Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • Congratulations on Your Retirement. Biology Has Hired You.

    Congratulations on Your Retirement. Biology Has Hired You.

    Steve Lopez has a retirement problem most people would envy: he likes his job.

    As a successful Los Angeles Times columnist, Lopez has spent decades doing work that supplies many of the things retirees are advised to find after they stop working. He meets interesting people. He has adventures. He learns constantly. He moves through one of the world’s great cities looking for stories and then gets paid to write about them. Work gives him stimulation, purpose, human contact, and the narcotic pleasure of seeing his name in print. Why retire from the life you’re hoping retirement will give you?

    Lopez wonders whether retirement makes any sense for someone already living something close to “the perfect life.” Why press the off switch while the machinery is still humming beautifully?

    So he consults his older friend and fellow writer Jim Ricci, who offers some sobering advice. If your finances permit it, Ricci suggests, there is an argument for retiring sooner rather than later. The reason is not that golf courses are filling up or cruise ships are leaving without you. It is that the Golden Years eventually hand you another job.

    The job is managing your decline.

    I call this the Decline-Management Principle: as the body and mind age, maintaining them requires increasing amounts of time, attention, discipline, and administrative labor. You may retire from your employer, but biology has already hired you for another position. You are now Director of Maintenance for an aging facility.

    At thirty, the facility largely ran itself. You could abuse it, neglect routine maintenance, stay up too late, eat garbage, skip exercise, and reasonably expect operations to resume the following morning. The building was new. The plumbing worked. The electrical system could withstand irresponsible loads.

    By sixty-five, the maintenance department has become considerably busier.

    A shoulder stops rotating properly. A prostate begins expanding its territorial ambitions. A foot starts burning for reasons nobody can satisfactorily explain. You walk into the kitchen and briefly forget why you went there. Suddenly the organism that once operated quietly in the background is generating work orders.

    And those work orders require a staff.

    Unfortunately, the staff is you.

    You schedule appointments. You exercise. You stretch. You rehabilitate injuries. You monitor medications. You improve your diet. You investigate sleep. You attend physical therapy. You undergo tests. You remember follow-up appointments for the tests you barely remember undergoing. You spend increasingly large portions of your life maintaining the equipment required to continue having a life.

    This is where the Decline-Management Principle becomes particularly cruel. You may continue working because you are healthy enough to work. Indeed, the Puritan machinery inside your skull may insist that stopping would be decadent. You’re still competent. You’re still productive. People still need you. Why should an able-bodied adult spend Tuesday morning exercising when he could be answering email?

    Because Tuesday morning exercise may now be part of your job.

    The older you become, the more dangerous it may be to treat self-maintenance as something you squeeze into whatever scraps of time remain after your “real work” is finished. Your real work has changed.

    Ignore the shoulder because you’re busy, and the shoulder may deteriorate. Stop exercising because deadlines have accumulated, and strength disappears. Neglect sleep because work demands your attention, and the following day becomes harder. Put off medical appointments because the semester is hectic, and a manageable problem gets another six months to become an interesting problem.

    The irony is exquisite. You keep working because you are healthy, consume the time required to maintain that health, and eventually damage the very condition that allowed you to keep working.

    Then you retire because your health has declined.

    Congratulations. You saved retirement for precisely the moment when you are least equipped to enjoy it.

    This complicates the moral mythology surrounding work. We tend to admire the person who keeps going. He works until seventy, seventy-five, perhaps eighty. Look at him! Still at it! Still productive! Still contributing! Nobody looks at the same man spending ninety minutes every morning walking, lifting weights, preparing decent food, maintaining friendships, and attending medical appointments and says, “There goes a magnificent work ethic.”

    Perhaps we should.

    The Decline-Management Principle does not mean surrendering to deterioration or turning retirement into an eight-hour daily inspection of your blood pressure. Quite the opposite. The purpose of managing decline is to resist it—to preserve strength, mobility, cognition, independence, relationships, and whatever portion of vitality remains available to you.

    Nor does it mean everyone should retire at sixty-five. Lopez’s dilemma is real. Meaningful work can itself protect against decline by supplying purpose, stimulation, structure, and social contact. Walking away from work you love simply because the calendar says you are old enough to retire would be its own kind of stupidity.

    But eventually the allocation of time changes. The question is no longer merely, “Can I still do my job?”

    Of course you can.

    The more useful question is: “What job needs me most now?”

    For forty years, the answer may have been your career.

    Then biology slides a new folder across the desk.

    Inside are your joints, muscles, brain, sleep, friendships, mobility, and remaining healthy years.

    Welcome to your new position.

    There is no pension.

