Popular psychology has taken Carl Jung’s sprawling ideas about psychological development and compressed them into a tidy Four Stages of Life paradigm. The scheme is probably too neat to be Jung, but it is useful nonetheless, especially if you are approaching retirement and wondering whether the final decades of life will produce wisdom or merely better lumbar support.
In the first stage, adolescence, you are supposedly the Athlete. You are acutely conscious of your body, appearance, appetites, and sexual power. Self-awareness remains under construction. You occupy the center of the universe and assume everyone else has been assigned supporting roles. You fantasize about dominance, dislike being challenged, and naturally prefer the company of people who recognize your magnificence. If invited to someone else’s birthday party, some primitive corner of your psyche wonders why your name isn’t on the cake. “Athlete” seems far too charitable. I prefer Imperial Narcissist.
Then adulthood throws you into competition. You acquire a career, make money, take action, climb hierarchies, accumulate trophies, and cultivate a reputation as “a force to be reckoned with.” Hugh Hefner supplied the operating philosophy: Work hard, play hard. You want money, sexual success, professional status, and that most intoxicating commodity of all—respect. The popular Jungian formulation calls this figure the Warrior. I prefer Status Gladiator. He experiences adulthood as an arena with an invisible scoreboard hanging over it, and he checks the standings constantly to make sure his name hasn’t slipped.
If life goes reasonably well, however, the trophies eventually lose some of their phosphorescence. The expensive car becomes a car. The promotion becomes another job with more email. Sexual conquest begins to resemble an exhausting administrative project. You start wondering whether the purpose of existence might involve something beyond accumulating evidence that you have defeated other people. The Jungian term attributed to this stage is Statesman. I prefer The Man Tired of the Bullshit. He has not necessarily become a saint. He has simply developed enough pattern recognition to notice that status, ambition, possessions, and applause make lousy gods.
Finally comes the stage usually called Spirit. Here you stop looking for transcendence in a Mercedes and begin looking for the genuine article: love, generosity, service, connection, perhaps God. “Spirit,” however, feels too vaporous for me. My mind goes instead to the famous 1971 “Hilltop” Coca-Cola commercial, with people from around the world standing on an Italian hillside holding bottles of Coke and singing about peace and harmony. They practically glow. This is Radiant Man. He has undergone a metamorphosis. He no longer needs to dominate the room because he is no longer terrified of disappearing inside it. His strength has become generosity. He beams outward.
The graceful trajectory of aging, then, is to move through these stages rather than establish permanent residency in one of them. Shed the old skins. Outgrow the Imperial Narcissist. Survive the Status Gladiator. Become tired of the bullshit. With luck, arrive at retirement age radiating enough benevolence that other people do not instinctively flee when they see you approaching.
Unfortunately, modern culture has constructed an enormous industrial complex devoted to preventing this development. It does not particularly want Radiant Man. Radiant Man is bad for business. He already has enough. He doesn’t need another trophy, another grievance, another sexual conquest, another luxury object, another algorithm telling him how important he is. Consumer culture has much greater use for the Imperial Narcissist: the adolescent who refuses to vacate adolescence and possesses enough adult money to finance the occupation.
Such a man spends his life constructing what I call an Adolescent Fortress. Every purchase, possession, sycophant, grievance narrative, algorithm, and carefully selected media source becomes another brick in the wall protecting him from reality. Eventually he suffers from Adolescent Fortress Syndrome: the lifelong construction of a psychological kingdom into which adult correction cannot penetrate. From inside, the fortress looks like sovereignty. From outside, it looks like a sixty-five-year-old man wearing the costume of a king while hiding from anyone willing to tell him the truth.
Jon Ronson introduces an astonishing specimen of this condition in The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men: Christopher Mark, owner of a Gothic castle in Woodstock, Connecticut. Mark, approaching his mid-sixties, inhabits a medieval fantasy world of elaborate clothing, exotic animals, darkened rooms, and women who address him as “My lord.” His guard dog is named Cerberus, after the multiheaded hound guarding the gates of Hades. Camels wander the grounds. The drapes remain closed. Hugh Hefner is his North Star. The Playboy Mansion has been reincarnated as a Gothic fortress, as if Dracula had purchased a subscription to Maxim.
Ronson first visits the castle after his son encounters the place under the pretense of attending a party. What they discover is considerably darker: a wealthy man in his sixties attempting to convert an adolescent harem fantasy into a reality television show called 101 Princesses. The number itself contains the pathology. Why one princess when you can have 101? And why 101 when, if the experiment somehow succeeded, the appetite would inevitably demand 1,001?
