Cinemorphosis

Category: Health and Fitness

  • My Master Control Center Has No Control

    My Master Control Center Has No Control

    I love sitting inside a premium automobile because the dashboard permits me, briefly, to believe I have been entrusted with something more consequential than driving to Costco.

    The displays glow. The gauges awaken. Climate control maintains the cabin at precisely seventy-one degrees. Cameras watch my blind spots. Radar measures the distance between me and surrounding vehicles. A satellite knows where I am even when I don’t. The center display resembles something Boeing might install in a modest interplanetary spacecraft.

    I settle into the driver’s seat and survey my domain.

    This is my Master Control Center.

    For a few glorious moments, I am Captain Kirk.

    Then the light turns green.

    The woman in front of me doesn’t move because she is staring at her phone, presumably receiving information of greater importance than the traffic signal directly above her windshield. I wait. She continues texting. The man behind me cannot see her, so he concludes that I am the idiot and begins pounding his horn.

    Now I am trapped between two strangers whose behavior I cannot control: one oblivious, the other enraged.

    My Master Control Center has become a $40,000 waiting room.

    So much for command.

    The same fantasy takes hold when I sit at my computer. My silver Mac mini is an exquisite little machine, a futuristic square with rounded corners smaller than a paperback. It feeds two twenty-seven-inch 4K monitors. In front of them sits my six-pound aluminum mechanical keyboard, an instrument substantial enough to survive a direct artillery strike.

    I lower myself into the chair.

    Again, the feeling arrives.

    Master Control Center.

    Two enormous screens await my instructions. Chrome launches instantly. Documents synchronize across the cloud. I can access libraries, maps, financial accounts, newspapers, artificial intelligence, satellite photographs, and most of the accumulated knowledge of civilization without leaving my chair.

    Then I decide to order a burrito from Chipotle.

    The website wants me to create an account.

    I enter a password.

    Rejected.

    Apparently, ordering carnitas now requires the cryptographic sophistication of a NATO intelligence officer. The password must contain at least twelve characters, one capital letter, one lowercase letter, three numbers, an obscure punctuation mark, the blood type of my maternal grandfather, and a hieroglyph unavailable on my keyboard. It cannot resemble any password I have used since 1987, contain an actual word, or be remembered by the human brain.

    I try again.

    Rejected.

    I am sitting behind two 4K monitors with enough computing power to help design a suspension bridge, and I cannot obtain guacamole.

    By now I’ve lost my appetite.

    So much for control.

    This recurring humiliation points to something I call the Master Control Delusion: the belief that sufficiently sophisticated equipment, information, planning, and preparation can place us at the controls of our lives.

    Modern life encourages this fantasy because it gives us extraordinary control over trivial things. I can regulate the temperature inside my automobile to a single degree. I can synchronize a wristwatch to an atomic clock in Colorado. I can watch my retirement account fluctuate by the dollar. I can determine how many calories I burned on an exercise bike, how many grams of protein I consumed at lunch, and exactly how many minutes it will take me to drive to Costco.

    All these measurements create the intoxicating sensation that someone is in charge.

    Me.

    Retirement may be the Master Control Delusion’s final examination.

    You know retirement is coming, so you prepare. You fill out forms for months. You email HR so many times that the benefits coordinator becomes one of the most enduring relationships in adult life. You calculate pension income and net cash flow. You investigate Medicare. You take your omega-3s and magnesium. You exercise. You adhere to something vaguely resembling a Mediterranean diet. You consult financial advisers. You read books.

    Eventually, you begin to feel that you have gotten your ducks in a row.

    There they are.

    The ducks.

    Perfectly aligned.

    Steve Lopez does his version of this in Independence Day. Trying to understand retirement before surrendering himself to it, he consults Nancy Schlossberg, the psychologist and author of Retire Smart, Retire Happy. If retirement has a Sherpa, Schlossberg qualifies. She has spent decades studying how people negotiate transitions, and she identifies several kinds of retirees.

    Lopez recognizes himself as a Continuer. He doesn’t intend to stop using the abilities he spent a lifetime developing. He will carry his skills into retirement, remain engaged, and find new ways to be useful.

    Excellent.

    Another switch illuminated on the Master Control Center.

    Lopez also establishes a more personal priority. Whatever else happens after retirement, he wants to remain close to his grown children.

    This seems eminently reasonable.

    Schlossberg does not reassure him.

    She pauses.

