Should I Take a Sabbatical From Work?

Dear Stanley,

I have paid off my house, car, credit card, and loans. The only reason I work is to pay for my utilities and cover spending money to fish on my days off. Then I save whatever is left over. I don't want to buy a bigger house, and I don't want a new car. I'm considering taking a year off from working and just taking it easy. My co-worker said that I am not living the American way and I am turning into a lazy communist. Am I?


Subversive in Seattle

Dear Amazing Specimen,

I salute you. I like everything you have told me, particularly the part about how you have to work to pay your utilities. This reveals the fact that you aren't a rich, lazy SOB -- you are merely a pleasantly indolent and unambitious SOB. As such, you do go against the go-getter grain of our age, which is infected with workaholism much in the same way that certain cultures are infested with, say, alcoholics, drug addicts, or sex maniacs. Work is our drug. Fame, too. Throw in a little greed, and what do you get? The guys who advised Michael Jackson to do that London tour, that's who.

I hope your co-worker is kidding. I would hope, as we reach the end of the first decade of this century, we would have left behind people who accuse others of being insufficiently American. Many of the horrible depredations of the last 100 years -- and possibly the last 1,000 -- have been wreaked by guys accusing somebody of being insufficiently something or other. Religious. Aryan. Patriotic to one flag or another. It's amazing how quick we as a species are to kill people for such supposed insufficiencies. As for the idea of you being a communist, I assure you that capitalists enjoy fishing just as much. And are just as lazy. Particularly the average security analyst, in my opinion. Not to mention bankers. Don't get me started on that.

In the end, my friend, I hope you have a long and lazy life. It's nice to think that somebody is. I most certainly hope that you do not wake up someday and think, "Whoa, what have I done with my life? I should have been a rocket scientist! Or competed in the Tour de France!" We only get one shot at this, Hindu theology notwithstanding. There may be some things that you might have wanted to get done while you were waiting for that fish to bite. Or not. Only you know for sure. If you look inside yourself and do not find a burning ember of envy at the success of others -- or the desire to punch your neighbor when he gets a new car, or a story of your very own that must be told to the universe -- then more power to you. Just because your path is a relatively solitary one doesn't mean it's not the right road to where we're all headed at the end of the day.