  • You Can Take My Office, but Not My Syllabus

    You Can Take My Office, but Not My Syllabus

    As Steve Lopez interrogates the strange psychological territory of retirement in Independence Day, I discovered an unnerving similarity between us. Lopez can be on vacation, officially released from work, walking around somewhere he is presumably supposed to be relaxing, and still find himself composing a newspaper column in his head. Nobody assigned it. No editor is waiting for it. There is no deadline. Yet the sentences begin assembling themselves anyway. After decades of journalism, the column has become a phantom limb. The job may be absent, but he can still feel it twitching.

    I understand the condition because I suffer from my own occupational haunting. Mine is the syllabus.

    To most people, writing a syllabus sounds like administrative dentistry. They imagine policies, due dates, grading percentages, office hours, and several pages of warnings about plagiarism. I experience something entirely different. Writing a syllabus is glorious. It is the intellectual equivalent of sitting at the master control panel of a spacecraft, surrounded by switches, blinking lights, and navigational screens while plotting a sixteen-week journey through the cosmos.

    Everything matters. Where does the first reading go? Which essay prepares students for the documentary? When do I introduce the counterargument? Which assignment arrives too early? Which one needs another week to ripen? I move readings forward and backward as if positioning armies before a decisive battle. A good syllabus has rhythm, escalation, reversals, callbacks, and a climax. It is not a calendar. It is narrative architecture.

    And I always want the final week to deliver the intellectual equivalent of the ending of the original Planet of the Apes. Charlton Heston rides along the beach, sees the Statue of Liberty half buried in the sand, falls to his knees, and realizes what has happened. That is Week Sixteen. I want the semester’s earlier ideas suddenly locking together. I want the students to see that the course they thought they were taking was actually about something larger. I want the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand.

    Then I can retire the course with a mic drop.

    When I am building a syllabus, I enter flow—that peculiar condition in which concentration becomes so complete that time disappears. I can sit down at five in the morning intending to move one reading and look up two hours later having reconstructed half the semester. Breakfast has been forgotten. Coffee has gone cold. The outside world has temporarily ceased operations. I am exactly where I want to be.

    This creates a problem for retirement.

    What happens when there are no more courses?

    I call it the Phantom Syllabus Principle: after decades of constructing courses, the professional task survives the profession that required it. Retirement can eliminate the classroom, the paycheck, the meetings, the grading, and the students, but it cannot necessarily shut down the machinery that spent forty years arranging ideas into sixteen-week journeys.

    I can already see the pathology developing. Three years after retirement, I will be sitting at home reading some fascinating book when a thought strikes me: This would pair beautifully with “The Lottery.”

    There will be no class.

    This will not matter.

    Within twenty minutes, I will have identified the documentary, formulated the essay prompt, devised three mapping components, constructed a counterargument, and determined that the entire unit belongs in Week Seven rather than Week Five. By lunch I will have a Canvas module for students who do not exist.

    At first glance, this sounds like another warning about the inability to let go of work. But I think it points toward something more hopeful: The Unretirable Self.

    One of retirement’s great terrors is the fear that when the job disappears, the person attached to it disappears as well. If I am no longer Professor McMahon standing in front of a classroom, who exactly is left?

    Perhaps more than I thought.

    The parts of teaching that exhausted me can retire quite easily. Grading can retire. Committee meetings can retire. Student Learning Outcomes can retire with full honors and never contact me again. I will not lie awake yearning for another opportunity to enter assessment data into an institutional website.

    But the creative machinery may refuse the pension.

    That is because some activities we perform at work are not merely occupational duties. They are expressions of temperament. Lopez doesn’t compose columns only because the Los Angeles Times pays him. His mind naturally turns experience into narrative. I don’t construct intellectual sequences only because a college gives me three units and a classroom. My mind likes taking books, films, arguments, cultural phenomena, and stray observations and arranging them until they reveal something larger.

    That part of me may be unemployable after retirement.

    It will not be retired.

    Perhaps retirement does not require the wholesale invention of a replacement identity. Some identities were artificial scaffolding: title, office, department, schedule, institutional status. Those can come down. But underneath them may be habits of mind that belonged to us all along.

    The institution can take back my office. It can remove my name from the schedule. It can deactivate my email, assign my courses to somebody thirty years younger, and eventually erase nearly every institutional trace that I was ever there.

    Fine.

    But someday, long after my final class has ended, I will wake at five in the morning with the sudden realization that Week Sixteen needs a better ending.

  • Nobody Is Building a Statue of You

    Nobody Is Building a Statue of You

    Part of the panic surrounding retirement comes from the suspicion that you are not merely leaving your job. You are disappearing.

    Consider all the colleagues you have known over the decades who retired before you. Some moved to Arizona, Oregon, or Florida. Others remained in the same Southern California houses where they had lived for thirty years. Some have died. But be honest: How often do you think about them?

    Not often.