    Then she tells him, in effect, that even the plans occupying the top shelf of our lives remain vulnerable to circumstances we cannot anticipate. Retirement changes routines, relationships, assumptions, identities. Children move. Spouses change. Friends disappear. Bodies malfunction. People die. Other people unexpectedly enter our lives.

    Schlossberg knows this not merely because she has studied retirement but because she has survived it.

    She lost her husband. She could not have predicted that afterward she would develop a close relationship with another man. Then, five years later, that man died too. At ninety-one, after a lifetime studying human transitions, Schlossberg still cannot tell you what will happen next.

    And during her conversation with Lopez, her phone rings.

    It’s her latest boyfriend.

    I love this detail.

    The woman who has devoted her professional life to mapping transitions is herself living a life that refuses to stay on the map.

    That is the Master Control Delusion demolished in a single telephone call.

    The lesson isn’t that planning is foolish. Quite the opposite. Fill out the forms. Calculate the pension. Exercise. Eat the salmon. Maintain relationships. Decide where you want to live. Know what matters to you.

    Build the finest Master Control Center you can.

    Just don’t confuse the dashboard with the universe.

    Retirement exposes that confusion because aging steadily enlarges the territory outside our command. You can manage risk but not abolish it. You can strengthen your body but not negotiate a permanent treaty with biology. You can love your children without determining where they will live. You can construct a meaningful life without controlling who remains in it.

    This is difficult for people like me because preparation feels so much like control.

    Give me a spreadsheet, two 4K monitors, a financial projection, a Mediterranean diet, and an ergonomically magnificent keyboard, and within fifteen minutes I begin to believe I have subdued contingency itself.

    Then somebody dies.

    Somebody falls in love.

    Somebody moves away.

    Somebody calls.

    Or the woman in front of me doesn’t notice that the light has turned green.

    The dashboard remains magnificent.

    The future remains unimpressed.

  • You Ate the Broccoli. There Is No Cheesecake

    You Ate the Broccoli. There Is No Cheesecake

    As Steve Lopez explores the psychological terrain of retirement in Independence Day, he consults psychologist Nancy Schlossberg, who has identified six broad species of retiree. Reading through them feels a little like examining a field guide to aging mammals. You recognize several immediately. Others make you hope natural selection intervenes before you become one.

    The Continuer takes the skills accumulated over a career and redeploys them after retirement. Why dismantle a perfectly good machine? The teacher tutors, mentors, writes, or volunteers. The accountant helps a nonprofit keep its books. The journalist continues writing without having an editor texting him at 6:15 in the morning. The Continuer changes the employment arrangement without performing an unnecessary personality transplant.

    The Easy Glider has no master plan and regards your insistence upon having one as evidence that you require medication. He wakes up, drinks coffee, looks outside, and sees what happens. Perhaps he gardens. Perhaps he meets someone for lunch. Perhaps he spends forty minutes watching a hummingbird. His calendar contains vast white spaces that do not frighten him. To someone who has spent forty years organizing life around semesters, deadlines, meetings, workouts, and carefully calibrated lunch times, the Easy Glider appears to possess either profound spiritual wisdom or frontal-lobe damage.

    The Adventurer goes in the opposite direction. Retirement becomes an opportunity to blow up the laboratory. New country. New hobby. New identity. New diet. I know a former vegan who became a carnivore and hunter and now makes her own liverwurst from venison. Evidently retirement can involve discovering that the person who once regarded a chicken breast as an ethical crisis now owns sausage-making equipment.

    The Searcher approaches retirement as an existential emergency. He wants meaning. Purpose. Transcendence. He has questions about mortality, identity, God, consciousness, and what exactly he has been doing for the previous sixty-five years. Somewhere nearby rests a battered copy of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning with seventeen passages underlined. The Searcher doesn’t merely take a walk. He takes a walk while contemplating Being.

    The Involved Spectator keeps one foot in the professional world without allowing the professional world to climb back onto his chest. He attends events, advises former colleagues, mentors younger people, perhaps takes on occasional projects. He remains connected to the game but no longer has to shower afterward.

    Then there is the Retreater.

    The Retreater confronts unlimited freedom and discovers that he has absolutely no idea what to do with it. Work disappears, structure collapses, social contact diminishes, and instead of constructing a new life, he withdraws. The house becomes his habitat. The recliner develops gravitational force. Going to Costco qualifies as an expedition. Netflix asks whether he is still watching, and he considers the question unnecessarily judgmental.

