Retirement presents an indignity nobody adequately warns you about: obscurity.
For forty years, you had a schedule. People expected you somewhere. Students waited for you. Colleagues knew your name. Your calendar was crowded with obligations you routinely complained about but which nevertheless performed the useful service of confirming your existence. Then you retire, and Tuesday morning opens before you like an abandoned airport runway.
Nobody needs you at nine.
Nobody needs you at eleven.
By two in the afternoon, you have completed your workout, eaten lunch, taken a restorative nap, and begun examining your navel with the concentration of an archaeologist studying the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Worse, your professional title has vanished. You are no longer Professor. You are Jeff, some guy standing in Costco comparing two enormous packages of toilet paper. The institution that once supplied your identity has withdrawn its sponsorship. Your lower lip begins to tremble. You feel the existential weight of your own irrelevance.
And then you remember something.
You have money.
More money, in fact, than you expected to have. For decades, you saved because responsible adults save. You contributed to retirement accounts, paid down debt, avoided idiotic purchases, and watched the numbers accumulate. Now you have arrived at the future you were saving for and discovered an unforeseen psychological complication.
You are going to die.
Suddenly, the swollen savings account looks less like prudence and more like inventory left in a warehouse scheduled for demolition.
“It’s my money!” you shout at nobody in particular. “By God, I’m going to enjoy it before they carry me out of here!”
This is not an ideal frame of mind in which to open a web browser.
Within minutes, you are examining a state-of-the-art Lenovo ThinkPad. Sixty-four gigabytes of RAM. Gorgeous keyboard. Magnificent processor. Enough computational power to edit a feature film while simultaneously modeling climate change. You are not a content creator. You write essays in Google Docs. Your existing computer performs this task without detectable distress.
No matter.
You deserve the ThinkPad.
Then comes the G-Shock Frogman, the Master of G watch engineered for professional divers. Sapphire crystal. Multiband 6. Depth sensor. Dive functions. A magnificent piece of Japanese overengineering designed to accompany a man into hostile underwater environments.
You spend most afternoons on a couch reinforced with a four-inch camping mattress.
Still, one never knows when deep-sea saturation diving might break out in Torrance.
Then you begin pricing a loaded Honda Accord Hybrid. Heated seats. Premium audio. Wireless Apple CarPlay. Excellent fuel economy. You drive perhaps two thousand miles a year, which means the gasoline savings may become financially significant sometime during the reign of your great-grandchildren.
You want it anyway.
You have succumbed to the Mortality-Spending Reflex: the late-life compulsion to medicate retirement’s loss of identity, structure, and professional importance through increasingly premium consumer goods. Mortality supplies the urgency. Consumerism supplies the anesthetic.
For forty years, the question governing an unnecessary purchase was simple: Can I afford this?
Retirement introduces a much more dangerous question: What exactly am I saving the money for?
This is where perfectly reasonable financial logic begins acquiring the feverish quality of a man shopping during an evacuation. You cannot take the money with you. True. You worked hard for it. True. You should enjoy some of it while you’re healthy. Absolutely true.
Therefore you need a $1,300 dive watch capable of measuring water depth while you watch true-crime documentaries.
The syllogism has deteriorated somewhere.
The Mortality-Spending Reflex is particularly dangerous because it disguises itself as wisdom. It tells you that you have finally transcended your neurotic attachment to money. You are embracing life! Seizing the day! Refusing to die with a fat bank account!
Yet Nietzsche’s Last Man is standing nearby with a shopping cart.
He no longer has students, deadlines, professional status, or anywhere in particular to be Monday morning. But he can have 32 gigabytes of RAM, sapphire crystal, Multiband 6, heated seats, and wireless Apple CarPlay. Each purchase delivers a small electrical jolt of novelty, followed by acclimation, followed by the search for the next premium experience.
Mortality has ceased being a philosophical problem.
It has become a purchasing justification.
And somewhere on the internet, another browser tab is already open.
Cinemorphosis 
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