Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • The Late-Life Ninja State 

    The Late-Life Ninja State 

    I was sixty-four years and ten months old, walking across campus in the early afternoon after teaching my student-athletes about sports-betting addiction in freshman composition. I was heading toward the multilevel parking structure when an enormous young man approached from the opposite direction.

    He was about twenty, perhaps six-foot-five and easily three hundred pounds. Dark-rimmed glasses gave him a studious, slightly nerdy appearance. His black pants were stretched tight, while an enormous T-shirt had been tucked into them with a commitment to fashion I did not entirely understand.

    As we passed, he suddenly stopped.

    He was staring at my feet.

    “Those look super comfortable,” he said. “Are those the Ghost Max 3s?”

    I looked down at my gray Brooks running shoes.

    “Yes.”

    Apparently, my testimony was insufficient.

    “Can I see the bottom?”

    I stared at him.

    He explained that “Ghost Max 3” was printed somewhere on the sole and he wanted visual confirmation.

    Now I faced a logistical problem.

    I could remove the shoe, which seemed cumbersome. Or I could remain standing and somehow present the bottom of my foot to a six-foot-five stranger in the middle of campus.

    I chose the latter.

    I planted my left foot, leaned my torso forward, and extended my right leg behind me until I had achieved something resembling a Romanian deadlift crossed with yoga airplane pose. There I stood—a sixty-four-year-old writing professor balancing on one leg in a parking structure while a three-hundred-pound college student conducted forensic analysis of my footwear.

    He examined the sole.

    There it was.

    Ghost Max 3.

    He erupted with delight.

    I had never seen anyone so happy to authenticate a running shoe.

    He thanked me profusely, and I returned to an upright position with whatever dignity remained available.

    Ordinarily, I might have found such a request intrusive. Why should a complete stranger stop me and demand access to the underside of my shoe? What was next? Would he need the serial number? Should I produce a receipt and two forms of identification?

    But I wasn’t offended.

    I understood him immediately.

    He was me.

    Not literally, thank God. If I suddenly became six-foot-five and three hundred pounds, my entire wardrobe would become an emergency. But psychologically, I recognized the condition.

    The young man had the fever.

    I have suffered from the same fever for decades.

    When I’m fascinated by something, normal social boundaries become surprisingly negotiable. I have accosted complete strangers wearing Grand Seikos, Seiko Monsters, and Tudor Pelagos. A man innocently drinking coffee while using a Lenovo ThinkPad can suddenly find himself being interrogated by me about his processor, screen brightness, battery life, keyboard travel, and thermal management.

    He had planned to drink a latte.

    Now he’s discussing nits.

    So when this young man stopped me to investigate my Brooks Ghost Max 3s, I couldn’t condemn him. Hobby obsessives recognize one another across categories. Watches. Computers. Running shoes. Different objects, same neurological disturbance.

    Still, I had to admit that I had never asked a stranger to perform an acrobatic maneuver so I could inspect the bottom of his shoe.

    That was advanced work.

    And yet something else about the encounter struck me.

    I wasn’t embarrassed.

    Presumably, other people were walking through the parking structure. Someone may have looked over and seen an aging bald professor suddenly assume yoga airplane pose while an enormous young man crouched nearby studying his sneaker.

    At an earlier age, I might have become acutely conscious of the spectacle.

    What do these people think I’m doing?

    Do I look ridiculous?

    Should I explain?

    At sixty-four years and ten months, I couldn’t have cared less.

    This, I realized, was The Late-Life Ninja State: the stage of life when you remain perfectly capable of recognizing how ridiculous you may look but discover that the opinions of random witnesses have lost most of their power over you.

    This is not the same as becoming oblivious.

    The ninja knows.

    The ninja simply doesn’t care.

    Age takes plenty from us. Hair disappears. Knees become temperamental. Metabolism develops a sense of humor. Restaurant lighting becomes suspiciously dim. You begin making small involuntary noises when rising from chairs.

    But perhaps age gives something back.

    You gradually escape the imaginary tribunal.

    For much of life, we move through public spaces carrying an invisible audience inside our heads. How do I look? What will they think? Did that sound stupid? Am I dressed correctly? Did anyone see that?

    Eventually you begin to understand that almost nobody is paying attention.

    And the few people who are paying attention don’t matter.

    The stranger who watched me balance on one leg will not be discussing the incident at dinner.

    “Anything interesting happen today?”

    “Yes. At approximately 1:17 p.m., I observed an older man displaying the sole of his Brooks Ghost Max 3 to a very large student.”

    Even if he does tell the story, what have I lost?

    Nothing.

    Retirement has been making me think obsessively about the things age takes away: income, professional identity, routine, colleagues, relevance, automatic social contact. But perhaps I should keep an inventory of the things age removes that I am delighted to lose.

    Embarrassment belongs near the top of the list.

    The Late-Life Ninja State is not indifference to other people. If anything, it may make human encounters easier. Once you stop devoting so much energy to managing your appearance, you become freer to participate in the strange little improvisations that life keeps offering.

    A young man wanted to see the bottom of my shoe.

    I showed him.

    He was delighted.

    I was amused.

    Nobody died of embarrassment.

    And somewhere in the near future, I suspect that young man will walk into a shoe store and buy himself a pair of Brooks Ghost Max 3s.

