I haven't set an alarm in decades. My body always wakes me a little after 4:30am, I get ready, read for a bit, and I'm at the gym when the doors unlock at 5. I love that hour. The parking lot is empty, the world hasn't started making noise yet, and I've gotten myself into the best shape of my life on the strength of it.
Which is why I can't explain why occasionally walking in at 5:02 instead of 5:00 produces a small knot of stress in my chest.
Maybe it's that I'll miss the first two minutes of Jonathan Ferro's pithy commentary on Bloomberg Surveillance, which I listen to while warming up, even though it all gets repeated over the next half hour? Or maybe that the squat rack will be occupied, even though it never is at that hour? My regular gym bros wander in at random times over the next fifteen minutes and appear entirely at peace with themselves, so I have no good answer for why I can't.
Two minutes. Against nothing. I retired three years ago, and my first real commitment most days is a pickleball match hours later, if you can even call that a commitment. I've spent a good chunk of those three years marveling at how ridiculous this is, and the marveling has accomplished exactly nothing.
Every external constraint that once made those two minutes matter is gone. My internal spec (perhaps aka OCD or neuroticism?!) outlived all of them.
My mantra, and the correction buried in it
I've been drawn to Stoic philosophy for a long time, and somewhere in the first year of retirement one line hardened into an actual mantra:
Seek tranquility by doing less, better.
That's my compression of Marcus Aurelius, and it turns out to be a compression of a compression. In Book 4 of Meditations he quotes Democritus, "If you seek tranquility, do less," and then takes issue with it. He amends it to doing what's essential, in the way the thing actually requires, and says that yields the double satisfaction of doing less, better.
So my mantra folds the correction back into the sentence being corrected, which suits me, because the correction is the half I need. Doing less by itself is just doing less. The sorting is the work, and the reduction shows up afterward as a consequence. There is an obvious tie-in to the lean world I spent most of my career in.
I like that he wrote all this while running an empire through a war and a plague. Whatever tranquility he was after, he wasn't proposing that anyone go sit on a beach.
The tolerance was correct once
Any engineer knows that specifying a tighter tolerance than the function requires is a design defect. It costs money and buys nothing the customer will ever notice. Same with significant figures: reporting to the third decimal when your measurement error runs half a unit is theater dressed up as rigor.
I spent thirty years being paid to hold tight tolerances on everything. Schedules to the minute, yield to the third decimal, and the second and third order effects of every conversation, org change, supplier relationship, and hire. That was the job, and I was reasonably good at it.
In lean terms, applying that rigor where the output doesn't need it is overprocessing. It can be the most durable of the wastes because it's indistinguishable from conscientiousness. Nobody has ever been pulled aside and told they care too much about detail. So the habit gets reinforced for decades, right up until the day the load case disappears and the design stays exactly as it was. Like retirement.
Plans A, B, and C
Then there's my travel planning, which my coworkers used to laugh at - until they needed my advice or help. I'd work out the routing, the aircraft type, the seat, and the connection buffer, and then build contingency plans A, B, and C against every failure mode I could imagine. Weather at the connecting hub, a crew timeout, a gate change on the far end. I could tell you which terminal to sprint through.
Stoicism has a name for this practice, and recommends it. Premeditatio malorum, premeditating adversity. Seneca advised rehearsing loss in advance so that when it arrives you've already met it once and it's lost some of its power. My spreadsheet of alternate itineraries was an unusually literal reading of the assignment.
Three contingency plans were proportionate when a missed connection meant a missed board meeting, or a plant visit that couldn't be rescheduled without burning two weeks of other people's calendars.
The stakes evaporated. Now the worst case is a night in an airport hotel and maybe missing a 5am workout (oh no!). The requirement disappeared and it's much harder to stop than I expected. Work in process. I book looser connections on purpose now, then catch myself checking the inbound aircraft's position the night before, which rather defeats the exercise.
Where it went instead
None of this has made me idle, and I want to be careful not to dress up sloth as philosophy.
I've dived into AI, quantum computing, space tech, consciousness research, and the largely unknown history of major world religions. I've created a few highly speculative stock portfolios in very narrow tech sectors I run mostly because the deep analytical research is fun. It keeps my mind engaged, and as a bonus has been remarkably profitable. I read far more now than I did when reading was part of the job. The difference is that I pick the subjects.
Plenty of retirees I know are as scheduled and driven as they ever were, sitting on boards, building second companies, filling every calendar block. Some are doing exactly what they should be and I have no interest in talking them out of it. Stoic tranquility was always about equanimity inside action rather than withdrawal from it.
What I find myself watching for is whether the motion is chosen or whether its absence has become unbearable. Those look identical from the outside, and I suspect they sometimes look identical from the inside too, which is the uncomfortable part.
I also know people who slid into a slow walk on the beach with no apparent effort at all, watching the pelicans work the surf line, entirely content. I envy that a little. Some of us have to be taught, and the teaching goes slowly.
So I keep showing up at 5:00, and every so often I go at 9am or even 3pm instead just to see what happens. What happens is an unease that trails me for an hour and then evaporates, which is useful information about what the two minutes were ever worth.
I don't know yet whether that knot is a habit I can sand down or just a permanent part of the equipment. Knowing that something doesn't matter and feeling that it doesn't matter turn out to be different projects, and only one of them responds to argument.
Which of your own tolerances outlived the load case they were designed for?