One of the most valuable ideas in Steve Lopez’s retirement memoir Independence Day is that a meditation on retirement eventually becomes a meditation on something much larger: What does it mean to remain fully alive?
Lopez keeps circling back to an answer that complicates the conventional retirement fantasy. Being fully alive is intimately connected to being useful to someone other than yourself. We don’t flourish merely because we possess freedom, comfort, entertainment, or an empty calendar. We need some evidence that our presence in the world matters.
Call this the Useful-Self Principle: Human beings have a deep psychological need to exercise their abilities in ways that benefit others. Our inherent worth does not depend upon our productivity, but our sense of vitality often depends upon knowing that something is better because we showed up.
Lopez considers this idea through the extraordinary example of Hedda Bolgar, a psychologist who continued working until she was 102. She told him, “What I grew up with was, if there’s an unmet need in this world, you try to meet it, and if there’s a problem, you try to solve it.”
There is an entire philosophy of life packed into those two sentences.
Bolgar didn’t regard the world as a giant resort constructed for her personal gratification. She looked outward. Where is the need? Where is the problem? What can I do about it?
Seen this way, retirement is a fairly narrow administrative concept. You retire from a job. You leave the classroom, hospital, office, factory, courtroom, newsroom, or whatever institution employed you for thirty or forty years. You surrender the title, paycheck, meetings, deadlines, performance evaluations, and passwords you can never remember.
But you don’t retire from the human condition.
The deeper obligation remains: escape the gravitational pull of narcissistic indifference, discover what you’re capable of doing, and connect those abilities to something the world needs.
Bolgar died at 103. Her longevity is remarkable, but the number isn’t the most interesting thing about her life. More important was the fact that she remained engaged with other people almost until the end. Her usefulness gave her an identity that survived the conventional expiration date of a career. She had somewhere to direct herself.
I think about my grandfather.
He had been politically active throughout his life. He marched with longshoremen in San Pedro in defense of union rights and participated in similar forms of activism. He had spent decades believing that citizenship required more than sitting in a chair and complaining about the government.
Then, at eighty, he fell.
His body never completely recovered. Eventually he entered a senior-care home in Palos Verdes. I visited him at least once a week until he died at eighty-five.
What tormented him wasn’t merely physical decline.
He hated feeling useless.
He looked around at the other residents and recognized the same despair in them. Their meals arrived. Their medications arrived. Their laundry was done. People cleaned their rooms, changed their sheets, pushed their wheelchairs, organized their activities, and watched over them.
Everything was being done for them.
That sounds like care, and of course it was. But there was another side to dependency that became increasingly visible to my grandfather: almost nothing was being asked of them.
Then he discovered a job.
The cafeteria needed residents to fold napkins for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Napkins.
Of all the grand human enterprises—building bridges, teaching children, performing surgery, defending workers, composing symphonies—we are talking about folding pieces of cloth before somebody eats meatloaf.
And there was a waiting list.
That waiting list has stayed with me because it reveals the Useful-Self Principle in its most concentrated form. Those residents weren’t desperate for napkins. They were desperate to be needed.
Give me something to do.
Let somebody depend upon me.
Let there be one small corner of this institution that functions differently because I am here.
When opportunities for usefulness become scarce, even folding a napkin can acquire dignity.
I remember another moment in that cafeteria. A woman in a wheelchair who appeared to have dementia saw me and suddenly began shouting. She wanted me to rescue her. Take me out of here. Get me away from this godforsaken place.
I looked at her and tried to reassure her. I told her everything would be okay.
She knew I was lying.
She was trapped, and some part of her understood it. What frightened her wasn’t simply the building. Her world had contracted. Other people determined where she lived, when she ate, where she went, and what happened next. She had become dependent upon strangers for the ordinary machinery of existence.
I don’t know what remained intact inside her mind, and I don’t want to romanticize dementia or pretend that usefulness could have rescued her from neurological decline. But the memory has always represented something larger to me: the terror of becoming entirely acted upon rather than retaining the ability to act upon the world.
That distinction becomes increasingly important as we age.
The Useful-Self Principle should never be confused with the cruel proposition that human beings earn their worth through productivity. A bedridden person has no less value than a surgeon. A person with dementia does not become less human because she can no longer contribute as she once did.
Human worth is unconditional.
But the experience of usefulness is something different. It is one of the ways we feel our connection to other people. We teach. We repair. We cook. We listen. We volunteer. We write. We mentor. We drive someone to an appointment. We watch a grandchild. We call a lonely friend. We fold the napkins.
This is why usefulness should not be treated as the broccoli of life—the dreary obligation we endure before finally earning the cheesecake of retirement.
Usefulness is not the broccoli.
It is part of the feast.
The great opportunity of retirement isn’t merely that nobody tells you what to do anymore. It is that you can finally ask a better question:
What needs doing that I am still capable of doing?
Hedda Bolgar kept answering that question until she was 102.
My grandfather understood its importance when he watched elderly people compete for the privilege of folding napkins.
Perhaps that is one of retirement’s most important lessons. We spend decades dreaming about the day when nobody will need anything from us.
Then the day arrives.
And we discover how desperately we want to be needed.
Cinemorphosis 
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