    May they cushion his considerable frame.

    May they carry him many comfortable miles.

    And may he someday reach an age when, without hesitation or apology, he too will stand on one leg in a parking structure for a complete stranger.

  • Ozempic and the Gospel of Suffering

    Ozempic and the Gospel of Suffering

    In his Washington Post essay “I’m on Ozempic. The Shaming Is Real,” Rick Reilly commits what remains, strangely enough, a minor social transgression: he admits that he loves GLP-1 drugs.

    Why wouldn’t he?

    They work.

    In three months, Reilly has lost twenty-two pounds. More importantly, he has escaped some of the relentless mental negotiations surrounding food—the calculations, cravings, promises, rationalizations, and internal committee meetings that can turn eating into a second occupation.

    You might expect people to congratulate him.

    Instead, they accuse him of cheating.

    Just exercise more, they tell him.

    Stop eating sugar.

    Use some willpower.

    In other words, please return to the traditional weight-loss program in which you spend every waking hour negotiating with a muffin.

    Reilly’s response is straightforward: Why is using effective technology considered cheating?

    Modern life is essentially one long conspiracy against doing things the hard way. We take statins to lower cholesterol. We use GPS rather than unfolding a map across the steering wheel while hurtling down the freeway. We undergo cataract surgery rather than accepting that God apparently wants the menu blurry. We use calculators, dishwashers, hearing aids, blood-pressure medication, cruise control, anesthesia, and increasingly cars capable of performing some of the driving themselves.

    Nobody emerges from surgery and announces, “Frankly, I think anesthesia was cheating.”

    Yet GLP-1 drugs somehow violate an ancient moral code.

    Even people taking them often behave like members of a secret society. At parties, Reilly says, people approach him and whisper that they’re on them too. Apparently admitting that you take a medication that helps control appetite now requires the discretion formerly reserved for revealing an affair with the tennis instructor.

    Why the embarrassment?

    Because body weight occupies a peculiar territory between medicine and morality. We don’t merely want people to lose weight. We want them to have earned the weight loss through visible suffering.

    Sweat.

    Hunger.

    Broccoli.

    Repentance.

    The acceptable thinner person must emerge from the wilderness carrying a food scale and a battered pair of running shoes.

    Tell people you lost thirty pounds by waking at five every morning, eating boiled chicken breasts, rejecting birthday cake, and performing burpees until your vision blurred, and they admire your discipline.

    Tell them a weekly injection quieted your appetite and suddenly an ethics committee needs to be convened.

    Reilly rejects the accusation that he lacks willpower. His problem, he argues, isn’t simply willpower. It’s time. Managing food can consume enormous amounts of mental bandwidth: thinking about what to eat, resisting what not to eat, calculating portions, experiencing cravings, compensating with exercise, and then beginning the entire negotiation again several hours later.

    There are only so many hours in a life.

    Why spend them arguing with a cheeseburger?

    Then comes the warning about “Ozempic Face”—the gaunt appearance associated with substantial or rapid weight loss. Reilly’s answer is that he is microdosing, trying to obtain the benefits without racing toward physical extremes. He isn’t attempting to disappear. He wants appetite control without looking as though someone left him overnight in a food dehydrator.

    So what explains the hostility?

    Some of it may indeed be envy. Watching someone obtain with medication what you obtained through years of dietary trench warfare can provoke resentment.

    But envy isn’t enough to explain it.

    Something deeper is operating: the lingering belief that appetite must be conquered through character. Discipline is virtuous precisely because discipline hurts. If technology reduces the struggle, people suspect that the resulting success is somehow counterfeit.

    This is the Moral Suspicion of Easy Weight Loss: when a difficult problem becomes easier to solve, we sometimes distrust the solution precisely because it eliminates the suffering we once considered evidence of virtue.

    There are legitimate questions about GLP-1 drugs—side effects, cost, access, long-term use, appropriate prescribing, and what happens after treatment stops. Those questions deserve serious attention.

    But “You cheated” isn’t a medical argument.

    It’s a moral complaint wearing gym clothes.

    Meanwhile, Reilly has lost the weight. The Food Noise has diminished. He has recovered mental territory previously occupied by appetite and negotiation.

    And he has no intention of surrendering it merely because someone else believes virtue should burn more calories.

  • Your Life Depends on Widening the Rest Stop Gap 

    Your Life Depends on Widening the Rest Stop Gap 

    I need to revisit the Bathroom-Proximity Principle of Retirement.

    The principle proposes that employment functions like a distant rest stop, maintaining a psychologically useful distance between you and your mortality. As long as work remains ahead of you—classes to teach, papers to grade, meetings to endure, students to advise—your body receives a reassuring message: the trip is still underway. We have miles to go. Maintain operations.

    Then you retire.

    The rest stop appears.

    Anyone who has driven the I-5 with a full bladder understands the phenomenon. For forty miles you are fine. There is pressure, certainly, but nothing a mature adult cannot handle. Then you see the sign:

    REST AREA — 2 MILES.

    Instantly, your bladder declares DEFCON 1.

    Nothing physiological has changed in the previous four seconds. What has changed is proximity. The body has received permission to stop holding itself together.