    What catches Lopez’s attention, however, is not merely Schlossberg’s taxonomy. It is Schlossberg herself. She remains useful. Her decades of research have become a roadmap for other people trying to negotiate one of life’s most disorienting transitions. Whatever category describes her retirement, she has not confused freedom from employment with freedom from contribution.

    That distinction points toward something larger. Arnold Schwarzenegger states it with admirable bluntness in the title of his book Be Useful. Human beings appear to do better when somebody or something needs them. Teaching, mentoring, writing, caring, building, volunteering, creating, helping—these activities direct the self outward. A life organized exclusively around personal gratification eventually becomes a very small life, no matter how comfortable the furniture.

    Yet retirement culture frequently encourages precisely the opposite fantasy.

    Call it the Retirement Dessert Fallacy.

    The Retirement Dessert Fallacy begins with one of our culture’s most persistent stories about work. Adulthood is broccoli.

    For thirty or forty years, you sit at life’s dinner table grimly chewing the cruciferous vegetable of employment. You wake to alarms. You commute. You answer emails. You attend meetings. You endure performance evaluations. You nod solemnly while someone explains a new strategic initiative. You keep eating the broccoli because responsible adults understand that dessert must be earned.

    And somewhere in the distance waits retirement.

    Cheesecake.

    Not ordinary cheesecake. Magical cheesecake.

    At sixty-five, the universe delivers an enormous slice to your doorstep. You take a bite and discover that the missing portion immediately regenerates. You eat another. It regenerates again. For the remainder of your earthly existence, your only obligation is consumption.

    Travel.

    Golf.

    Restaurants.

    Television.

    Shopping.

    Cruises.

    A premium mattress.

    A premium automobile.

    A premium experience.

    You have eaten your broccoli. Now you are entitled to infinite cheesecake.

    The problem is that there is no cheesecake.

    More precisely, pleasure exists, and retirement should contain plenty of it. Travel somewhere beautiful. Eat something magnificent. Sleep late occasionally. Sit beside a swimming pool and do absolutely nothing. After forty years of employment, nobody needs to defend the moral legitimacy of an afternoon nap.

    The fallacy lies in imagining that gratification can provide the architecture of a life.

    It can’t.

    Pleasure works beautifully as pleasure. Ask it to provide identity, purpose, connection, usefulness, and meaning, and eventually the cheesecake begins tasting like paste. What initially feels like liberation can curdle into spiritual entropy: fewer obligations, fewer challenges, fewer people depending upon you, fewer reasons to leave the house, until freedom has quietly become disengagement.

    The original metaphor was wrong anyway.

    Work was never simply broccoli.

    Work contained aggravation, bureaucracy, exhaustion, ridiculous meetings, difficult personalities, and enough administrative nonsense to make a grown man contemplate fleeing into the mountains. But work also provided friendship, competence, challenge, contribution, recognition, structure, accomplishment, and the satisfaction of occasionally being useful to another human being.

    That wasn’t broccoli.

    That was part of the meal.

    The Retirement Dessert Fallacy is therefore built upon a catastrophic piece of nutritional symbolism. We have mistaken responsibility for deprivation and consumption for reward. A consumer culture happily reinforces the mistake because a seventy-year-old convinced that happiness awaits in the next purchase is an excellent customer.

    Buy the cruise.

    Buy the watch.

    Buy the laptop.

    Buy the luxury SUV to transport yourself three miles to buy more things.

    Surely the next premium experience will produce the feeling you’ve been waiting for.

    It won’t.

    Schlossberg’s six retirees may follow radically different routes, but the healthier roads seem to share something fundamental: movement outward. Remain curious. Remain connected. Remain useful. Give somebody a reason to notice whether you showed up.

    Retirement should certainly contain dessert.

    But if dessert becomes the entire meal, eventually you aren’t retired.

    You’re just sitting at the table getting sick.

  • Father Time Would Like to See Your Receipts

    Father Time Would Like to See Your Receipts

    Retirement changes your relationship with time because retirement changes your proximity to death.

    For most of your life, mortality resembles a dark castle somewhere beyond the horizon. You know it exists. You have seen illustrations. You have read stories about people who unfortunately arrived there. But the castle remains pleasantly obscured behind enormous banks of cumulus clouds, and you have been granted the psychological luxury of assuming that several mountain ranges, a river, and perhaps a small European principality stand between you and its front gate.

    You have time.

