I want you to withdraw. Not completely, not dramatically, not in a way that announces itself as philosophy in action — just gradually, steadily, back toward yourself.
I know what you'll say: how do I leave? I'll tell you how: the same way you entered. You ventured a great deal for money, endured a great deal for position, took on considerable risk for the sake of a title. Do you imagine leisure requires less courage than ambition? The question is only whether you dare something to gain freedom, or whether you wait until the succession of responsibilities hands you to the next one, which will demand the same and then yield more of the same.
There is a pattern here worth seeing clearly. One desire ends where another begins. You will not reach a point where everything has been acquired and you are finally free to rest. That point doesn't exist. The person who waits for it is waiting for something that will never come, and the waiting is itself a life being spent.
Consider what you would actually be leaving. The morning callers? They are not there for you — they are there for what you can give them. A lonely old man changes his will and the visitors transfer to the next door by evening. The friendships formed around your position are friendships with the position. What remains if you step down from it?
What remains is you. And you haven't spent much time with that recently.
Would you rather be poor and sated, or rich and hungry? Prosperity is not only greedy itself — it exposes you to everyone else's greed as well. And as long as nothing satisfies you, you cannot satisfy anyone.
In retirement, everything will be on a smaller scale. But you will be enough for yourself. And that is more than you currently have.
Here's today's thought, from Epicurus, and it is the real argument for what I'm recommending:
You must reflect carefully beforehand with whom you are to eat and drink, rather than what you are to eat and drink. For a dinner of meats without the company of a friend is like the life of a lion or a wolf.
You cannot choose your companions while your door is open to everyone with a claim on your attention. The friend worth having is not the one selected from the morning crowd by your secretary. That kind of friend, the more they owe you, the more they will eventually resent you — a small debt makes a man grateful, a large one makes him an enemy.
Come in from the high seas. Let us, in old age at least, die in harbour.
Begin by calling your mind your own again. Everything else will follow from that.
Yours, already in harbour,