread across the whole day. You were nominally on 9 to 5. In reality you were often on until 8 at night, or on from 5 in the morning, so you could talk to people in France, Germany, China, Japan and India, and so you could deal with it when just-in-time logistics went tits up on a Saturday morning.
Everyone got into that mode, and drifted into electronic entertainment at the same time, because you could do it whenever you had a gap. You were pulled into a place where work intruded into what had been your time and sometimes the office seemed to get in the way and be about meetings and training rather than the job. But you ended up with very little time of your own.
Over the same period the semi-formal side of spare time thinned out: clubs, historic societies, even Meetup. In the early 2010s I could have gone to a Meetup every day of the week. Now they’re largely hollowed out. People don’t have the time or the energy.
The historic societies are starting to collapse. The people who had time in their 60s ten years ago are 70 and 80 now, and less able to do the work. People in their forties and fifties, who used to get involved mid-career, don’t have the time. They also don’t have the muscle memory for these organizations, which carry a social structure of their own that works very differently from work.
The post-labor panic
I think this gap feeds the post-labor panic. If my job goes away, what do I do with myself? Where do I go? Some people have strong hobbies, but they’re a fairly small minority. Most people, like me in the old days, need the job to give them structure. When it goes, there’s no obvious next place.
Sixteen months of “we love your background”
I’ve sent out at least one resume every weekday for sixteen months, sometimes more. I’ve had interviews about once a month on average. Nothing has come of them.
The answer is the same each time. They’re interested in the background: 40 years of creating, designing and organizing things and bringing people together. They love talking to me. Then they say they need someone who can hit the ground running on one specific tool, someone very down in the weeds in one area, rather than someone broad who can do system synthesis and pull the work together.
Age is part of the math. They know I’m past retirement age. I’m energetic, and in many ways I’m as good as I was at 30, or better. They can’t know that I learn quickly and like new tools, methods and experiences. So why take the risk? At my age (which they get from my graduation date), the thinking goes, they might get five years out of me, where someone in their thirties or forties might stay 30. Nobody has said that to me directly, but it’s what I would question. I understand it.
What I’m doing now
I’m at the point of accepting that and moving on. The plan:
- Work harder on my novels.
- Work harder with the AI on design and making as well as the editing.
- Build a social life that doesn’t depend on a job. I found a meetup coming up with people from the startup world, and I’m going.
- Look at starting some kind of business besides the novels.
- Get back to a weekly cadence of YT releases, on everything from EVs to science fiction to working with AI.
You have to take hold of your own life, be proactive, and decide where you’re going and what you’re going to do. That’s where I am.
If you’ve left full-time work, where does your social life come from now? Tell me in the comments on the video.
Subscribe at maharris2.substack.com for engineering, AI and science fiction. I write the fiction as M.A. Harris.
