The Vicarious Retirement Effect

For the last few years, several colleagues about ten years younger than I am have been asking me the same question with suspicious regularity:

“When are you going to retire?”

At first, I wondered if they knew something I didn’t. Perhaps my teaching evaluations had collapsed. Perhaps students were complaining that the old man kept referring to something called a “newspaper.” Perhaps a secret departmental committee had concluded that I was blocking the natural advancement of younger faculty and was waiting for me to shuffle toward the exit so someone else could inherit my office.

But that wasn’t it.

They didn’t want to get rid of me.

They wanted me to escape.

More precisely, they wanted me to escape first.

Call this the Vicarious Retirement Effect: the tendency of still-employed colleagues to become unusually invested in someone else’s retirement because his departure allows them to rehearse their own escape psychologically. The prospective retiree becomes an advance scout sent beyond the walls of the institution to determine whether civilization exists on the other side. Does the pension arrive? Can you afford groceries? Do you become bored? Do you lose your identity? Do you wander around Costco at eleven in the morning wearing sweatpants and staring blankly at rotisserie chickens? Or do you appear six months later rested, solvent, twenty pounds lighter, and glowing with the serene expression of a man who has not attended a committee meeting since May?

My colleagues want data.

I am the probe.

If I successfully land on Planet Retirement and begin transmitting photographs of myself reading novels at ten in the morning while they are sitting through a presentation on Student Learning Outcomes, I will have established the existence of intelligent life beyond academia.

Their hunger for escape seems to have intensified after COVID. Something happened during those strange lockdown years when millions of people stopped commuting and discovered that a surprising amount of professional life could be conducted from a spare bedroom while wearing shorts. The workplace, once regarded as an immutable fact of adult existence, suddenly became negotiable. Meetings that had previously required forty people to drive across town, locate parking, find a conference room, and spend ninety minutes breathing the same recycled air were reduced to little rectangles on a laptop screen.

Then the campuses reopened.

People returned carrying dangerous knowledge.

They knew what it felt like not to be there.

At the same time, teaching itself had changed. Years of smartphone saturation had not exactly produced a renaissance in sustained attention or recreational reading. Students accustomed to receiving information in fifteen-second bursts were now being asked to read twenty-page essays containing paragraphs that stubbornly refused to dance, sing, or display subtitles. Then generative AI arrived, offering exhausted students the opportunity to outsource the inconvenience of thinking altogether. Suddenly professors who had spent careers teaching people how to write found themselves reading enormous quantities of synthetic prose generated by machines that could produce five pages of grammatically polished oatmeal in approximately eight seconds.

For some of my younger colleagues, this appears to have accelerated the retirement clock by a decade.

They aren’t necessarily miserable. They still care about students. They still take pride in teaching. But I can sense an emerging reluctance to volunteer for the next great transformation of higher education. They survived the pandemic. They survived Zoom. They survived smartphones. They survived declining reading stamina, assessment initiatives, learning-management systems, administrative acronyms, and enough pedagogical reforms to fill an archaeological museum.

Now AI has arrived carrying a flamethrower.

At some point, even conscientious educators begin looking toward the next generation and thinking: You know what? You guys handle this one.

COVID also produced another curious phenomenon among Californians approaching retirement age: the Great Zillow Migration.

My colleagues began spending their lockdown afternoons browsing houses in Florida, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. They weren’t moving, exactly. They were conducting reconnaissance. A four-bedroom house in Albuquerque appeared on the screen for approximately the price of a detached garage in Southern California, and suddenly a person who had never expressed the slightest interest in New Mexico was researching property taxes, summer temperatures, crime statistics, and the distance from Santa Fe to the nearest Trader Joe’s.

The fantasy was remarkably specific.

They wanted to leave California without actually leaving California.

They wanted the enormous affordable house in Arizona but also the Trader Joe’s. They wanted Texas prices but California produce. They wanted New Mexico solitude but a Costco within twenty minutes. They wanted a quiet desert neighborhood, central air-conditioning, excellent broadband, decent Thai food, and a yoga studio where the instructor had somehow been imported directly from Manhattan Beach.

Give them those things and Albuquerque started looking like Tuscany.

This is why my retirement has become strangely important to people who are still a decade away from their own. When they ask, “So, are you really retiring?” there is sometimes an unmistakable gleam in their eyes.

They aren’t asking about me.

They’re asking about themselves.

They want to know whether escape is possible. They want someone they trust to cross the border first, establish a settlement, and send word back that the natives are friendly and the pension checks clear.

So I will go.

I will venture beyond the faculty parking lot into that mysterious territory where Mondays are indistinguishable from Saturdays and nobody knows what a Student Learning Outcome is. I will establish whether a man can survive without checking his college email. I will determine whether the human nervous system can recover from four decades of grading freshman composition papers.

And if everything works out, I will send a message back to my younger colleagues:

The air is good. The money arrived. Costco is open.

Come when you’re ready.