    The Bathroom-Proximity Principle proposes—without the slightest concern for medical peer review—that retirement can produce a similar effect. For decades, employment kept the metaphysical rest stop somewhere beyond the horizon. Then you announce your retirement, clear out your office, receive several congratulatory emails, and suddenly the sign appears beside the highway.

    REST AREA — NEXT EXIT.

    Your body looks at the sign and begins shutting down departments.

    The knees reduce operating hours. The lower back announces a staffing shortage. The prostate initiates a major infrastructure project. The brain begins moving nouns into off-site storage.

    But I now realize that the Bathroom-Proximity Principle contains a serious flaw.

    It assumes helplessness.

    Knowing that retirement can trigger an acute awareness of mortality does not mean you must surrender to it. You can create distance between yourself and the rest stop again.

    You can create The Rest Stop Gap.

    The Rest Stop Gap is the deliberate distance you maintain between retirement and physical, intellectual, and social decline. Employment once created much of this distance automatically. Retirement does not. Therefore, you must manufacture the gap yourself.

    You must keep telling your body and brain:

    We are not there yet.

    There is work to do.

    I contemplated this recently while suffering on my Schwinn Airdyne.

    The Airdyne is technically classified as an exercise bicycle, although this description seems unnecessarily charitable. It is better understood as a medieval torture apparatus that happens to contain a seat. You pedal furiously while simultaneously pushing and pulling two large handles, thereby ensuring that no major muscle group feels excluded from the proceedings. Your quadriceps burn. Your shoulders complain. Your lungs begin drafting a formal letter to management.

    After forty-five minutes, the machine no longer feels like exercise equipment. It feels personal.

    Yet this suffering has a purpose.

    The objective is not to destroy yourself. At my age, crawling away from an exercise bicycle and spending the remainder of the afternoon convalescing beneath a blanket is not evidence of fitness. It is evidence of poor judgment.

    Nor is the objective to become lax.

    The goal is to find the edge.

    You work hard enough that the body must respond, adapt, strengthen, and remain useful. But you stop before productive stress becomes demolition. Don’t retreat ten feet behind the line. Don’t charge heroically across it and collapse on the other side.

    Walk to the edge.

    Learn where it is.

    Make friends with it.

    This physical challenge creates part of the Rest Stop Gap because it sends an unmistakable message to the organism: nobody is closing this facility. Tomorrow these muscles may be needed again.

    But exercise alone isn’t enough.

    This leads to The Three-Pillar Vitality Principle: maintaining the Rest Stop Gap requires continuing demands upon three parts of yourself—the physical, intellectual, and social.

    The first pillar is physical challenge.

    Move. Walk. Lift. Pedal. Stretch. Give your body difficult but reasonable work. Remind your muscles, bones, heart, and lungs that retirement is a change in employment status, not a liquidation sale.

    The second pillar is intellectual challenge.

    Read difficult books. Write. Study. Learn something unfamiliar. Develop projects that refuse to resolve themselves without sustained attention. Give your brain problems sufficiently demanding that it cannot reasonably conclude its services are no longer required.

    The third pillar is social engagement.

    This may be the easiest pillar to underestimate. Employment supplied human contact whether you wanted it or not. Students appeared. Colleagues knocked on the door. Meetings materialized with malignant regularity. Retirement removes much of this involuntary social infrastructure. If you do nothing to replace it, days can become strangely frictionless.

    You need people.

    Not merely text messages. Not merely podcasts. Not merely the reassuring illusion of companionship provided by listening to two strangers discuss politics through earbuds.

    Actual people.

    This is why the Walking Companion Principle matters. Find someone. Put on shoes. Walk. Talk. Show up again. A regular walking companion performs the remarkable trick of strengthening two pillars simultaneously: physical and social.

    Maintain all three pillars and you widen the Rest Stop Gap.

    Neglect them and you risk entering what might be called the Retirement Larval State.

    The Retirement Larval State does not initially feel terrible. That’s precisely the problem.

    You wake without an alarm. Excellent.

    You remain in your pajamas until eleven. Why not?

    Lunch becomes a Hot Pocket because technically it contains several food groups.

    You wander into the living room holding the remote control with the practiced grip of an orthopedic surgeon holding a scalpel. Netflix asks whether you’re still watching.

    Of course you’re still watching.

    What else would you be doing?

    Gradually, the boundaries of life contract. The workout disappears. Difficult books become strangely exhausting. Invitations seem inconvenient. The house becomes the habitat. The recliner develops gravitational properties.

    And the frightening part is that none of this feels quite as bad as you were warned.

    Decay can be comfortable.

    That’s why it is dangerous.

    The larval retiree does not wake one morning and announce, “Today I shall begin my physical, intellectual, and social deterioration.” He simply removes one demand after another until nothing remains that requires very much of him.

    The rest stop gets closer.

    The Three-Pillar Vitality Principle offers a different model of retirement. You no longer have to work for an employer, but you must continue placing intelligent demands upon yourself. Your body needs something difficult to do. Your mind needs something difficult to solve. Your social self needs people who expect you to appear.

    The point is not to manufacture another job and call it retirement. Nor is it to fill every hour with frantic activity because silence reminds you that you are mortal.

    The objective is simpler.

    Keep enough road between yourself and the rest stop.

    Exercise.

    Think.

    Connect.

    Then get up tomorrow and do it again.