    At thirty-five, this belief requires almost no effort. At forty-five, you may occasionally notice one of the turrets poking through the clouds, particularly when a parent becomes ill or an old friend dies. Then work intervenes. There are classes to teach, children to raise, bills to pay, meetings to attend, groceries to buy. The clouds roll back in.

    Then you retire.

    Or, more precisely, you press Submit on the retirement application.

    The clouds vanish.

    There is the castle.

    Good God.

    It’s much closer than advertised.

    This is the Castle-Proximity Principle: the closer you move toward the visible end of life, the harder it becomes to experience time as an inexhaustible resource. The castle has not suddenly moved toward you. You have simply reached the point in the journey where atmospheric conditions no longer conceal its location.

    Retirement is particularly effective at clearing the weather because work has served for decades as a kind of chronological camouflage. As long as another semester waits in the future, you remain inside the machinery of ordinary adult life. There will be another fall schedule, another spring semester, another opening-day meeting, another batch of freshman essays, another argument about Student Learning Outcomes. The repetition itself creates the illusion of permanence.

    Then you announce your final semester.

    Suddenly every event acquires the word last.

    Last fall semester.

    Last opening-day meeting.

    Last final exam.

    Last student who submits six pages of AI-generated oatmeal and looks wounded when you ask whether he participated in its manufacture.

    The castle emerges from the mist.

    And standing at the entrance is someone you recognize from childhood illustrations.

    Father Time.

    Unfortunately, he isn’t carrying a birthday cake.

    He is holding a ledger.

    This is the Kronos Audit: the late-life reckoning in which finite time forces you to examine not merely how long you have lived but what you have done with the life you were given.

    The audit is comprehensive.

    Father Time is apparently unconcerned with privacy.

    He wants the public records and the private ones. The work you completed and the work you avoided. The people you helped and the people you neglected. The books you wrote and the books you merely announced you were going to write. The hours spent exercising, creating, loving, teaching, reading, listening, and paying attention.

    He also wants the screen-time report.

    This is where things become uncomfortable.

    Psychiatrist Phil Stutz gives a name to the force that makes the Kronos Audit such an unpleasant prospect. He calls it Part X. Steven Pressfield, in The War of Art, calls a similar force Resistance. Different terminology, same infernal sales representative.

    Part X does not generally appear in your living room with horns and sulfurous breath. That would make him too easy to identify. He appears as convenience.

    Skip the workout.

    Start the writing tomorrow.

    Don’t make the telephone call.

    Stay angry.

    Buy something.

    Watch another episode.

    Scroll for twenty minutes.

    Have another snack.

    You deserve it.

    Part X specializes in transforming the squandered life into a series of perfectly reasonable afternoons.

    Resistance operates much the same way. It rarely commands you to abandon your life’s work forever. That would sound suspicious. It merely suggests that you postpone it until tomorrow, preferably after you have checked your email, researched a laptop, watched several YouTube reviews of the laptop, compared processors, investigated whether 64GB of RAM might provide useful “future-proofing,” and discovered that somehow it is lunchtime.

    No single offense looks particularly damning.

    That is the genius of the operation.

    A wasted life is rarely wasted dramatically. You don’t wake one morning and announce, “Beginning today, I shall squander my remaining years on trivia, consumerism, resentment, and short-term gratification.”

    You lose the life ten minutes at a time.

    That is why the Kronos Audit becomes more severe as the castle approaches. At twenty-five, wasting an afternoon seems almost mathematically insignificant. You possess what feels like an industrial supply of afternoons. At sixty-five, the inventory has become visible.

    You begin counting.

    How many healthy years?

    How many trips?

    How many books?

    How many summers with your family?

    How many mornings when your mind remains sufficiently sharp to write something worth reading?

    How many miles can your legs still carry you?

    The questions can become morbid if you allow them to. The objective is not to turn retirement into a death vigil in which you sit beside an hourglass watching grains of sand fall while whispering, “There goes another one.”

    The point is accountability.

    Stutz argues that Part X seduces us with the fantasy of exemption. Other people may have to obey the laws governing effort, discipline, sacrifice, consequences, aging, and time, but somehow we imagine that special accommodations have been made for us. Tomorrow will always be available. Our bodies will tolerate neglect. Relationships will survive inattention. Talent will remain indefinitely on standby until we finally decide to use it.

    Father Time has reviewed the exemption request.

    Denied.

    This is the moral force behind the Kronos Audit. Your life is not merely a possession you were issued for private amusement. Time creates responsibility precisely because it is finite. If you possess capacities for love, thought, creation, service, friendship, physical effort, curiosity, and attention, repeatedly surrendering those capacities to trivial gratification eventually becomes more than a scheduling problem.

