Early Retirement for Disabled Federal Gov. Employees: Noted durations

Don’t you hate those “Apps” that reveal how much time you have taken to engage Activity-X or mindless-video-game-Y?

To engage in an aside for pure enjoyment’s sake is to get lost in the moment of leisure, to become engrossed and without a mind to time, problems of the world, circumstances of the present or the irrelevancy of one’s own station in life.  To read a book – perhaps of no great consequence, neither a “classic” nor a best seller of sorts; to push buttons in responding to a mindless video game; to have a silly electronic conversation with a spouse, a friend, a daughter or son aside from the seriousness of wisdom, guiding principles and life’s meaning couched in pointless meanderings without a compass of direction; and then we look down and realize that the cumulative duration expended has taken up a greater slice of our lives.

Now, that is irritating.  Yet, we cannot always and forever discipline ourselves to engage in the strict teleological essence of that which we are called to do or be.  Perhaps, in some former times when leisure was not yet an invented necessity, where finding basic necessities on a daily basis meant survival for that day or perishing in the pangs of growing hunger; or when our moments were occupied in service to a tyrant, a Lord or the King or Queen, whose very displeased nod could mean taking away one’s freedom and being banished into the dungeons of a rat-infested abyss where typhoid and other excrements of human dystopia ran rampaging through the horrors of a powerless populace; and of those times, people could with singular focus engage the toil of monotonous service without any mirth or joy but for a drunken state of euphoria here and there.

Do durations of time noted, in their aggregate, mean anything in the end?  If we have “wasted” such-and-such hours, or perhaps days and weeks that amount to a full year at the end of one’s life, does that mean that we have failed in our need to reach, to accomplish and complete the lifelong project of – what?  How many unmarked graves evidencing lives unrepentant for time wasted will be remembered for projects not completed?  We wait upon life, and life rewards by giving back silence.  We now have algorithms to show ourselves the extent of our wasted activities, and believe that we can improve ourselves by pointing out that which we stare at in wasting further time being anxious over noted durations that stand time still within the conscience of our own making.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who know the feeling of “waiting”, and have realized that noted durations mean that time has come to a standstill because of a chronic medical condition that simply will not go away, it may be time to prepare, formulate and file an effective Federal Disability Retirement application with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset.

Time does, indeed, stand still, and noted durations serve to reveal to us that time wasted is time never recovered, and remaining in a constant state of fear because the medical condition has “angered” or otherwise irritated members of that “team” you once served in your former and healthy capacity, will never get “better” by staying put.  Noted durations are for those who want to remain in a perpetual state of inactivity, and for the Federal employee or U.S. Postal worker who needs to move onward to the next stage of life, such noted durations only serve to hold us back from throwing off the shackles of conventional and normative lives that whisper not the brightness of tomorrow’s future.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire

Federal Disability Retirement Benefits: Edifying false gods

Are falsity and nonexistence equivalent concepts?  If you believe in something that cannot be proven, but nevertheless turns out to not exist but yet cannot be verified with certitude or confirmed validity, is it a “false” belief?  Conversely, if there is general recognition, acknowledgment and consensus of agreement that embracing a certain paradigm is an act of futility precisely because it is deemed to be “false”, but doing so provides a semblance and feeling of comfort and security, does such submission to falsity encompass any substantive differentiation from a mistaken but unsubstantiated belief?

The inane nature of believing in “false gods”, of course, has taken its own absurd turn of nonsensical meaninglessness.  We have now made of moral equivalence idol-worshiping of mundane objects, events and activities, such that the charge itself is so widespread as to no longer have any relative relationship with ‘sacrilege’ or sin of a mortal nature, leaving aside being merely a venial sin of inconsequential punishment of deeds or beliefs.  Whether edifying false gods or nonexistent ones, the point nowadays is to make sure that it isn’t something that will harm one’s self.

Throughout history, people have always harbored secret beliefs, whether of superstitious and nonsensically held ones that resulted in no or little harm (unless, of course, eccentricity and bizarre, somewhat out-of-the-ordinary behavior was engaged in under the watchful eyes of innocent children who ratted out on witchcraft and sorcery counter to the religious decorum of the town’s ruling class), and such discourse of irrationality and lack of methodological reasoning were acceptable so long as self-harm or interruption of another’s peace and tranquility were not engaged.

In modernity, edifying false gods has been accepted, if only because liberty, freedom and free will have all been conflated to confuse and deify the self, the ego and the echoes of rebelling against the traditionalism of past ages.  We love to tear things down, to defy the past and unravel the historicity of yesterday’s constraints.

For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who have been too readily praying at the altar of “the mission of the agency” or the importance of the Postal work by volume and time, all at the expense of edifying the false gods of immortality, invincibility and loyalty to a function which has no end, the wages paid are often the deterioration of one’s health.

Preparing, formulating and filing an effective Federal Disability Retirement application, whether the Federal or Postal employee is under FERS, CSRS or CSRS Offset, is often the only way to step away from the altar of workplace madness, and the recognition of edifying false gods is often accomplished only by realizing that no gods, false, nonexistent or malevolent, are worth the price of one’s health.

Sincerely,

Robert R. McGill, Esquire