    The sign will eventually appear. It appears for everyone.

    There is no reason to take the next exit.

  • Mediated Persona Fatigue

    Mediated Persona Fatigue

    Sometime in the 1990s, I encountered two words about television that fascinated me. The first was médiatique: possessing the kind of face, presence, and personality that translates well through a camera. The second was mediated: knowing how to perform once the red light comes on—polished, relaxed, articulate, confident, seemingly spontaneous while remaining completely aware that thousands or millions of people may be watching.

    At the time, these qualities seemed impressive. Television still possessed a certain distance and glamour. Not everyone could stare into a camera and appear comfortable. Most ordinary people, confronted by a lens, suddenly became aware of their hands, forgot how their mouths worked, and developed the facial expression of someone being questioned by customs officials.

    Then came YouTube.

    Then TikTok.

    Then Instagram Reels.

    The rare skill became an industry.

    Millions of people learned how to become médiatique. They mastered the raised eyebrow, the conspiratorial lean toward the camera, the strategic pause, the widened eyes, the incredulous head shake, the sudden whisper, the explosion of outrage, the knowing smirk. They learned to speak in hooks. They learned to manufacture urgency. They learned that apparently nothing in human experience could simply be interesting. It had to be INSANE.

    At first, this new breed of camera personality could seem engaging. After sufficient exposure, however, I developed what I call Mediated Persona Fatigue: the exhaustion produced by prolonged contact with people who have optimized every gesture, vocal inflection, facial expression, and emotional reaction for maximum engagement.

    Eventually, you stop seeing the personality and start seeing the machinery.

    The intimacy begins to feel synthetic. The enthusiasm feels pharmaceutical. The spontaneous outrage arrives with suspicious punctuality. These people no longer strike me as companions sharing something interesting. Increasingly, they resemble dopamine peddlers standing on digital street corners, opening their trench coats and whispering, “Psst. Want to see something absolutely crazy?”

    The commodity is attention.

    The subject hardly matters. Murder. Politics. Celebrity divorce. Watches. Football. Restaurants. Skin cream. A disagreement between two strangers at Costco. Everything gets processed through the same engagement refinery and converted into thirty-second pellets of stimulation for an audience whose attention span is already being sandblasted into oblivion.

    I thought about this last night while my wife and I watched Welcome to the Family: The Murder of Dan Markel. The docuseries was generally excellent, but inevitably it reached the point where the filmmakers had to demonstrate how enormous the case had become online.

    Up came the social-media personalities.

    There they were.

    The faces.

    The voices.

    The incredulity.

    The histrionics.

    The solemn promise that somebody was about to “spill the tea” concerning an actual murder.

    I felt immediate revulsion.

    Part of my reaction may simply be generational. Perhaps I am an aging man standing on his porch demanding that the influencers get off his lawn. Fair enough. Every generation eventually discovers that the communication style of the next generation sounds like civilization being fed into a wood chipper.

    But I suspect something larger is happening.

    We may be approaching Engagement Saturation: the point at which techniques designed to capture attention become so ubiquitous that they begin repelling the very audience they were designed to attract.

    The raised eyebrow once worked.

    So everyone raised an eyebrow.

    The dramatic pause worked.

    So everyone paused dramatically.

    Outrage worked.

    So everyone became outraged.

    The reaction face worked.

    So the internet filled with adults staring at thumbnails as though they had just witnessed the Resurrection in the parking lot of a Cheesecake Factory.

    Eventually the entire digital environment begins screaming at once.

    And when everyone screams, screaming loses its power.

    This is why I have difficulty believing the current social-media aesthetic can continue indefinitely. Human beings habituate. Yesterday’s stimulation becomes today’s background noise. The influencer must therefore become louder, faster, more emotional, more intimate, more outraged, more revealing. The engagement economy contains its own escalation mechanism, and eventually the needle reaches the red zone.

    Something has to give.

    Perhaps the next form of charisma will be restraint.

    Perhaps the radical media personality of the future will sit in front of a camera, speak in complete sentences, refrain from widening his eyes, and allow three consecutive seconds to pass without a jump cut.

    Perhaps someone will tell us something interesting without promising that it will blow our minds.

    Perhaps understatement will become exotic.

    I hope so.

    Because watching millions of people trapped inside this social-media hellscape—performers frantically stimulating audiences who require increasingly intense stimulation—feels less like communication than a civilization repeatedly pressing the button on a laboratory cage.

    I have to believe this particular chapter of media culture will eventually exhaust itself.

    After enough Mediated Persona Fatigue and Engagement Saturation, calm and composure may become a form of rebellion.

  • The Walking Companion Principle

    The Walking Companion Principle

    A few weeks before the beginning of what would be my final fall semester teaching college writing, my family spent a week in Carlsbad.

    One morning we ate breakfast at the French Corner. I ordered a savory crepe and drank coffee softened with milk, cinnamon, and honey. The meal achieved that increasingly rare equilibrium in which you leave neither hungry nor incapacitated. I was full but not bloated, caffeinated but not vibrating, satisfied without immediately wondering what I might eat next. For several fleeting minutes, I experienced something approaching perfection. The meal did not merely fill my stomach; it seemed to quiet some hidden chamber of the soul that normally conducts emergency meetings around the clock.