    It becomes a way of disappearing before you are dead.

    And perhaps that is what makes Part X genuinely frightening. Death will eventually take your life regardless of what you do. Part X offers to take it earlier, in installments.

    An hour here.

    An afternoon there.

    A year spent waiting to begin.

    The castle will eventually receive all of us. No exercise program, spiritual practice, writing regimen, retirement strategy, or Mediterranean diet has yet defeated that particular zoning ordinance.

    But there is a considerable difference between arriving at the castle after having lived and arriving after having spent decades hiding from life in increasingly comfortable rooms.

    Which brings us, inevitably, to the eggshell-white Honda Accord Hybrid.

    Father Time opens the ledger.

    “Forty years of teaching.”

    “Yes.”

    “Writing?”

    “Every morning.”

    “Family?”

    “My center.”

    “Exercise?”

    “I suffer voluntarily on an Airdyne.”

    He nods approvingly.

    Then he turns the page.

    “Explain the new Honda.”

    “I needed better gas mileage.”

    “How far do you drive?”

    “Well, Costco is two miles away.”

    Father Time looks over his glasses.

    I clear my throat.

    “It gets almost fifty miles per gallon.”

    Silence.

    Somewhere behind me, Part X smiles.

  • Meet the Stranger Who Is About to Become You

    Meet the Stranger Who Is About to Become You

    You do not know who you will become when you retire.

    This is an irritating fact because retirement planning encourages the opposite assumption. You sit at your desk while still employed and confidently construct the future version of yourself. He will exercise four times a week. He will read difficult books. He will write every morning. He will travel. He will maintain friendships. He will practice Expansive Leisure and avoid the Retirement Larval State. He will be disciplined, curious, physically vigorous, socially engaged, and spiritually alert.

    This man sounds magnificent.

    Unfortunately, he does not exist.

    The person making these plans is still embedded in the structures that have defined him for forty years. He has a job, a title, colleagues, students, deadlines, routines, and an institution that tells him where to be and when to be there. He knows himself under these conditions and therefore assumes he will remain essentially the same person after the conditions disappear.

    Why would he?

    This is the Stranger-Self Principle: the person planning your retirement has never experienced retirement and therefore cannot reliably predict the behavior of the person who will actually live it.

    Working You and Retired You have never met.

    Working You wakes at five and imagines that Retired You will continue waking at five because this is simply the kind of disciplined fellow you are. Perhaps. Or perhaps Retired You will wake at seven-thirty, shuffle into the kitchen wearing Hawaiian tank tops and flip-flops, eat breakfast, inspect the internet, and conclude that the morning’s intellectual work should begin immediately after a brief restorative lie-down.

    Working You has no idea.

    Retirement removes too many variables for confident prediction. Your work-based social life disappears. Your professional identity weakens. The automatic encounters vanish. Nobody waits outside your office. Nobody expects you in a classroom. Nobody sends an email asking whether you can attend a meeting Thursday at two, thereby providing the unexpected pleasure of declining it.

    You have crossed the Rubicon. The old shore is behind you, and the maps become increasingly speculative.

    You can study other retirees, of course. You can read Steve Lopez’s personal retirement journey. You can consult psychologists, financial advisers, longevity experts, philosophers, theologians, and seventy-eight-year-old men with magnificent calves who walk six miles every morning. Everyone has a roadmap. Maintain purpose. Cultivate friendships. Exercise. Volunteer. Travel. Learn Italian. Join a pickleball league. Buy resistance bands.

    Excellent advice.

    Retired You may tell all of them to go to hell.

    Welcome to the Stranger-Self Principle. Retirement isn’t merely a new circumstance imposed upon an established personality. The circumstance may alter the personality itself. The man who spent forty years craving free time may discover that unlimited free time terrifies him. The introvert who dreamed of being left alone may discover that solitude loses some of its charm around the fourth consecutive Tuesday. The professor who swore he would never miss teaching may find himself constructing a syllabus for imaginary students at five in the morning.

    You don’t know.

    This uncertainty exposes an even more embarrassing human tendency: the Retrospective-Wisdom Principle. We improvise our way through life and afterward invent elegant explanations for what we have done.

    We prefer to imagine ourselves as architects following blueprints. In reality, much of the time we are raccoons trapped in a garage, knocking things over in the darkness until we accidentally find the pet door.

    Later, naturally, we write a book about our methodology.

