Cinemorphosis

Category: culture

  • I’m Going to Die, Therefore I Need 64GB of RAM

    I’m Going to Die, Therefore I Need 64GB of RAM

     Retirement presents an indignity nobody adequately warns you about: obscurity.

    For forty years, you had a schedule. People expected you somewhere. Students waited for you. Colleagues knew your name. Your calendar was crowded with obligations you routinely complained about but which nevertheless performed the useful service of confirming your existence. Then you retire, and Tuesday morning opens before you like an abandoned airport runway.

    Nobody needs you at nine.

    Nobody needs you at eleven.

    By two in the afternoon, you have completed your workout, eaten lunch, taken a restorative nap, and begun examining your navel with the concentration of an archaeologist studying the Dead Sea Scrolls.

    Worse, your professional title has vanished. You are no longer Professor. You are Jeff, some guy standing in Costco comparing two enormous packages of toilet paper. The institution that once supplied your identity has withdrawn its sponsorship. Your lower lip begins to tremble. You feel the existential weight of your own irrelevance.

    And then you remember something.

    You have money.

    More money, in fact, than you expected to have. For decades, you saved because responsible adults save. You contributed to retirement accounts, paid down debt, avoided idiotic purchases, and watched the numbers accumulate. Now you have arrived at the future you were saving for and discovered an unforeseen psychological complication.

    You are going to die.

    Suddenly, the swollen savings account looks less like prudence and more like inventory left in a warehouse scheduled for demolition.

    “It’s my money!” you shout at nobody in particular. “By God, I’m going to enjoy it before they carry me out of here!”

    This is not an ideal frame of mind in which to open a web browser.

    Within minutes, you are examining a state-of-the-art Lenovo ThinkPad. Sixty-four gigabytes of RAM. Gorgeous keyboard. Magnificent processor. Enough computational power to edit a feature film while simultaneously modeling climate change. You are not a content creator. You write essays in Google Docs. Your existing computer performs this task without detectable distress.

    No matter.

    You deserve the ThinkPad.

    Then comes the G-Shock Frogman, the Master of G watch engineered for professional divers. Sapphire crystal. Multiband 6. Depth sensor. Dive functions. A magnificent piece of Japanese overengineering designed to accompany a man into hostile underwater environments.

    You spend most afternoons on a couch reinforced with a four-inch camping mattress.

    Still, one never knows when deep-sea saturation diving might break out in Torrance.

    Then you begin pricing a loaded Honda Accord Hybrid. Heated seats. Premium audio. Wireless Apple CarPlay. Excellent fuel economy. You drive perhaps two thousand miles a year, which means the gasoline savings may become financially significant sometime during the reign of your great-grandchildren.

    You want it anyway.

    You have succumbed to the Mortality-Spending Reflex: the late-life compulsion to medicate retirement’s loss of identity, structure, and professional importance through increasingly premium consumer goods. Mortality supplies the urgency. Consumerism supplies the anesthetic.

    For forty years, the question governing an unnecessary purchase was simple: Can I afford this?

    Retirement introduces a much more dangerous question: What exactly am I saving the money for?

    This is where perfectly reasonable financial logic begins acquiring the feverish quality of a man shopping during an evacuation. You cannot take the money with you. True. You worked hard for it. True. You should enjoy some of it while you’re healthy. Absolutely true.

    Therefore you need a $1,300 dive watch capable of measuring water depth while you watch true-crime documentaries.

    The syllogism has deteriorated somewhere.

    The Mortality-Spending Reflex is particularly dangerous because it disguises itself as wisdom. It tells you that you have finally transcended your neurotic attachment to money. You are embracing life! Seizing the day! Refusing to die with a fat bank account!

    Yet Nietzsche’s Last Man is standing nearby with a shopping cart.

    He no longer has students, deadlines, professional status, or anywhere in particular to be Monday morning. But he can have 32 gigabytes of RAM, sapphire crystal, Multiband 6, heated seats, and wireless Apple CarPlay. Each purchase delivers a small electrical jolt of novelty, followed by acclimation, followed by the search for the next premium experience.

    Mortality has ceased being a philosophical problem.

    It has become a purchasing justification.

    And somewhere on the internet, another browser tab is already open.