    Then we wandered into downtown Carlsbad.

    My family disappeared into a used record store while I remained outside. I have never understood the romance people attach to the smell of old books, record sleeves, and aging paper. To enthusiasts, the aroma evokes libraries, childhood, discovery, civilization. To me it smells like mildew wearing a tweed jacket.

    So I waited on the sidewalk and did what I often do when temporarily deprived of distraction: I conducted an inventory of my deficiencies.

    Twenty extra pounds.

    Inconsistent discipline.

    A tendency to overthink everything.

    And, increasingly, the suspicion that I required more regular companionship than I had previously been willing to admit.

    Then I saw two men walking toward me.

    They appeared to be in their early seventies, and I assumed they were retired. Both wore safari hats, T-shirts, shorts, and tennis shoes. Their phones rested harmlessly in their back pockets rather than occupying the command center of their consciousness. They walked side by side, talking with the effortless rhythm of men who had probably traveled this route together hundreds of times.

    They laughed.

    They listened.

    Neither seemed compelled to dominate the conversation, check a notification, document the walk, measure engagement, cultivate a personal brand, or inform the world that he was currently walking.

    They were simply two men walking.

    Their calves caught my attention. These were not gym-manufactured calves, inflated through heroic campaigns involving protein powder, compression sleeves, and motivational playlists. They were walking calves: lean, hard, unremarkable, the product of thousands of ordinary miles accumulated without fanfare. Both men looked younger than plenty of men twenty years their junior because their bodies had quietly become advertisements for moderation.

    I envied them immediately.

    Certainly I envied their leanness. I am not spiritually advanced enough to pretend otherwise. But what I really envied was the life their bodies implied.

    These men had apparently solved a problem I had been treating as several different problems. They did not need to schedule exercise and then separately schedule friendship. They had fused the two. Their physical fitness and social fitness occupied the same hour.

    They had discovered what I began to think of as The Walking Companion Principle: one of the most valuable pieces of retirement infrastructure is another human being who reliably walks beside you.

    Consider the efficiency.

    Walking provides cardiovascular exercise, mobility, sunlight, fresh air, routine, and protection against the gradual transformation of the human body into upholstered furniture. A companion provides conversation, laughter, accountability, perspective, and evidence that you still exist outside your own head. Combine the two and you have created a remarkably sophisticated health intervention requiring almost no technology.

    Shoes.

    Friend.

    Walk.

    Repeat tomorrow.

    No bestselling self-help book is required. No wellness retreat in Sedona. No twelve-week optimization protocol administered by a forty-two-year-old podcaster who owns a cryogenic chamber and hasn’t eaten a carbohydrate since the finale of Breaking Bad.

    Just show up.

    What unsettled me was that the principle seemed particularly important for retirement while having almost nothing specifically to do with retirement. It was simply a principle for living well.

    You take care of your body.

    You walk every day.

    You eat reasonably.

    You cultivate friendships.

    You show up.

    You repeat the process tomorrow.

    These truths possess none of the glamour of revelation. Nobody returns from a monastery in Nepal and announces that he has discovered the importance of taking a walk with a friend. Common sense suffers from terrible marketing.

    Yet the older I get, the more suspicious I become that common sense may contain considerably more wisdom than the elaborate intellectual systems I’ve spent decades examining.

    Standing outside that record store, I began wondering whether I had spent much of my life practicing Existential Overfishing—casting my line ever deeper into the waters of ultimate meaning while ignoring perfectly good fish swimming near the surface.

    I had contemplated religion, mortality, consciousness, transcendence, identity, purpose, and the possibility of God. I had read books by people who had spent their entire lives thinking about these subjects, followed them into increasingly deep philosophical waters, and occasionally surfaced gasping for air with another seven books I apparently needed to read.

    Meanwhile, two retired men in safari hats walked past me and accidentally delivered the executive summary.

    Move your body.

    Find someone you like.

    Talk.

    Keep doing it.

    Could it really be that simple?

    Is common sense enough?

    Could common sense sometimes be superior to profound religious contemplation?

    Had I submerged myself beneath an ocean of fascinating but largely irrelevant abstractions?

    Had I mistaken intellectual complexity for spiritual maturity?

    Had I spent years searching for the meaning of life while failing to notice some of its operating instructions?

    Had I, after all these years, simply lost the plot?

    The questions left me strangely melancholy because the Walking Companion Principle contained an obvious problem.

    When I retired, who would walk beside me?

    Employment had supplied more social infrastructure than I had realized. For forty years, people simply appeared. Students entered classrooms. Colleagues materialized in hallways. Someone stopped outside my office. Conversations occurred because hundreds of people had been deposited into the same institution at approximately the same time.

    Retirement would dismantle much of that machinery.

    Free time would increase precisely as automatic human contact decreased.

    I could walk alone, of course. I could listen to podcasts. I could listen to audiobooks. I could march five miles while absorbing fascinating information about theology, politics, artificial intelligence, crime, nutrition, or the collapse of Western civilization.

    But headphones are not companions.

    A podcast host does not notice when you fail to show up.

    An audiobook does not laugh at your joke.

    The men disappearing down the Carlsbad sidewalk possessed something I suddenly wanted very badly: another person who expected them to be there.