    We take the accident, the compromise, the lucky encounter, the failure we survived, and the decision we made because every other option looked worse, and transform it into a Principle. Suddenly the crooked path becomes a journey. The improvisation becomes wisdom. The scar becomes evidence that we knew where we were going all along.

    I should be particularly suspicious of this tendency because I have spent considerable time naming retirement principles. I have principles for walking, principles for exercise, principles for leisure, principles for bureaucracy, principles for mortality, principles for maintaining vitality, and principles explaining why I need to get off my reinforced couch.

    At this rate, by the time I retire I will possess enough principles to govern Switzerland.

    What I will not possess is certainty.

    Perhaps that is the useful realization. Human beings know considerably less than they pretend to know, particularly about themselves. We construct identities, announce convictions, establish routines, and declare that we have finally figured things out. Then circumstances change and expose how much of our supposedly permanent character depended upon the scaffolding surrounding it.

    Retirement removes a considerable portion of that scaffolding.

    Then you meet the stranger underneath.

    Perhaps he will exercise, write, travel, cultivate friendships, and become Radiant Man. Perhaps he will spend three consecutive afternoons comparing laptops he doesn’t need while eating red grapes on a camping mattress installed permanently atop his couch.

    Probably both.

    So I am entering retirement without pretending that I possess the master plan. I have some useful principles. I have people I love. I have things I want to do. I can see occasional shards of light in the distance, and for now that is enough to establish a direction.

    The rest I will make up as I go along.

    Just like everybody else.

    Although I would prefer to make it up while driving a brand-new eggshell-white Honda Accord Hybrid.

    God knows I need excellent gas mileage for the two-mile expedition to Costco every other Wednesday.

  • 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.

  • Congratulations on Your Retirement. Biology Has Hired You.

    Congratulations on Your Retirement. Biology Has Hired You.

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

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

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

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

    The job is managing your decline.

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

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

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

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

    And those work orders require a staff.

    Unfortunately, the staff is you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Then you retire because your health has declined.

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

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

    Perhaps we should.

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

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

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

    Of course you can.

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

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

    Then biology slides a new folder across the desk.

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

    Welcome to your new position.

    There is no pension.

  • You Can Take My Office, but Not My Syllabus

    You Can Take My Office, but Not My Syllabus

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

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

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

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

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

    Then I can retire the course with a mic drop.

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

    This creates a problem for retirement.

    What happens when there are no more courses?

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

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

    There will be no class.

    This will not matter.

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

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

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

    Perhaps more than I thought.

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

    But the creative machinery may refuse the pension.

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

    That part of me may be unemployable after retirement.

    It will not be retired.

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

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

    Fine.

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

  • Nobody Is Building a Statue of You

    Nobody Is Building a Statue of You

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

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

    Not often.

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

    Then they retired.

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

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

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

    Forgetting is not necessarily indifference. Sometimes it is efficiency.

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

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

    Surely they won’t forget me.

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

    A tremendous hole.

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

    You imagine the department staggering around after your retirement.

    “How are we going to replace Jeff?”

    “We can’t.”

    “What will happen to freshman composition?”

    “God help us.”

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

    Then you retire.

    Someone gets your office.

    Someone gets your classes.

    Someone changes the password to something.

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

    The crater has mysteriously filled itself.

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

    A better metaphor is the Baton Principle.

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

    Then somebody handed it to you.

    You ran.

    You ran for forty years.

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

    That’s a respectable leg of the race.

    Now somebody else is waiting with an outstretched hand.

    Give her the baton.

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

    Your legacy is that the race continues.

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

    Good.

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

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

    You are supposed to disappear from the workplace.

    That’s what retirement means.

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

    Let them forget you.

    You will forget some of them too.

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

    The race continues.

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

  • The Road to Hell Has Excellent Lumbar Support

    The Road to Hell Has Excellent Lumbar Support

    Popular psychology has taken Carl Jung’s sprawling ideas about psychological development and compressed them into a tidy Four Stages of Life paradigm. The scheme is probably too neat to be Jung, but it is useful nonetheless, especially if you are approaching retirement and wondering whether the final decades of life will produce wisdom or merely better lumbar support.

    In the first stage, adolescence, you are supposedly the Athlete. You are acutely conscious of your body, appearance, appetites, and sexual power. Self-awareness remains under construction. You occupy the center of the universe and assume everyone else has been assigned supporting roles. You fantasize about dominance, dislike being challenged, and naturally prefer the company of people who recognize your magnificence. If invited to someone else’s birthday party, some primitive corner of your psyche wonders why your name isn’t on the cake. “Athlete” seems far too charitable. I prefer Imperial Narcissist.