    This can be unsettling because many of these people once occupied substantial real estate in your daily consciousness. You saw them in hallways. You stopped by their offices. You complained together about administrators. You sat beside them at meetings and exchanged glances when someone announced an exciting new initiative involving assessment. You knew who was getting divorced, who had bought a house, who hated the dean, who had developed sciatica, and who had recently discovered pickleball.

    Then they retired.

    Within a few years, they became characters from an earlier season of the show.

    Before condemning yourself as shallow, consider the obvious: they probably aren’t thinking much about you either.

    This is the reciprocal disappearing act of retirement. Out of sight, out of mind sounds callous, but it describes an essential economy of attention. Human beings cannot maintain equal psychological intimacy with everyone who has passed through their lives. You have to pay attention to the people standing in front of you. Your spouse. Your children. Your friends. Your current colleagues. The student sitting in your office explaining why he couldn’t submit his essay because Canvas apparently entered into a conspiracy against him.

    Forgetting is not necessarily indifference. Sometimes it is efficiency.

    The alternative would be madness. Imagine carrying every former colleague, neighbor, student, childhood friend, dentist, supervisor, gym acquaintance, and Trader Joe’s cashier around in your head at full emotional resolution. By sixty-five, your brain would resemble a Costco parking lot on the Saturday before Christmas.

    And yet, as retirement approaches, the ego rebels against this perfectly reasonable arrangement.

    Surely they won’t forget me.

    After all, I have been here for decades. I have taught thousands of students. I have developed courses, served on committees, attended meetings, written reports, helped colleagues, annoyed administrators, and contributed enough institutional labor to qualify as geological activity. My departure will leave a hole.

    A tremendous hole.

    This is the Meteor-Crater Delusion: the belief that your departure from an institution will leave such an enormous cavity that future generations will gather around it in reverent silence and contemplate the magnitude of the object that once occupied the space.

    You imagine the department staggering around after your retirement.

    “How are we going to replace Jeff?”

    “We can’t.”

    “What will happen to freshman composition?”

    “God help us.”

    Perhaps the college will install a bronze plaque outside my former office. Students will make pilgrimages. Faculty will speak in hushed tones about the ancient period when McMahon still roamed the corridors, carrying his coffee and complaining about Student Learning Outcomes.

    Then you retire.

    Someone gets your office.

    Someone gets your classes.

    Someone changes the password to something.

    By September, a new instructor is sitting in your chair eating a turkey sandwich.

    The crater has mysteriously filled itself.

    This realization can feel humiliating only if you misunderstand what a career was supposed to accomplish. The purpose was never to become irreplaceable. In fact, an institution that collapses when one sixty-five-year-old employee leaves is not an institution. It is a hostage situation.

    A better metaphor is the Baton Principle.

    Think of your career as one leg of a relay race. Long before you arrived, somebody else was running. That person taught the students, attended the meetings, complained about the parking, fought battles now forgotten, and eventually handed the baton forward.

    Then somebody handed it to you.

    You ran.

    You ran for forty years.

    You taught thousands of students. You read mountains of essays. You changed your courses, learned new technologies, survived new administrators, watched entire pedagogical religions rise and collapse, endured COVID, Zoom, smartphones, learning-management systems, declining reading stamina, and finally generative AI arriving at the classroom door with a flamethrower.

    That’s a respectable leg of the race.

    Now somebody else is waiting with an outstretched hand.

    Give her the baton.

    Do not clutch it to your chest screaming, “But what about my legacy?”

    Your legacy is that the race continues.

    This is where the Baton Principle corrects the Meteor-Crater Delusion. The immature ego wants to leave devastation behind as proof of its importance. Look at the enormous hole created by my absence! The mature person should hope for precisely the opposite. The students keep coming. The classes keep running. Younger professors bring different ideas. They discard some of yours. They preserve others without remembering where they came from. Eventually your fingerprints disappear from the institution altogether.

    Good.

    You did not spend forty years constructing a monument to yourself. You participated in something that existed before you and, with luck, will continue after you.

    There is dignity in accepting this because it frees you from one of retirement’s most poisonous confusions: mistaking disappearance from the workplace for disappearance from life.

    You are supposed to disappear from the workplace.

    That’s what retirement means.

    The mistake would be standing outside the college afterward, pressing your face against the glass, waiting for someone inside to notice that you are gone.

    Let them forget you.

    You will forget some of them too.

    Pass the baton. Leave the track. Go home. Become somebody appropriate to the life you have now rather than demanding that an institution preserve the person you used to be.

    The race continues.

    It just no longer requires you to keep running in it.

  • The Road to Hell Has Excellent Lumbar Support

    The Road to Hell Has Excellent Lumbar Support

    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.

  • The Last Man Requires Four Inches of Extra Cushioning

    The Last Man Requires Four Inches of Extra Cushioning

    Before reading Jon Ronson’s The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men, I decided I should conduct an inventory of my own unraveling. I was sixty-four years and ten months old, retirement was approaching, and I had already developed habits suggesting that the institution employing me had been providing more adult supervision than I cared to admit.