    I didn’t know whether I would find such a companion in retirement. I didn’t know what could substitute for one if I couldn’t. I didn’t know whether my melancholy was justified or merely another example of my ability to turn an innocent morning into an existential emergency.

    But I had learned something.

    Perhaps retirement would not require some magnificent new philosophy capable of replacing forty years of professional identity. Perhaps the essential architecture would be embarrassingly ordinary: decent food, regular movement, human companionship, curiosity, and enough discipline to show up again tomorrow.

    I stood outside the record store watching the two men disappear into the distance.

    I still didn’t know what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

    But I knew exactly where I wanted to eat breakfast the next morning.

  • The Lemon Pesto Principle of Retirement

    The Lemon Pesto Principle of Retirement

    At eight o’clock on Friday morning, I was moving through Trader Joe’s at my customary speed, which is somewhere between brisk shopping and evacuation. I hurled groceries into my cart with the urgency of a man who had been informed that at precisely 8:30 he would turn into a giant pumpkin.

    This is not because I dislike Trader Joe’s. I love Trader Joe’s. But at sixty-four, I have developed an almost religious scrupulosity about time. Friday morning has a sequence. Shop. Drive home. Unload groceries. Put everything away. Work out. Shower. Eat lunch. Nap. Then begin the afternoon shift of academic work and personal creative projects. Disturb the sequence and the entire day threatens to collapse like a poorly stacked Jenga tower.

    So there I was, scrutinizing a gigantic Japanese sweet potato, when I encountered a former colleague.

    He had taught Spanish and Italian at the college and had been retired for years. Now in his eighties, he is a petite man who nevertheless carries himself with tremendous dignity: chest out, posture erect, eyes bright and alert. He looked less like someone retreating from life than someone who had simply been reassigned to another department.

    He smiled.

    I faced a decision.

    Ordinarily, I might have offered a friendly greeting and continued moving. Conversation is dangerous when you are operating under a timetable. One innocent “How have you been?” can metastasize into twelve minutes, and twelve minutes at Trader Joe’s means the workout gets pushed back, which pushes lunch back, which pushes the nap back, which eventually threatens civilization.

    But this man deserved better than a drive-by salutation.

    So I stopped.

    We talked for several minutes. Nothing profound. Retirement. Teaching. Life. The ordinary conversational currency exchanged by two former colleagues standing beside produce while other shoppers maneuver carts around them.

    Then we parted.

    Ten minutes later, I encountered him again in the pasta-sauce aisle.

    He was holding a small jar of lemon pesto.

    “You have to try this,” he said.

    I looked at the jar.

    Lemon pesto was not on the schedule.

    Nevertheless, politeness prevailed. I took it, thanked him, placed it in my cart, and continued my race against the pumpkin.

    By lunchtime I had forgotten about it. Then, while assembling my usual salad—arugula, tuna, garbanzo beans, diced Japanese sweet potato—I noticed the jar. I opened it and added two teaspoons.

    I took a bite.

    Good Lord.

    The salad was magnificent.

    The lemon cut through the tuna. The pesto coated the arugula. The sweetness of the Japanese potato played against the acidity and herbs. Ingredients I had eaten dozens of times suddenly seemed to have hired a new conductor. I sat there staring at my bowl with the astonishment of a chemist who had accidentally discovered penicillin.

    It was easily one of the best salads I had ever made.

    And I owed it to the retired foreign-language professor I had almost been too busy to talk to.

    This is The Lemon Pesto Principle of Retirement: the older and more regimented your life becomes, the more important it is to leave small openings through which the unexpected can enter.

    The principle becomes especially important as retirement approaches. Retirement frightens me partly because I can imagine life contracting. Fewer colleagues. Fewer students. Fewer accidental conversations. Fewer reasons to encounter people outside the familiar perimeter of family and friends. You can respond to this contraction by becoming increasingly efficient, arranging your days into immaculate little compartments—exercise here, lunch there, nap precisely there—until you have constructed a beautifully organized life in which absolutely nothing unexpected can happen.

    This is the dark side of time management. You become so skilled at protecting your time that eventually you protect yourself from life.

    The antidote does not require moving to Tuscany, learning Mandarin, or taking up hang gliding at eighty-two. Novelty can arrive in humiliatingly modest packages. Talk to someone you ordinarily would have hurried past. Listen when he recommends something. Put an unfamiliar jar in your shopping cart. Allow two teaspoons of something new to contaminate the immaculate machinery of your routine.

    At sixty-four, approaching retirement, I am understandably preoccupied with what I am about to lose: professional identity, colleagues, income, structure, relevance, the daily friction of being required somewhere. But perhaps one defense against that contraction is remarkably simple. Keep the aperture open. Keep listening. Keep accepting small invitations into experiences you did not schedule.

    My retired colleague had been out of the classroom for years, but that morning at Trader Joe’s he taught me something anyway.

    I had interrupted my schedule for a few minutes.

    The return on the investment was enormous.

    Two teaspoons of lemon pesto.

    And evidence that the world was not finished surprising me.

  • Congratulations on Your Retirement: Your Organs Have Been Notified

    Congratulations on Your Retirement: Your Organs Have Been Notified

    You should never have initiated your retirement.

    Unfortunately, this revelation has arrived several months too late.