    Then adulthood throws you into competition. You acquire a career, make money, take action, climb hierarchies, accumulate trophies, and cultivate a reputation as “a force to be reckoned with.” Hugh Hefner supplied the operating philosophy: Work hard, play hard. You want money, sexual success, professional status, and that most intoxicating commodity of all—respect. The popular Jungian formulation calls this figure the Warrior. I prefer Status Gladiator. He experiences adulthood as an arena with an invisible scoreboard hanging over it, and he checks the standings constantly to make sure his name hasn’t slipped.

    If life goes reasonably well, however, the trophies eventually lose some of their phosphorescence. The expensive car becomes a car. The promotion becomes another job with more email. Sexual conquest begins to resemble an exhausting administrative project. You start wondering whether the purpose of existence might involve something beyond accumulating evidence that you have defeated other people. The Jungian term attributed to this stage is Statesman. I prefer The Man Tired of the Bullshit. He has not necessarily become a saint. He has simply developed enough pattern recognition to notice that status, ambition, possessions, and applause make lousy gods.

    Finally comes the stage usually called Spirit. Here you stop looking for transcendence in a Mercedes and begin looking for the genuine article: love, generosity, service, connection, perhaps God. “Spirit,” however, feels too vaporous for me. My mind goes instead to the famous 1971 “Hilltop” Coca-Cola commercial, with people from around the world standing on an Italian hillside holding bottles of Coke and singing about peace and harmony. They practically glow. This is Radiant Man. He has undergone a metamorphosis. He no longer needs to dominate the room because he is no longer terrified of disappearing inside it. His strength has become generosity. He beams outward.

    The graceful trajectory of aging, then, is to move through these stages rather than establish permanent residency in one of them. Shed the old skins. Outgrow the Imperial Narcissist. Survive the Status Gladiator. Become tired of the bullshit. With luck, arrive at retirement age radiating enough benevolence that other people do not instinctively flee when they see you approaching.

    Unfortunately, modern culture has constructed an enormous industrial complex devoted to preventing this development. It does not particularly want Radiant Man. Radiant Man is bad for business. He already has enough. He doesn’t need another trophy, another grievance, another sexual conquest, another luxury object, another algorithm telling him how important he is. Consumer culture has much greater use for the Imperial Narcissist: the adolescent who refuses to vacate adolescence and possesses enough adult money to finance the occupation.

    Such a man spends his life constructing what I call an Adolescent Fortress. Every purchase, possession, sycophant, grievance narrative, algorithm, and carefully selected media source becomes another brick in the wall protecting him from reality. Eventually he suffers from Adolescent Fortress Syndrome: the lifelong construction of a psychological kingdom into which adult correction cannot penetrate. From inside, the fortress looks like sovereignty. From outside, it looks like a sixty-five-year-old man wearing the costume of a king while hiding from anyone willing to tell him the truth.

    Jon Ronson introduces an astonishing specimen of this condition in The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men: Christopher Mark, owner of a Gothic castle in Woodstock, Connecticut. Mark, approaching his mid-sixties, inhabits a medieval fantasy world of elaborate clothing, exotic animals, darkened rooms, and women who address him as “My lord.” His guard dog is named Cerberus, after the multiheaded hound guarding the gates of Hades. Camels wander the grounds. The drapes remain closed. Hugh Hefner is his North Star. The Playboy Mansion has been reincarnated as a Gothic fortress, as if Dracula had purchased a subscription to Maxim.

    Ronson first visits the castle after his son encounters the place under the pretense of attending a party. What they discover is considerably darker: a wealthy man in his sixties attempting to convert an adolescent harem fantasy into a reality television show called 101 Princesses. The number itself contains the pathology. Why one princess when you can have 101? And why 101 when, if the experiment somehow succeeded, the appetite would inevitably demand 1,001?

    Thomas Aquinas had a word for this: concupiscence, the disordered appetite that grows hungrier as you feed it. The promise is satisfaction; the mechanism guarantees dissatisfaction. You keep adding women, possessions, attention, status, spectacle, and power, expecting the next acquisition to fill the void. Instead, the void develops an appetite of its own. Psychiatrist Phil Stutz describes a related condition as living in the “lower channel,” where existence contracts around immediate gratification rather than purpose. Whatever terminology you prefer, the destination looks much the same: entropy. Or, to borrow Ronson’s word, unraveling.