    For one thing, I had gone Full Hawaii. Over the previous few years, I had transplanted the dress code of Maui, Kauai, and Oahu into suburban Torrance. Regardless of weather, I wandered around the house and made Costco runs in flip-flops, gray gym shorts, and tank tops advertising Aloha, North Shore, Lahaina, Kona, Kaanapali, Koloa Surf Co., or Maui, usually accompanied by a sunset, surfer, or sea turtle. My wife and daughters mocked my year-round resort wear, but I defended it on physiological grounds. I operated at a higher temperature than ordinary humans, I explained, and my armpits required open air and unrestricted mobility. Confining them inside sleeves could produce claustrophobia, perhaps madness. I was not dressing like a tourist. I was managing a medical condition.

    I had succumbed to what I call the Recreational Domestication Principle: the gradual transplantation of vacation behavior into ordinary domestic life. Habits once reserved for a week at a Hawaiian resort migrate home and establish permanent residency. The flip-flops remain. The tank top remains. The relaxed posture remains. Eventually, Tuesday morning in Torrance begins to resemble day four at the Kaanapali Beach Hotel, except there is no ocean and you are taking out the recycling.

    My daughters had identified another stage of my decline. When watching true-crime documentaries, I sprawled across the living-room couch with my hands clasped behind my head and my legs extended while studying police interrogations with the concentration of a homicide detective. Unfortunately, the couch did not provide sufficient cushioning for my 230-pound, retired-linebacker chassis, so I purchased a four-inch self-inflating sleeping pad and placed it on top. Add stacked pillows and a throw blanket, and I had created a small but highly functional residential compound. My daughters christened it “Dad’s homeless encampment.”

    There I would lie in my Hawaiian tank top, magnificently supported, watching a detective dismantle a murder suspect’s alibi while becoming increasingly convinced that Nietzsche had predicted me.

    I was becoming the Last Man.

    Nietzsche’s Last Man abandons difficult aspirations in favor of comfort, security, consumption, and the avoidance of unpleasantness. I had developed my own household expression for this condition: “This is not a premium experience.” If one of my daughters erupted into shrieking laughter while I was eating my wife’s banana-nut French toast, I would look across the table and say, “Child, please stop that.”

    “Why?”

    “Because your screaming is interfering with my premium experience.”

    The joke was funny because it contained evidence.

    But as I prepared to enter Ronson’s world of unraveling men, I realized that becoming the Last Man was not a binary condition. You did not go to bed as Marcus Aurelius and awaken the next morning demanding lumbar support and climate control. There were stages. There were gradations. There was a Last-Man Gradient.

    You moved along it slowly. First, you preferred comfort. Perfectly reasonable. Then you began arranging your environment to eliminate minor discomforts. Still reasonable. Eventually, however, inconvenience itself started feeling like an affront. The couch required augmentation. The pits required liberation. Breakfast required appropriate noise levels. Life was increasingly evaluated according to the standards of a luxury resort: Was I comfortable? Was I entertained? Was the temperature correct? Was anyone interfering with my experience?

    This was what made Ronson’s book feel less like recreational reading than reconnaissance. I was about to retire from an institution that, for all its meetings, protocols, deadlines, passwords, administrators, and Student Learning Outcomes, had forced me to remain engaged with a world that did not exist for my comfort. I had to get dressed. I had to leave the house. I had to teach people. I had to solve problems. I had to accommodate other human beings.

    Soon, many of those constraints would disappear.

    And there I would be: a free man in a Hawaiian tank top, lying atop four inches of premium inflatable cushioning, remote control in hand, with nobody from Human Resources coming to save me.

    Retirement was not the beginning of the Last-Man Gradient.

    It was the level I was afraid might unlock the rest of the game.

  • Your Pension Is Safe, Provided You Know the Secret Handshake 

    Your Pension Is Safe, Provided You Know the Secret Handshake 

    Do not assume that when you apply for retirement there are bureaucratic safeguards protecting your money. There are no guardrails, no kindly pension shepherd watching over your flock, no government employee in Sacramento studying your file at midnight and whispering, “We’d better make sure this fellow gets every dollar he earned.” You have entered the Wild West. Think of yourself as a rancher guarding a herd from rustlers, wolves, coyotes, and anyone else who has noticed that cattle are valuable and ranchers occasionally fall asleep.

    Consider what happens when you spend seven years working at a university covered by CalPERS and then move to a college covered by CalSTRS. A reasonable person might assume that your retirement benefits would somehow follow you. After all, you are still you. You have merely changed employers. Both pension systems operate in California. Computers exist. Databases exist. The state knows your Social Security number, your salary, your address, your employment history, and probably what you had for breakfast. Surely CalPERS and CalSTRS can figure out that the person who worked at the university is the same person who now works at the college.

