Cinemorphosis

Category: Literary Dispatches

  • What If Perseverance Is the Disease?

    What If Perseverance Is the Disease?

    In the 1970s, I wanted to become a Major League Baseball player. There was one problem: I sucked.

    I couldn’t hit a curveball. I couldn’t catch up to a high fastball. At third base, I could field a grounder and then launch the throw twenty feet over the first baseman’s head, turning a routine out into an emergency evacuation of the opposing dugout. By thirteen, the scouting reports were conclusive. I quit.

    Next came bodybuilding. I actually showed some promise. In 1981, I took runner-up in Mr. Teenage San Francisco. But that was about as far as the genetics were going to carry me. I could build a respectable mid-level physique, but I wasn’t going to become Sergio Oliva or Arnold Schwarzenegger. Those men appeared to have been assembled in a laboratory using replacement parts from livestock. I quit bodybuilding that same year.

    Then I wanted to become a pianist and composer. Unfortunately, reading music and writing compositions on staff paper struck my brain with roughly the same clarity as vector and stochastic calculus. Another dream quietly left the building.

    Next came the Smooth Bachelor.

    This was my plan to become a smooth, smarmy bachelor who knew exactly what to say to women. My life would be full of hot tubs, champagne, water beds, and lava lamps. Unfortunately, I possessed approximately the same romantic smoothness as Richard Lewis after five cups of espresso. The Smooth Bachelor era was brief and catastrophic.

    Then came the big one.

    I would become a novelist.

    This ambition survived longer because I could actually write. I had a quirky, neurotic personality. I could make people laugh in conversation. Surely these qualities meant that somewhere inside me lived a novelist waiting to emerge.

    They didn’t.

    My novels were usually constructed around premises sturdy enough to support a Saturday Night Live sketch. I would then stretch the premise across two hundred pages and wonder why the resulting manuscript felt less like a novel than a short story being held against its will.

    They were reliably unreadable.

    Yet this was the dream I had the greatest difficulty quitting because becoming a novelist wasn’t merely another ambition. I had turned it into redemption.

    The published novel would retroactively make sense of everything. All the neurosis, misanthropy, social awkwardness, failed ambitions, compulsions, humiliations, and self-sabotage would be transformed into literary material. I wouldn’t merely have suffered from my peculiarities. I would have monetized them.

    Even better, people would admire me.

    This was the part I was reluctant to admit.

    Publication had become my Holy Grail of affirmation and vindication. Somewhere in my imagination, people were rising to their feet:

    “Ladies and gentlemen, Jeff McMahon has done it! The failed baseball player, failed bodybuilder, failed pianist, failed composer, and failed Hot Tub Stud has finally fulfilled his destiny. He is a novelist!”

    Applause.

    Someone brings me a chilled beverage.

    Someone else produces a generous slice of carrot cake.

    “Make sure this man feels loved. Make sure he feels special. He has suffered enough.”

    Once I understood that fantasy, perseverance became a much more complicated virtue.

    We are constantly told that perseverance reveals character. Keep going. Never surrender. Follow your dream. Winners never quit.

    But what if perseverance isn’t always strength?

    What if sometimes it is fear wearing a motivational T-shirt?

    A person can keep pursuing a goal because the goal remains worthwhile and attainable. But he can also keep pursuing it because quitting threatens some deeper fantasy about who he needs to become. He isn’t persevering because the work is flourishing. He’s persevering because he has assigned the achievement an impossible psychological task: Make me worthy. Vindicate my life. Make people admire me. Make me feel loved.

    Under those conditions, perseverance stops looking noble.

    It starts looking pathological.

    That is why Lindsay Crouse’s The Case for Quitting feels less like another book on my reading list than an intervention. For someone of my temperament, quitting isn’t necessarily evidence that I lack character. Sometimes quitting may require more character than continuing.

    I’ve spent enough of my life chasing various Holy Grails of vindication.

    At this point, I’d like to know which quests are worth finishing—and which ones deserve to be abandoned in the woods.

