Latitudinal Man

 

An “active-living community” is more than a place. It’s a philosophy. Throw in a dash of Hawaiian shirts, parrot pool floats, and Jimmy Buffett music, and you may be beyond philosophy. You may be in the realm of religion. To get a closer look at this religion, check out Latitude Margaritaville, a retirement community in Daytona Beach. Nearby is the Bar & Chill, where margaritas flow endlessly. Forget the Land of Milk and Honey. You’re in the Land of Tequila and Triple Sec.

Latitude Margaritaville is a defiant rebuttal to philosophical writers such as Arthur C. Brooks and David Brooks, who have built a thriving cottage industry mansplaining to people of retirement age that the secret to happiness is to abandon the pursuit of happiness and replace it with a life of meaning. Decline is humiliating. Preserve your dignity with a moral compass composed of Tolstoy, Augustine, and Kierkegaard. Reading the books and essays of the Brooks Establishment is an invigorating skin bracer. Slap some of their tonic on your face. It’s a bracing way to wake up in the morning, stare into the mirror, and not despair over the fact that you’ll be seventy soon.

Or maybe it’s not.

Maybe Latitude Margaritaville is the true path. No pretentious mansplaining here. This is paradise on Earth, starting at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a Beach Collection tract home.

New Yorker writer Nick Paumgarten explores this paradise and its inhabitants in his essay “Retirement the Margaritaville Way.” The people who live amid the cabanas and tiki huts don’t seem lost and lonely. They seem genuinely happy. They seem connected to one another. The place exudes “community” and “active living.” Light classic rock plays all day. You can order cheeseburgers, beer, and margaritas whenever you please. Never leaving high school may be the secret to eternal youth.

Paumgarten seems taken aback by the sheer amount of happiness he finds in this retirement community. He writes, “The citizens of Latitude Margaritaville testify so consistently to a life of gratification that one suspects, but finds no evidence for, a regimen of happy pills or talking points.” Disgruntlement and curmudgeonliness must exist, he observes, but somehow they remain out of sight.

What is the secret of a place that can turn even a cranky old bastard into an upbeat senior citizen animated by optimism and joy? In search of the answer, Paumgarten finds “cheerleading pooh-bah” and head of residential community relations Stuart Schultz, who delivers the happiness formula that has eluded Arthur C. Brooks and David Brooks: Latitude Margaritaville is “like being in college, but with money and without having to study.” You have a great dorm room, no classes, and there’s always a party.

Take that, Arthur C. Brooks and David Brooks.

Paumgarten’s exploration of late-life living uncovers a happiness formula that seems to have eluded some of our most celebrated authors. You need to live in the tropics, where it’s balmy all year round. You need a cabana theme with lots of aquatic activities. You need to recreate the high-school burger-joint life. Never underestimate the power of nostalgia. Create a community of financially solvent boomers with the same nostalgic longings. And forbid political conversations, which are anathema to paradise.

If you adhere to this formula, you can become the happiest person on Earth. Forget Kierkegaard’s Aesthete, forever searching for novel experiences to quell his inner restlessness. Forget Nietzsche’s Last Man, forever seeking consumer comforts and a mindless return to the womb.

In Daytona Beach, you can become Latitudinal Man.

Latitudinal Man defies the laws of aging. He unapologetically embraces the nostalgia of his adolescence, cocoons himself from the toxic unpleasantries of political life, and walks around year-round shirtless in bathing trunks and flip-flops, his body smeared with SPF 50 sunscreen while he carries a platter of nachos and wings. If someone asked Latitudinal Man whether he had ever read Arthur C. Brooks or David Brooks, his response would be roughly the same as if someone had asked baseball legend Pete Rose what he thought of the novels of Marguerite Duras and her exploration of emotional disequilibrium and transgressive love.

What we learn from Latitudinal Man is that perhaps the intellectual elite have led us astray. All this talk of “interiority” and cultivating “an inner life” may not bear fruit. It may even be downright dangerous. Too much interiority could leave you sitting alone in a room reading Kierkegaard when happy hour started twenty minutes ago.

What is needed is a down payment on Phase Three at Latitude Margaritaville. The villas are selling out fast.

The boomer hive mind of the Latitudeners awaits you.