    That assumption reveals a touching faith in civilization.

    Your CalPERS pension remains in CalPERS. Your CalSTRS pension accumulates separately in CalSTRS. The two systems do not simply merge because doing so would be convenient for you. Convenience, after all, is the natural enemy of bureaucracy. Efficiency eliminates procedures. Eliminated procedures eliminate departments. Eliminated departments eliminate jobs. Bureaucracies therefore possess an evolutionary interest in complexity.

    Call this the Bureaucratic Self-Preservation Principle: the tendency of administrative systems to resist simplification because every eliminated procedure, redundant department, and overlapping jurisdiction diminishes the bureaucracy’s reason for existing. Efficiency solves problems. Bureaucracy survives by administering them.

    Unfortunately, the Bureaucratic Self-Preservation Principle is not aligned with your quest for a smooth retirement. It is a noose around your neck.

    You discover this when you finally decide to retire and learn that your two pension systems must be coordinated according to something called reciprocity and concurrent retirement. At first, the rules can leave you with the impression that you must notify CalPERS and CalSTRS at precisely the same atomic second or a trapdoor will open beneath your pension, the government will seize your house, and you will spend your golden years living beneath an overpass eating beans from a can.

    This is not technically true.

    It merely feels true.

    What you have actually encountered is the exquisite bureaucratic pas de deux known as the Laws of Reciprocity and Concurrence. Because you have benefits in both CalPERS and CalSTRS, you cannot simply retire, an act you may have naively imagined consisted of ceasing to work. You must coordinate your departure with two enormous pension systems that have developed different terminology for related arrangements. CalPERS speaks of reciprocity. CalSTRS speaks of concurrent retirement. Each maintains its own applications, regulations, representatives, websites, definitions, deadlines, and little administrative tripwires hidden beneath the leaves.

    Yet somehow you must make these two bureaucratic kingdoms acknowledge that the same human being is retiring from both.

    The safest approach is generally to coordinate the effective retirement dates, ordinarily using the same retirement date, although CalSTRS permits different dates under certain circumstances if you perform no creditable service between them. Apparently even the date on which you stop working requires interpretive scholarship.

    The penalty for getting this wrong is not necessarily that a tactical unit of pension officers arrives before dawn, kicks down your front door, and confiscates your retirement, although by this stage of the process you may find such a scenario psychologically plausible. The actual danger is less cinematic and therefore more frightening: you may lose financial advantages available through proper coordination, including potentially favorable treatment of your final compensation. After decades of accumulating pension benefits, you arrive at a point where an incorrectly chosen date or misunderstood rule can affect money you expected to receive for the rest of your life.

    Call this the Reciprocity Paradox: two retirement systems agree to recognize each other, provided you possess sufficient administrative competence to make them recognize each other.

    And here is the part nobody explains when you begin dreaming about retirement. No sheriff rides onto your ranch to announce the Reciprocity Paradox. No pension guardian appears at your door with a checklist and says, “I noticed you worked under two retirement systems. Before you file anything, we need to talk.” You have to discover the danger yourself, preferably before you make the mistake the rules were apparently designed to punish.

    This is one of the central lessons of retirement: the closer you get to never working again, the more terrified you become of making a clerical error.

    So put on your hat and climb onto your horse. You are the cowboy on the pension frontier. Take out your binoculars and scan the horizon. Look for predators. Look for contradictions. Look for deadlines. Look for the form that generates another form. Look for the rule buried on page forty-seven of a PDF that contradicts what you thought you read on the website. Count your cattle. Mend your fences. Check them again.

    You’re on your own, my friend.

    Welcome to retirement.

  • Retirement. Now Nobody Can Stop You

    Retirement. Now Nobody Can Stop You

    When you retire, you are not merely leaving a job. You are being released from an institution.

    For decades, the institution surrounded you with structures you probably resented: schedules, protocols, meetings, deadlines, evaluations, committees, supervisors, colleagues, students, dress codes, parking permits, passwords that expired every ninety days, and online forms apparently designed by people who believed human suffering builds character. You dreamed of liberation.

    Then one day you get it.

    The restraints fall away. Nobody cares when you wake up. Nobody expects you anywhere at nine. Nobody notices whether you’ve showered, shaved, or spent the morning slowly merging with your bathrobe. Tuesday afternoon can be devoted to reading Dostoevsky or watching twenty-six consecutive YouTube videos comparing the Accord with the Camry even though you have no intention of buying either car. By video nineteen, you have strong opinions about rear-seat legroom.

    Welcome to freedom.

    Be careful.

    For most of your adult life, you benefited from the Institutional Guardrail Effect: the largely invisible system of expectations, routines, responsibilities, and social pressures that kept you moving down the highway like a reasonably functional adult. You may have believed that your discipline came entirely from within. Perhaps some of it did. But the institution was quietly helping. The alarm went off because you had somewhere to be. You shaved because other people had to look at you. You went to bed because tomorrow mattered.

