Too old to hire. Too young to retire.

Here's what nobody tells you about losing work after fifty. A job doesn't just pay a man. It gives him a place to go, people who expect him, and a ready answer when somebody asks what he does. When the job goes, all of it goes at once, and the losses start impersonating a verdict. No income becomes no purpose. No employer becomes nobody wants me.

That is a lie.

And a book written 2,300 years ago has been dismantling it for longer than any empire has lasted. It's called the Zhuangzi. Older readers know it as Chuang Tzu. Same book, same man, and when Herbert Giles first translated it into English in 1889, he noticed who its devoted readers had always been: older men, pushed aside, disappointed by how their careers had gone. It has been finding men like us for two thousand years.

A measuring system cannot tell you what you are. It can only tell you what it knows how to use. The Scattered Man, Chapter 4

Jason Comely is the creator of Rejection Therapy, the game played worldwide in which players seek out rejection on purpose until the word no loses its power over them. He spent more than six years working overnight shifts in emergency shelter, and he wrote this book at 56, unemployed, from inside the same wait you may be in. On the afternoon the manuscript was finished, the phone finally rang. The book didn't need the ending changed.