Congratulations on Your Retirement: Your Organs Have Been Notified

You should never have initiated your retirement.

Unfortunately, this revelation has arrived several months too late.

Dozens of colleagues already know. Administrators know. People in offices you have never visited know. Your dean has not yet made the official announcement, but that is merely a ceremonial delay. He is waiting for you to complete the college’s online retirement form, which you plan to submit after your CalSTRS exit interview next month. The machinery is already humming. Your name is moving through calendars, spreadsheets, succession plans, and whispered hallway conversations.

Technically, you could reverse course.

Psychologically, you would rather fake your own death.

Imagine announcing to everyone who has congratulated you, hugged you, envied you, or quietly begun calculating how much larger their office might become that you have reconsidered. “Good news, everyone. I’m staying.” You would have the social grace of a man who delivers an emotional farewell speech at his retirement banquet, receives a gold watch, walks toward the exit, pauses at the door, and says, “Actually, I’ll see you Monday.”

No.

The humiliation alone guarantees forward motion.

Still, let us acknowledge the obvious: perhaps you should never have retired in the first place. Perhaps nobody should retire. If you are healthy enough to work, keep working. Work gives you money, structure, social contact, identity, deadlines, relevance, and a reason to shower before noon. Retirement gives you Tuesday.

Let us first look at your cash flow.

At first, your retirement income may be only twenty percent lower than your working income. Twenty percent sounds manageable until you remember that restaurants have discovered they can charge eighteen dollars for a sandwich. A decent takeout dinner for a family of four now crosses the hundred-dollar line with the casual confidence of a hedge-fund manager ordering lunch. Then inflation begins nibbling around the edges of your fixed income. The twenty-percent gap becomes thirty. Perhaps forty. Suddenly the golden years are less about cruises through the Mediterranean and more about standing in the kitchen asking whether anyone really needs guacamole.

But the financial loss may not be the most frightening part.

The real danger is psychological.

The mind and body are conspirators.

Consider the bladder. You can be driving home for forty-five minutes with only mild discomfort. Your body remains disciplined. Stoic. Heroic. Then you turn onto your own street.

Disaster.

The house comes into view and your bladder declares a national emergency. Thirty seconds earlier you were a functioning adult. Now you are fumbling with the garage-door opener like a bomb technician whose hands have stopped obeying him.

The bathroom did not create the need.

Its proximity gave the body permission to stop pretending.

Welcome to the Bathroom-Proximity Principle of Retirement: the theory that employment functions like a distant rest stop. As long as work remains ahead of you, your body receives the message that the trip is still underway. There are classes to teach, papers to grade, meetings to attend, colleagues to annoy, students to encourage, problems to solve. The machinery must remain operational.

Then you retire.

The metaphysical bathroom appears on the horizon.

Your subconscious surveys the situation and says, “Excellent. We’ve arrived.”

Different parts of your body begin to shut down.

The knees file for disability. The lower back reduces operating hours. The prostate announces an infrastructure project. Your memory starts placing ordinary nouns in long-term storage. You sit in your recliner at ten-thirty in the morning watching a documentary about container ships and wonder whether your body has interpreted retirement not as freedom but as permission to begin dismantling the facility.

Is any of this medically sound?

Almost certainly not.

That is beside the point.

You are experiencing retirement buyer’s remorse, and buyer’s remorse is not known for peer review.

Add to this the possible loss of relevance. For decades, people needed you somewhere. Students waited for your class. Colleagues emailed you. Administrators summoned you to meetings you did not want to attend. Your irritation was proof of your importance. Retirement threatens to remove not only the irritation but also the flattering assumption beneath it: somebody expects you to show up.

So if you have not yet retired, interrogate the decision ruthlessly. Examine the money. Examine your health. Examine your tolerance for unstructured time. Ask whether you possess interests powerful enough to replace the gravitational pull of work.

And if, after all that, you still decide to retire, understand what you are doing.

You are not merely leaving a job.

You are driving home.

The bathroom is getting closer.