    Dozens of colleagues already know. Administrators know. People in offices you have never visited know. Your dean has not yet made the official announcement, but that is merely a ceremonial delay. He is waiting for you to complete the college’s online retirement form, which you plan to submit after your CalSTRS exit interview next month. The machinery is already humming. Your name is moving through calendars, spreadsheets, succession plans, and whispered hallway conversations.

    Technically, you could reverse course.

    Psychologically, you would rather fake your own death.

    Imagine announcing to everyone who has congratulated you, hugged you, envied you, or quietly begun calculating how much larger their office might become that you have reconsidered. “Good news, everyone. I’m staying.” You would have the social grace of a man who delivers an emotional farewell speech at his retirement banquet, receives a gold watch, walks toward the exit, pauses at the door, and says, “Actually, I’ll see you Monday.”

    No.

    The humiliation alone guarantees forward motion.

    Still, let us acknowledge the obvious: perhaps you should never have retired in the first place. Perhaps nobody should retire. If you are healthy enough to work, keep working. Work gives you money, structure, social contact, identity, deadlines, relevance, and a reason to shower before noon. Retirement gives you Tuesday.

    Let us first look at your cash flow.

    At first, your retirement income may be only twenty percent lower than your working income. Twenty percent sounds manageable until you remember that restaurants have discovered they can charge eighteen dollars for a sandwich. A decent takeout dinner for a family of four now crosses the hundred-dollar line with the casual confidence of a hedge-fund manager ordering lunch. Then inflation begins nibbling around the edges of your fixed income. The twenty-percent gap becomes thirty. Perhaps forty. Suddenly the golden years are less about cruises through the Mediterranean and more about standing in the kitchen asking whether anyone really needs guacamole.

    But the financial loss may not be the most frightening part.

    The real danger is psychological.

    The mind and body are conspirators.

    Consider the bladder. You can be driving home for forty-five minutes with only mild discomfort. Your body remains disciplined. Stoic. Heroic. Then you turn onto your own street.

    Disaster.

    The house comes into view and your bladder declares a national emergency. Thirty seconds earlier you were a functioning adult. Now you are fumbling with the garage-door opener like a bomb technician whose hands have stopped obeying him.

    The bathroom did not create the need.

    Its proximity gave the body permission to stop pretending.

    Welcome to the Bathroom-Proximity Principle of Retirement: the theory that employment functions like a distant rest stop. As long as work remains ahead of you, your body receives the message that the trip is still underway. There are classes to teach, papers to grade, meetings to attend, colleagues to annoy, students to encourage, problems to solve. The machinery must remain operational.

    Then you retire.

    The metaphysical bathroom appears on the horizon.

    Your subconscious surveys the situation and says, “Excellent. We’ve arrived.”

    Different parts of your body begin to shut down.

    The knees file for disability. The lower back reduces operating hours. The prostate announces an infrastructure project. Your memory starts placing ordinary nouns in long-term storage. You sit in your recliner at ten-thirty in the morning watching a documentary about container ships and wonder whether your body has interpreted retirement not as freedom but as permission to begin dismantling the facility.

    Is any of this medically sound?

    Almost certainly not.

    That is beside the point.

    You are experiencing retirement buyer’s remorse, and buyer’s remorse is not known for peer review.

    Add to this the possible loss of relevance. For decades, people needed you somewhere. Students waited for your class. Colleagues emailed you. Administrators summoned you to meetings you did not want to attend. Your irritation was proof of your importance. Retirement threatens to remove not only the irritation but also the flattering assumption beneath it: somebody expects you to show up.

    So if you have not yet retired, interrogate the decision ruthlessly. Examine the money. Examine your health. Examine your tolerance for unstructured time. Ask whether you possess interests powerful enough to replace the gravitational pull of work.

    And if, after all that, you still decide to retire, understand what you are doing.

    You are not merely leaving a job.

    You are driving home.

    The bathroom is getting closer.

  • There Was No Final Visit

    There Was No Final Visit

    Last night I dreamed I was driving slowly down a long, sloping road on my way to an important appointment at a mysterious nightclub. I knew almost nothing about the place except that outside its entrance sat a haunted statue of an angry man, and that somehow I was required to present myself before him.

    As I descended the hill, another car shot past me at a reckless speed. I watched it accelerate and knew immediately what was going to happen. The driver lost control. The car veered off course and began flipping violently, metal striking pavement, the vehicle tumbling again and again before finally coming to rest in a mangled heap.

    I stopped and ran toward the wreckage.

    The injured man had recently been released from prison. Somehow I knew this without being told. He had already endured brutality, hunger, and dehydration during his confinement, and now the crash had added another layer of suffering. He was alive but in unbearable pain. I lifted him onto my shoulder and carried him toward a nearby house, although I had no idea who lived there or why I believed help could be found inside.

    Once through the door, instinct told me to take him into the living room.

    Above the fireplace was a large screen.

    It suddenly came alive.

    An old woman appeared, perhaps in her seventies. She had the unmistakable presence of a witch—not the theatrical kind with a pointed hat and broomstick, but something older and more disturbing, a woman whose authority seemed to precede explanation. She instructed me to bring the injured man closer.

    Then the boundary between the screen and the room dissolved.

