但他接下来给出的理由就比较合情合理一些。他的新工作可以净化他的心灵。每天下午1点回到家后，直到第二天早晨7点半，他都无须再考虑任何有关工作的事情。而在上一份工作中，对工作的担忧在他脑海里挥之不去，这让他疲惫不堪，无暇再去关注其它事情。
But then he said something that made more sense. His new job had allowed him to reclaim his mind. When he goes home at 1pm every day he does not have to give work another thought till 7.30am the next day. In his old job, worries from the office took up permanent residence in his head, making his synapses too ragged to allow him to focus properly on anything else.

于是，我开始理解他为何如此热爱这份工作。这与做一名邮差从绝对意义上讲是多么美妙无关，而是相对于做高管，这种工作非常美妙。他很高兴拖着大大的邮包，因为他清楚另一种选择是什么。他明白，那是多么不幸的一件事，在工作时试图让其他人做内心不喜欢的事情，还要为那些自己无法改变的事情承担责任。作为一名高管，仅唯一的好处就是身份和金钱；如果你不在乎这些，那么当一名邮差是一种好得多的打发时间的方式。他说自己56岁了，已经不再在乎地位了，而且他还有一小笔存款，他已做好了当体力工人的准备。
And then I started to realise why he loves this job so much. It has nothing to do with how nice it is to be a postman in absolute terms but how nice it is relative to being a senior manager. He enjoys lugging his big bag because he knows what the alternative is. He knows how wretched it is spending your working life trying to get people to do things they don't want to do and bearing responsibility for things that you can't change. The only good things about being a top manager are status and money; if you ignore those, then being a postman is a much nicer way of passing the time. At 56, he said he had got beyond status, and as he had a small pile of savings, he was ready to be a manual worker.

日本人深谙此道。该国有大量老人在做体力劳动——人们认为，无论哪种工作，都比失业强——而且，在生命接近终点时社会地位下降，也没什么特别有损身份的地方。
The Japanese know all about this. There are plenty of older people who do manual work – any work is seen as better than no work – and there is nothing especially demeaning about being downwardly mobile at the end of one's life.

在我看来，这似乎是结束工作生涯的完美方式：做些补偿性的体力工作，几乎把它当作一种爱好，用早些年收入更丰厚时攒下的积蓄补贴家用。但这种模式存在一个致命缺陷：这些工作是他们从那些或许不那么喜欢这份工作、却（唉）更需要钱的中青年人手中抢过来的。
This seems to me a perfectly good way of ending ones career: doing redeeming manual work almost as a hobby, subsidised by savings from fatter times. The model has one fatal flaw: the jobs are being taken away from younger people who might enjoy the work less, but who, alas, need the money more.

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