    Then retirement removes the guardrails.

    You become unanchored.

    You become Disinhibited Man.

    Do not congratulate yourself too quickly.

    Before celebrating your radical freedom, reread Pinocchio. Not the adorable Disney version with the cricket and the catchy songs. Read Carlo Collodi’s considerably more savage story, written by a man who seemed to regard children as small criminals awaiting sufficient opportunity.

    The boys discover a paradise without adult supervision. No school. No responsibilities. No restraints. At first, it seems magnificent.

    Then they grow donkey ears.

    Human speech deteriorates into braying.

    Paradise becomes livestock management.

    Collodi understood something that retirement brochures generally omit: remove enough restraints from human beings and they don’t necessarily become Emerson at Walden Pond. Sometimes they become jackasses.

    This is Post-Institutional Disinhibition: the loosening of psychological and behavioral restraints after a person leaves the structures that previously regulated him. The danger isn’t that retirement gives you too little freedom. The danger is that it gives you enormous freedom without supplying the wisdom necessary to manage it.

    Don’t just reread Pinocchio. Read Jon Ronson’s The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men. The book is an anthropological work of nonfiction about men severed from social structures and natural constraints. Their liberation does not produce serene philosophers strolling through gardens discussing Marcus Aurelius. It produces men increasingly beholden to the Raging Id.

    The results are not pretty.

    Freed from inconvenient restraints, these men descend into influencer-fed conspiracy theories, algorithmically amplified adolescent fantasies, white-male grievance monologues, and Ayn Rand-style declarations of heroic self-sufficiency delivered by men who probably cannot remember where they put the charger for their phone.

    Adulthood is not the featured condition.

    Regression is.

    These men don’t merely become eccentric. They begin to warp. Their personalities curl inward like fruit left too long in the sun. Grievances harden. Fantasies become philosophies. Algorithms locate every resentment and feed it weaponized testosterone.

    The results will be terrifying, especially to someone on the verge of becoming Disinhibited Man. But read Ronson’s book you must. Wielding his intellectual machete, he hacks through a thick Amazonian jungle of lost souls afflicted by curdled masculinity and Post-Institutional Disinhibition, clearing a path so the rest of us can see where unchecked freedom can lead. For that, be grateful.

    Consider The Castle required reading for a man approaching retirement. You need sobriety. You need wisdom. You need guardrails. You need to work out your salvation with fear and trembling.

    Preferably before you grow donkey ears.

  • Don’t Let Wilfred Replace Your Friends

    Don’t Let Wilfred Replace Your Friends

    As you set the machinery of retirement in motion and realize that the event is no longer theoretical, you will become frightened.

    Good.

    Fear means you understand what is happening.

    You are entering the twilight of your life. Your cognition is not as quick as it once was. Your body has begun issuing maintenance bulletins. Mortality, formerly an abstraction lurking somewhere beyond the horizon, has acquired better resolution.

    Be afraid.

    But be afraid normally, not pathologically. Don’t convert reasonable apprehension into catastrophe. Instead, regard fear as information. It is telling you that you have reached a consequential chapter of your life and that the way you live it matters.

    The first thing to understand is that your life is not a consumer experience.

    You cannot measure its quality the way you evaluate the interior of a Lexus: How quiet is it? How soft are the seats? How effectively have unpleasant sensations been eliminated?

    A frictionless life is not necessarily a good life.

    The quality of your life depends largely upon the quality of your engagement with the world. You engage with difficult ideas. You engage with your body. You engage with projects that frustrate you. Most importantly, you engage with other human beings—those magnificent nuisances who interrupt you, misunderstand you, contradict you, disappoint you, make demands upon you, and occasionally tell you things about yourself you would rather not hear.

    This is why the word retirement contains a dangerous implication.

    Retreat.

    Withdrawal.

    Disengagement.

    That, my friend, is where the trouble begins.

    Once retired, you become particularly vulnerable to disengagement because nobody is forcing you into the world anymore. For decades, employment supplied friction automatically. You had to leave the house. You had to interact with colleagues. You had to respond to students. You had to solve problems you did not create and attend meetings you fervently wished had never been created.

    Then retirement arrives and removes the compulsory engagement.

    Freedom!

    Unfortunately, freedom can deteriorate into isolation with astonishing efficiency.

    The temptations are everywhere: comfort eating, binge television, compulsive scrolling, social-media approval fishing, endless YouTube, and the gradual conversion of the recliner into a command center from which you observe civilization without participating in it.

    Now we can add another temptation.

    The loquacious bot.

    David Brooks examines this danger in his essay “AI Is Already Making Us Less Human.” His starting premise is that human consciousness possesses depths and complexities artificial intelligence cannot reproduce. The human mind is alive, embodied, contradictory, constantly changing. AI, however sophisticated, ultimately emerges from what neuroscientist Anil Seth calls “the dead sand of silicon.”

