The Retirement Calculator I Keep Running for the Job I Quit RedeemedExistence daily devotional — September 28, 2026 I found the old spreadsheet again last night, the one I built years ago when I still worked at the plant, before I walked into my supervisor's office and quit without another job lined up. I plug in the same numbers every few months, the salary I would be making now with the raises I would have earned, the pension that would have vested last spring, the 401k match I walked away from before it was worth much of anything. The calculator does what calculators do. It compounds the number forward without any feeling attached to it, and every time I run it I sit there doing arithmetic on a life I did not choose, watching a stranger's retirement grow steadily larger while mine sits considerably smaller in a different account, under a different name, built by a different set of decisions. I left that job nine years ago because staying there meant staying inside a ...

My daughter's wedding is eleven days away, outdoors, on a bluff her fiancé's family has used for three generations, and I have opened the weather app on my phone more than a hundred times since the forecast first became visible ten days out. It keeps changing. Sunny, then a chance of showers, then sunny again, then a chance of showers dropped to a lower percentage that somehow worries me more than the higher one did, because by now I have started treating the app itself as an oracle instead of what it actually is, a rough guess made by a computer looking at patterns it cannot fully know eleven days out. I understand this. I check it again anyway, sometimes four times in one evening, as if enough refreshing might change what the sky over that bluff is actually going to do. I have spent a lot of years trying to manage things I have no real authority over, and it started long before I had a daughter old enough to get married. In my drinking years I told myself I was in control...