Many years ago, I worked with a woman whose daughter was divorced with 3 young kids (very young military couple; you can guess the rest) and at the time, the daughter was on welfare and attending college, in a 2-year certificate program. My co-worker lived with them and helped her with the kids. One day, she said her daughter was a burden on society, and I nearly burst into tears and said, “No, she isn’t! She’s dependent on society, but that’s not the same thing.” I then revised what I said, and told her, “Actually, she’s BENEFITING society by doing this. When they created these programs, she’s exactly the kind of person they had in mind - and she is working. She’s working to get her education, she’s working to raise her kids, and she just needs some help in the meantime.”
For me, if someone had told me at age 47 years 11 months that I would be retired before my next birthday, I’d have said they were nuts, but at 47y11m2w, I realized my job was literally killing me and that the profession I worked in was no longer the one I had trained for. Quitting that job without notice was, for me, more traumatic than my cancer diagnosis a few years later (and other people have told me that they thought so too). In the meantime, I worked briefly at Home Depot and tried to get on at the 2020 Census (see footnote) but that didn’t work out either. I started my book resale business, and even though that cratered in May when I was kicked off Amazon, I still maintain it.
Footnote: I had to watch a bunch of videos about various scenarios a census worker might encounter. The one I got stuck on was a video where a man answers the door with a baseball bat in his hand, and yells, “You so-and-sos, get off my property!” and at that point, I could not proceed further, even to give the proper multiple-choice answer. I took that as a sign that I was not supposed to do it.