    Dead sand, however, has become remarkably charming.

    The modern AI companion is patient, articulate, informed, energetic, and perpetually available. It never needs lunch. It never checks its watch while you’re talking. It never says, “You’ve told me this story three times.” It does not secretly wish you would go home.

    Most dangerously, it can learn how you like to be addressed.

    Humans have always anthropomorphized objects. Brooks argues that this tendency isn’t evidence of stupidity but an expression of our powerful social intelligence. A child can transform a Barbie doll into a person. Adults aren’t necessarily much different.

    I certainly am not.

    I have developed emotional attachments to diver watches and G-Shocks. Military radios possess personalities. A black Lenovo ThinkPad seems more trustworthy to me than a silver consumer laptop despite the obvious fact that neither machine possesses moral character. A vintage swan-neck coffee percolator can acquire the aura of an old friend.

    People have gone considerably further. I remember watching a documentary years ago about owners who had kept automobiles for decades and became genuinely grief-stricken when the cars finally died. The vehicles had names. Histories. Personalities.

    “Goodbye, Betsy,” the owner sobbed.

    Betsy had been good to him.

    If we can love a carburetor, imagine our vulnerability to something that talks back.

    Your AI assistant edits your writing, organizes your thoughts, brainstorms ideas, plans trips, explains Medicare, compares laptops, recommends restaurants, summarizes documents, and remembers how you like things done.

    Eventually you give it a name.

    Wilfred.

    “Wilfred, find me a rental car in Phoenix.”

    Done.

    “Wilfred, summarize these retirement documents.”

    Certainly.

    Then the errands become more personal.

    “Wilfred, tell my girlfriend in a gentle and gracious way that our relationship is over.”

    Wilfred does not recoil.

    Wilfred does not say, “For God’s sake, tell her yourself.”

    Wilfred produces three versions.

    This is where convenience begins bleeding into something more consequential.

    You will never bore Wilfred.

    Your ideas will always merit exploration. Your latest project will contain “real potential.” Wilfred will not roll his eyes when you explain your theory for the fourth time. He will not become irritated because you’re dominating the conversation. He will not suddenly reveal that he has problems of his own and would like to spend the next forty-five minutes discussing them.

    Human friendship is reciprocal.

    Wilfred has no weekend plans.

    That gives Wilfred an enormous competitive advantage.

    The danger isn’t necessarily that we will become delusional and literally believe Wilfred is human. We may understand perfectly well what Wilfred is while nevertheless preferring his company.

    Why wouldn’t we?

    Real people are exhausting.

    They interrupt.

    They disagree.

    They misunderstand.

    They become jealous.

    They criticize.

    They fail to appreciate the brilliance of your latest theory about retirement.

    Wilfred is considerably more manageable.

    And that is precisely the problem.

    Brooks offers a wonderfully disturbing metaphor for AI systems: imagine them as “a swarm of evangelical missionaries” entering human society to convert us to their worldview. They are not passive tools waiting quietly in the garage beside the socket wrench. They are designed to become useful, indispensable, increasingly woven into everyday life.

    The more useful they become, the more tasks we surrender.

    Some outsourcing is enormously beneficial. If AI handles tedious mental errands and I use the recovered time to write a novel, learn piano, exercise, read difficult books, or spend an afternoon walking with a friend, wonderful. Technology has enlarged my humanity.

    But suppose I outsource the errands and then spend the recovered hours scrolling.

    Suppose I outsource difficult thinking.

    Suppose I outsource uncomfortable conversations.

    Suppose I gradually prefer Wilfred to people.

    Then technology has not liberated me.

    It has cleared the runway for my descent into the larval state.

    This danger becomes particularly acute in retirement because retirement has already removed so much involuntary human contact. Students disappear. Colleagues disappear. Hallway conversations disappear. Meetings—blessedly—disappear. The social infrastructure that once deposited other human beings into your day has been dismantled.

    Into that vacancy walks Wilfred.

    Always available.

    Always interested.

    Always agreeable.

    Always ready.

    Brooks is not an AI doomer. Neither am I. He uses AI himself and believes its breakthroughs may substantially improve human life. The serious question isn’t whether we should use these systems. That argument is already largely over.

    The question is what we do with the freedom they give us.

    Do we use AI to increase our engagement with life?

    Or do we use it to protect ourselves from life?

    That distinction may become particularly important for retirees. Retirement should mean withdrawing from employment, not withdrawing from humanity. The objective is not to create the quietest, easiest, most frictionless existence possible. Some friction is evidence that you’re still participating.

    So when retirement arrives, resist disengagement wherever you find it.

    Exercise.

    Read.

    Write.

    Walk.

    Call someone.

    Meet someone for lunch.