  • Congratulations, Nobody Cares What You Used to Do

    Congratulations, Nobody Cares What You Used to Do

    Writing to Steve Lopez about the psychological hazards of retirement, fellow writer Jim Ricci identifies a loss that has nothing to do with money. Retirement doesn’t merely take away the paycheck, the office, and the deadlines. It takes away the intoxicating little introduction that once told strangers exactly how impressed they were supposed to be.

    Ricci had been a writer for a major newspaper. At a party, a restaurant, or some social gathering, he could meet a stranger and casually reveal what he did for a living. Immediately, the temperature changed. A newspaper writer! Interesting. What do you cover? Have I read your work? Tell me more. The profession arrived several seconds before the man himself, carrying a tray of prestige and handing out complimentary glasses.

    A successful career does this for you. “I’m a surgeon.” “I’m a professor.” “I’m an attorney.” “I’m a newspaper columnist.” The title performs advance work. Before you have demonstrated intelligence, wit, charm, judgment, or even basic conversational competence, your occupation has supplied evidence that you are somebody. You arrive pre-certified.

    This is one of the quieter narcotics of professional life: easy status.

    After forty years, you may barely notice you’re taking the drug. The dosage arrives automatically. Students call you Professor. Colleagues seek your opinion. Strangers hear what you do and make flattering assumptions. Your institution provides a recognizable brand, and you get to walk around inside its reflected glow while attributing most of the luminosity to yourself.

    Then you retire.

    “What do you do?”

    “I’m retired.”

    Ah.

    There is no follow-up question guaranteed.

    You have entered Credential Withdrawal Syndrome: the psychological discomfort that occurs when retirement removes the professional title that once supplied dependable doses of recognition, authority, curiosity, and status.

    The withdrawal can be brutal because the drug was so easy to obtain. You didn’t have to perform for it every morning. You merely had to remain employed. Your title traveled everywhere with you like a small publicist whispering into people’s ears: This man has accomplished things. Pay attention.

    Retirement fires the publicist.

    Now you’re on your own.

    You meet someone and no institution walks into the room ahead of you. No impressive title supplies instant cachet. You have to establish yourself through the raw materials of personality, intelligence, humor, curiosity, generosity, and whatever conversational powers remain after decades of professional life.

    This arrangement would be challenging enough at forty.

    At sixty-five, it feels like particularly cruel casting.

    You are being asked to perform without your professional costume at precisely the age when some of your equipment is beginning to show wear. Your memory may occasionally refuse to produce a noun. Your best anecdote may take three minutes longer than necessary because you have wandered into an explanatory cul-de-sac involving somebody named Bob. Meanwhile, the thirty-eight-year-old across the table has a fascinating career, excellent hair, and a future containing several decades more than yours.

    You may begin longing for the old introduction.

    This helps explain why some people remain at work long after the work itself has stopped nourishing them. They say they love the job. Perhaps they do. They say the institution needs them. Possibly. They say they still have something to contribute. Almost certainly.

    But Credential Withdrawal Syndrome suggests another possibility.

    They like being somebody.

    There is no shame in admitting this. Status feels good. Recognition feels good. Being sought after feels good. After spending decades acquiring professional authority, surrendering it can feel less like liberation than voluntary demotion.

    The danger comes when we confuse our dependence on status with devotion to work.

    A seventy-year-old professor may tell himself that students desperately need his wisdom when what he desperately needs is to remain Professor. The executive cannot leave because the company still needs his leadership. The physician cannot stop practicing because medicine is his calling. The writer cannot put down the column because writing is who he is.

    Perhaps.

    Or perhaps nobody wants to surrender the little electrical charge that comes when a stranger asks, “What do you do?” and the answer still has pizzazz.

    Retirement eventually requires detoxification.

    The goal is not to replace one prestige dispenser with another. You don’t retire from being Professor and immediately begin constructing a second résumé designed to prove that Retired Professor remains a Force to Be Reckoned With. That is merely Credential Withdrawal Syndrome wearing resort casual.

    You have to tolerate becoming less impressive.

    That may be one of retirement’s more difficult forms of maturity: doing things because they are worth doing even when nobody applauds. Read without becoming an expert. Write without needing publication. Exercise without posting the workout. Help somebody who cannot advance your reputation. Spend time with your family. Travel. Walk. Learn. Make things. Become interested rather than interesting.

    Eventually, perhaps, the professional costume can remain hanging in the closet without your needing to put it back on.

    For decades, the title introduced you.

    Now you have to introduce yourself.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.