    What makes Mark particularly useful to someone contemplating retirement is his conspicuous absence of guardrails. An heir to a fortune, he never had to build his adult life around employment. No boss expected him at nine. No colleagues depended on him. No students awaited him. No HR department required him to sit through sexual-harassment training. No professional code periodically forced his ego to accommodate the irritating existence of other people. What sounds like magnificent freedom begins to resemble the Guardrail Deficit: the absence of work, schedules, bosses, deadlines, colleagues, and professional expectations that periodically force us into contact with reality.

    We complain bitterly about these constraints while quietly benefiting from them. Work makes us shower. Deadlines make us finish things. Colleagues make us compromise. Students make us explain ourselves. Institutions routinely irritate us, but irritation is sometimes the friction that prevents psychological free fall. Remove enough guardrails and the Imperial Narcissist can drive wherever his appetites point him.

    Mark therefore embodies what I call the Never-Employed Retiree Paradox. He has reached retirement age with nothing to retire from. The ordinary retiree loses the external structures of employment at sixty-five. Mark never acquired them. In that sense, he has been retired since adolescence, with no workplace, career, professional standards, or institutional obligations separating youthful fantasy from late-life reality. He possesses radical freedom and uses it to dress like medieval royalty while planning a reality show about acquiring 101 princesses. Apparently freedom without maturation does not produce Marcus Aurelius. Sometimes it produces The Bachelor with camels.

    This brings me uncomfortably close to home.

    Most men cannot afford Gothic castles, exotic animals, and harems, but we have developed a more economical version of the Adolescent Fortress: the Man Cave. We carve out little kingdoms where reality agrees to leave us alone for a while. There is the football den with the enormous television, recliner, pizza, nachos, and master remote. On Married… with Children, Peggy Bundy understands that her husband Al’s deepest erotic fantasy is not another woman but a remote capable of controlling every television in the house. Absolute power, apparently, requires batteries.

    Watch enthusiasts have their own castles. I have spent embarrassing quantities of time watching YouTube videos in which grown men gather around expensive watches, conduct ceremonial unboxings, discuss “wrist presence,” and deliver solemn State of the Collection addresses as though NATO were awaiting their conclusions. The watch community becomes a tiny sovereign ecosystem with its own language, hierarchies, rituals, grails, and moat. The outside world may be collapsing, but inside the fortress we urgently need to determine whether forty-four millimeters is too large for a seven-and-a-quarter-inch wrist.

    And then there is my couch.

    Because the ordinary cushions proved inadequate for my 230-pound retired-linebacker chassis, I fortified the couch with a four-inch self-inflating camping mattress, stacked pillows, and a throw blanket. My daughters call it Dad’s Homeless Encampment. In the late afternoon, it exerts a gravitational pull. I lie there watching true-crime documentaries while eating red grapes, hummus, and Wheat Thins, observing homicide detectives restore order to a universe temporarily disrupted by murder.

    The documentaries are disturbing, but they are also strangely comforting. Chaos occurs. Detectives arrive. Evidence accumulates. The suspect lies. The detective catches the lie. Handcuffs appear. Order is restored. The narrative offers precisely what real life refuses to provide: control. Al Bundy has his master remote. The watch collector has his gleaming collection. The football fan has his nacho bunker. Christopher Mark has his Gothic castle and Cerberus. I have my padded couch and a homicide detective explaining why the suspect’s timeline makes no sense.

    None of these refuges is inherently pathological. Everyone needs respite. The danger begins when respite becomes habitat—when the place where you occasionally retreat from life becomes the place from which you conduct it. The fortress gets more comfortable. The moat gets wider. The drawbridge comes up more often. Eventually, freedom from irritation becomes freedom from challenge, freedom from obligation, freedom from other people, and finally freedom from reality itself.

    That is what makes Christopher Mark more than an eccentric character in someone else’s book. For a man approaching retirement, he is a warning. Employment has spent forty years dragging me out of the house, making demands upon me, exposing me to people I did not choose, and preventing my padded couch from becoming the geographical center of my existence. Soon those guardrails will disappear.

    So when late afternoon arrives and I lower myself onto four inches of premium camping foam, arrange my pillows, pull the blanket across my legs, open the Wheat Thins, and watch a homicide detective interrogate a suspect while Cerberus sleeps safely several states away, I do not feel myself approaching the incandescence of Radiant Man.

    I feel like I may already be retired.