    The witch somehow acquired a physical body behind the screen. She took the broken man to her breast and began nursing him. The scene was grotesque and maternal at once: an elderly supernatural woman feeding a battered former prisoner as if he were an enormous newborn. Yet I understood that he desperately needed what she was giving him. After prison, thirst, starvation, violence, and the crash, he was finally receiving nourishment.

    Satisfied that I had delivered him to someone capable of saving him, I left.

    My appointment remained.

    I continued down the road until I reached the nightclub. Outside, sitting on a bench like a malevolent sentry, was the statue of the angry man.

    He was waiting for me.

    The statue demanded something vital from inside my soul. Whatever he required could somehow be translated into a numerical code. Push-buttons were embedded in his chest, and I entered the sequence carefully, knowing that a mistake would provoke some unspeakable violence.

    The code worked.

    I was spared.

    Around me were other visitors who had apparently completed the same ritual. They too had surrendered whatever the statue required, entered their codes, and earned permission to proceed into the club. We were the survivors of an initiation none of us had chosen.

    But I felt no relief.

    Slowly, a far more terrible realization came over me. This was not my first visit. I had been here hundreds of times before. I had driven down this road, approached this nightclub, stood before this furious stone man, surrendered some essential fragment of myself, and punched the code into his chest over and over again.

    And I would have to keep doing it.

    There was no final visit. No graduation. No debt that could eventually be paid. I had mistaken repetition for progress. The ritual was permanent.

    I was condemned.

    My only consolation was the injured man. Whatever else this nightmare demanded of me, I had stopped on the road and helped another human being. I had carried him when he could no longer carry himself. Perhaps that small act of mercy meant something in a world governed by witches, haunted statues, secret codes, and compulsory rituals.

    Then another thought occurred to me.

    I had left the man with the witch.

    She had healed him. She had fed him. She had restored what prison and violence had taken away.

    But I had no idea what she intended to do with him once he was strong again.

  • The Possession Completion Delusion

    The Possession Completion Delusion

    I connect with certain material objects on a level that is so deep that I find the gravitational pull both disturbing and fascinating. For example, I have a great watch collection, but when I see the spy photos of the supposedly up-and-coming G-Shock Frogman GWF-D1000BC-1JF, I say to myself that I must positively own this watch. This watch is me. This watch completes me, and a barrage of other similar nonsense. This gravitational pull is not limited to watches. A student brought her brand new shiny black Lenovo Legion 5 with an Ultra 7 processor to class. It was built like a tank. I was in love with it. I don’t need a laptop, but I felt incomplete without it. This laptop is more than a laptop. It is an extension of me. My cerebral cortex knows my thoughts are completely absurd. My reptilian brain stem, on the other hand, has other ideas. Depending on which side of my brain wins the arm wrestling match, my pocketbook may or may not suffer. 

    One thing is clear. I suffer from The Possession Completion Delusion: the irrational conviction that a particular object will resolve some vague incompleteness in the self. You don’t merely want the Frogman; you recognize yourself in it. The Legion isn’t simply a laptop with specifications grotesquely beyond your needs; it feels like the physical manifestation of the person you imagine yourself to be. The cerebral cortex understands that no consumer product can complete a human being. The reptilian brain replies, “Fine. But have you seen the OLED?”

  • The El Capitan Principle of Retirement

    The El Capitan Principle of Retirement

    Think of retirement as a solo climb up El Capitan. At first, the whole enterprise feels exhilarating. You have studied the route, checked your finances, calculated your pension, announced your plans, and begun climbing toward that glorious summit called Freedom. The office is shrinking beneath you. Meetings are disappearing into the mist. Somewhere far below, people are discussing Student Learning Outcomes without you.

    Then, halfway up the granite wall, a gust of doubt hits you.

    What the hell are you doing here?

    You cling to the rock and suddenly reconsider the entire project. Retirement was a terrible idea. You were meant to work forever. Work gives you structure, identity, colleagues, purpose, deadlines, and a reason to put on pants before noon. Perhaps employment is the machinery keeping you alive. Remove it and the gears stop turning. Six months after retirement, they will find you sitting in a recliner at eleven in the morning watching a documentary about airport baggage systems while eating low-fat cottage cheese directly from the container.

    Turn around.

    Save yourself.

    Go back to work.

    Then you make the mistake of looking down.

    The people below are specks. You have already told everyone you’re retiring. You have calculated your revenue streams. You have contacted CalSTRS and CalPERS. You have enrolled in Medicare Part A. You have begun arranging your health insurance. You have started describing ordinary events as “my last fall semester,” “my last opening-day meeting,” and “my last year of grading freshman essays.” You have spent so much time filling out retirement paperwork that returning to work would require filling out paperwork to recover from the paperwork you completed in order to stop working.

    You realize that descending may now be more dangerous than continuing upward.

    Call this the El Capitan Principle: the point in retirement when continuing toward the summit terrifies you, but you have climbed too far to descend safely.

    This is not courage. Courage would imply that you have conquered your fear. You haven’t conquered anything. You are hanging from a granite wall wondering whether your career was actually a life-support system and whether removing it will cause your internal organs to shut down in alphabetical order.

    But the choice has changed.

    Earlier, you were deciding whether to retire. Now you are retiring.

    So you tighten your grip, stop looking down, and continue climbing.

    The summit awaits.