Thomas Aquinas had a word for this: concupiscence, the disordered appetite that grows hungrier as you feed it. The promise is satisfaction; the mechanism guarantees dissatisfaction. You keep adding women, possessions, attention, status, spectacle, and power, expecting the next acquisition to fill the void. Instead, the void develops an appetite of its own. Psychiatrist Phil Stutz describes a related condition as living in the “lower channel,” where existence contracts around immediate gratification rather than purpose. Whatever terminology you prefer, the destination looks much the same: entropy. Or, to borrow Ronson’s word, unraveling.
What makes Mark particularly useful to someone contemplating retirement is his conspicuous absence of guardrails. An heir to a fortune, he never had to build his adult life around employment. No boss expected him at nine. No colleagues depended on him. No students awaited him. No HR department required him to sit through sexual-harassment training. No professional code periodically forced his ego to accommodate the irritating existence of other people. What sounds like magnificent freedom begins to resemble the Guardrail Deficit: the absence of work, schedules, bosses, deadlines, colleagues, and professional expectations that periodically force us into contact with reality.
We complain bitterly about these constraints while quietly benefiting from them. Work makes us shower. Deadlines make us finish things. Colleagues make us compromise. Students make us explain ourselves. Institutions routinely irritate us, but irritation is sometimes the friction that prevents psychological free fall. Remove enough guardrails and the Imperial Narcissist can drive wherever his appetites point him.
Mark therefore embodies what I call the Never-Employed Retiree Paradox. He has reached retirement age with nothing to retire from. The ordinary retiree loses the external structures of employment at sixty-five. Mark never acquired them. In that sense, he has been retired since adolescence, with no workplace, career, professional standards, or institutional obligations separating youthful fantasy from late-life reality. He possesses radical freedom and uses it to dress like medieval royalty while planning a reality show about acquiring 101 princesses. Apparently freedom without maturation does not produce Marcus Aurelius. Sometimes it produces The Bachelor with camels.
This brings me uncomfortably close to home.
Most men cannot afford Gothic castles, exotic animals, and harems, but we have developed a more economical version of the Adolescent Fortress: the Man Cave. We carve out little kingdoms where reality agrees to leave us alone for a while. There is the football den with the enormous television, recliner, pizza, nachos, and master remote. On Married… with Children, Peggy Bundy understands that her husband Al’s deepest erotic fantasy is not another woman but a remote capable of controlling every television in the house. Absolute power, apparently, requires batteries.
Watch enthusiasts have their own castles. I have spent embarrassing quantities of time watching YouTube videos in which grown men gather around expensive watches, conduct ceremonial unboxings, discuss “wrist presence,” and deliver solemn State of the Collection addresses as though NATO were awaiting their conclusions. The watch community becomes a tiny sovereign ecosystem with its own language, hierarchies, rituals, grails, and moat. The outside world may be collapsing, but inside the fortress we urgently need to determine whether forty-four millimeters is too large for a seven-and-a-quarter-inch wrist.
And then there is my couch.
Because the ordinary cushions proved inadequate for my 230-pound retired-linebacker chassis, I fortified the couch with a four-inch self-inflating camping mattress, stacked pillows, and a throw blanket. My daughters call it Dad’s Homeless Encampment. In the late afternoon, it exerts a gravitational pull. I lie there watching true-crime documentaries while eating red grapes, hummus, and Wheat Thins, observing homicide detectives restore order to a universe temporarily disrupted by murder.
The documentaries are disturbing, but they are also strangely comforting. Chaos occurs. Detectives arrive. Evidence accumulates. The suspect lies. The detective catches the lie. Handcuffs appear. Order is restored. The narrative offers precisely what real life refuses to provide: control. Al Bundy has his master remote. The watch collector has his gleaming collection. The football fan has his nacho bunker. Christopher Mark has his Gothic castle and Cerberus. I have my padded couch and a homicide detective explaining why the suspect’s timeline makes no sense.
None of these refuges is inherently pathological. Everyone needs respite. The danger begins when respite becomes habitat—when the place where you occasionally retreat from life becomes the place from which you conduct it. The fortress gets more comfortable. The moat gets wider. The drawbridge comes up more often. Eventually, freedom from irritation becomes freedom from challenge, freedom from obligation, freedom from other people, and finally freedom from reality itself.
That is what makes Christopher Mark more than an eccentric character in someone else’s book. For a man approaching retirement, he is a warning. Employment has spent forty years dragging me out of the house, making demands upon me, exposing me to people I did not choose, and preventing my padded couch from becoming the geographical center of my existence. Soon those guardrails will disappear.
So when late afternoon arrives and I lower myself onto four inches of premium camping foam, arrange my pillows, pull the blanket across my legs, open the Wheat Thins, and watch a homicide detective interrogate a suspect while Cerberus sleeps safely several states away, I do not feel myself approaching the incandescence of Radiant Man.
I feel like I may already be retired.
Cinemorphosis 
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