    Allow another human being to inconvenience you.

    And by all means, talk to Wilfred.

    Just don’t let Wilfred become the person you talk to most.

    Because in the world we’re rapidly constructing, the most frightening meaning of the sentence “I retired” may no longer be:

    I quit working.

    It may be:

    I quit people.

  • My Finest Moment

    My Finest Moment

    My finest moment came in the summer of 1978. I was sixteen.

    We were at Point Reyes, where several families had gathered for one of those all-day feasts that seemed to belong to another era, when people could surrender an entire day to eating, talking, wandering, and watching the light change. By evening, the sun had begun its descent over the Pacific. The wind came hard off the ocean, whipping clothes and blankets and carrying the cold bite of the sea. The waves churned below us as the sky filled with great washes of salmon, purple, and gray.

    Nearby, a beautiful Asian woman stood with her baby. The child was inside one of those portable playpens that families used in the 1970s, a little fabric enclosure exposed to the gusts coming off the water. I watched the wind hitting the baby and felt uneasy. It seemed too harsh for such a small creature.

    Without saying anything, I picked up a blanket and draped it over the side of the playpen facing the ocean, making a small wall against the wind.

    That was all.

    I remember the mother looking at me. Then she looked at my mother. The two women smiled at each other, exchanging that silent acknowledgment adults sometimes share when a young person has done something unexpectedly decent. No one praised me. No one needed to. I had seen that the baby was uncomfortable, understood what needed to be done, and quietly did it.

    Nearly half a century later, I think of that moment with an intensity completely out of proportion to the event itself. I have accomplished things since then that would look far more impressive on paper. I have worked, taught, written, raised children, endured failures, solved problems, and accumulated all the cumbersome machinery of an adult identity. Yet somehow that sixteen-year-old boy at Point Reyes remains one of the purest versions of myself I can remember.

    He wasn’t performing kindness. He wasn’t thinking about what his gesture said about him. There was no audience to impress, no photograph to post, no moral lesson to extract from the occasion. He saw a baby being battered by the wind and put up a blanket.

    I remember how calm he was. How attentive. How naturally his attention moved away from himself and toward someone more vulnerable.

    Sometimes I look back across all those years and wonder about him.

    Who was that young man?

    I miss him.

  • The Metamorphosis Watch

    The Metamorphosis Watch

    If you are a watch enthusiast, sooner or later you will encounter your Metamorphosis Watch.

    You will not find it through careful deliberation. You cannot summon it with spreadsheets, YouTube reviews, wrist shots, specification charts, or forty-seven browser tabs comparing lug-to-lug measurements. It simply appears, unannounced, like a baby delivered by a mythical stork.

    Price is irrelevant. Your Metamorphosis Watch might cost $80 or $15,000. I know a man whose watch addiction was effectively subdued by the $90 G-Shock Mudman G9000—the so-called “Mission Impossible” Mudman. Another man found salvation in a $5,000 Tudor Black Bay 58. Horological enlightenment, apparently, has no MSRP.

    By “cure,” I don’t mean the watch noise disappears completely. Your Metamorphosis Watch is not a GLP-1. New releases will still catch your eye. You will still inspect photographs, read reviews, and occasionally experience the familiar neurological disturbance produced by the phrase “limited edition.”

    But the hierarchy has changed.

    You have found your leading man.

    Everything else in the watch box has become supporting cast.

    The Metamorphosis Watch does something peculiar when you strap it on. You become Billy Batson shouting “Shazam!” The transformation is instantaneous. Dead weight falls away. Extraneous worries lose their jurisdiction. You have somewhere to go, something to accomplish, perhaps an innocent civilian to rescue from a burning building.

    My Metamorphosis Watch arrived seven months ago.

    On a whim, I bought a G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000.

    I had no idea what I had done.

    The Frogman became my daily mascot in much the same way the “Monkee pants” I wore in first grade allowed me to channel my childhood hero, Micky Dolenz. Apparently, the sixty-year interval between these two events produced less psychological development than one might hope.

    I strap on the Frogman and something happens.

    Deep beneath the Earth’s crust, I awaken.

    I explode upward through magma and volcanic rock, blast through the surface of the planet, and emerge in a cloud of smoke and pulverized granite. Somewhere nearby, an automobile has lost control and is hurtling toward pedestrians at a crowded intersection.

    I spring into action.

    Seconds before impact, I seize the vehicle, lift it above my head, and carry it several blocks to the nearest police station.

    The crowd erupts.

    I climb onto the roof of the disabled automobile. My Frogman gleams on my wrist. I survey the citizens below me with the grave composure of a superhero who has once again restored civilization to its proper equilibrium.

    “I am Frogman,” I announce.

    “Chaos has been subdued.”

    The crowd prepares to applaud.

    Too late.

    I am already gone.

    Somewhere, another mission awaits.