Best Time to Live

 

My father received a master's degree in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, joined the Navy during WWII as an aviation officer and at the end of the war, went to work for the Federal Government in the Department of Agriculture.

His job was strictly 9:00 am to 5:00 pm with an hour off for lunch, which if my math is correct works out to 7 hours of work each day for just five days a week or 35 hours, always having the weekends off and earning twenty days of vacation a year.

Half of the year, he was either flying around the US or flying around the globe for his job but seldom did he work more than 35 hours a week and seldom did he work during the weekends.

While he was working for the Federal Government, he say in the Navy Reserves, going to training one weekend a month and two weeks a years that was no counted as part of his twenty days of vacation.

At age 55, he was promoted to a Navy Captain and at age 62 he retired after a 40-year career earning the same amount of money retired as he earned working because he received a government pension along with his Navy pension (26 years).  After he retired, the Government stopped offering retirement benefits to their employees.

Some would say that my dad was born at the right time because of how he benefitted financially from the system that was latter disallowed.  However, I would disagree with them, because the cancer cures that we have available now, were not available back then.

It is not just the cancer cures, but the computers, laptops, smart phones, the internet, and AI.

So, one might say my generation was the best time to live but that would not be true either because of all the advancement that are yet to happen or be discovered.

Perhaps, one might say that the BABY BOOMERS was the last generation to experience life before technology turned the world upside down.