  • The Salvation Hustle

    The Salvation Hustle

    You reach a point in life when everything feels desperate. Losing weight will save you from dying in your bed at night from sleep apnea. Writing a publishable book or viral essay will save you from being both irrelevant and useless. Making a viral video will do the same. Embarking on a successful podcast will keep you mentally alive and “part of the conversation.” Starting your own restaurant featuring your grandmother’s brisket with gravy made from a secret family recipe will put you on the map and change what it means to enjoy good brisket. Become a yoga instructor and open your own studio to help people reinvent themselves in ways no one could have imagined. You’re special, dammit, and you’re going to prove it. You just need to work harder. So you must do this. You must do that. Make more sacrifices. Get on the true path. Never take your eyes off the prize.

    But a voice breaks through your insanity and tells you that you’re on a fool’s errand. You’re trying to save your life. Deep down, you know you are losing it.

    That same voice says: Let go. Surrender to the things you can’t control. Don’t live out other people’s fantasies of success. Don’t think fame and popularity will make you whole. Don’t confuse fame and popularity with love. It’s not love. It’s desperation.

    So you retire your delusions. You realize that all the time and energy invested in your various mirages were killing you. You were making a bad investment. Take stock. Assess the damage. You become certain that it’s time to abandon your many chimeras and start from scratch. Use your time and energy on projects rooted in sanity, projects that might actually bear fruit.

    The problem is, you don’t have a clue what these new projects will be. You’ve lived in a fever dream for years, perhaps decades. Where do you begin?

    Such is the existential challenge presented in Lindsay Crouse’s The Case for Quitting: The Surprise Benefits of Opting Out. She observes that too many of us spend enormous amounts of desperate energy auditioning for the role of superstar—the venerated, successful person who sets records and raises the bar in whatever field we pursue, believing that this prized status will make us whole and happy. We create unrealistic expectations and often head down the wrong path. Then we become so exhausted from pursuing our dreams that we no longer have enough distance to assess whether those dreams are even viable.

    Crouse uses the metaphor of a duck to describe this desperate period of her life: “gliding along on the surface while my legs churned furiously below.” That brief description perfectly captures the life of quiet desperation described by Henry David Thoreau. Always auditioning for some desirable role, we glide along on the surface while below our legs churn furiously in pursuit of some fruitless endeavor.

    Crouse argues that we should take stock of all that furious churning and, when necessary, put an end to it. It’s called quitting. Contrary to society’s condemnation of “the quitter” as someone who lacks perseverance, the real character flaw may be the refusal to quit: cowardice. You need the courage to interrogate the results of your endeavors and ask whether those results merit perseverance. In some cases, quitting can be a good thing. Crouse offers an “alternative definition” of quitter from the Middle French: “to set free.”

    All her life, Crouse confesses, she has been a high achiever, fiercely competitive, always pushing herself to the limit and loath to interrupt her path to glory. When an injury threatened her athletic training, she’d forego the doctor and take an Advil instead. Late-night runs were aided by GPS. When her grandmother died, she didn’t tell her team for fear that it would compromise their performance.

    Looking back at the ways she pushed and punished herself, Crouse questions the wisdom of these often ruthless efforts. Her self-interrogation became serious after she had two children and realized she didn’t want to pass on her “darker types of perseverance” to them. Self-abuse is one thing. Teaching your children the habits of self-abuse crosses the line.

    When the forces of ambition are no longer part of your flourishing but have become a dark pact with fear and desperation, it may be time to abandon ship. It may be time to move on.

  • What If Nobody Shows Up?

    What If Nobody Shows Up?

    I know where my greatest reach is. A blog post might get a dozen readers. A ten-minute video essay about philosophy, retirement, materialism, addiction, or my twenty-five-year enthusiasm for timepieces can get a few thousand views. If I want to engage with a larger audience, the evidence is fairly clear: I should take more of my writing and turn it into video essays.

    After I retire, I’ll have more time to do this. I could become, for lack of a less embarrassing term, a YouTuber essayist. But it strikes me as dreadfully presumptuous to assume I could pull that off. I see five major impediments: desperate content mining, narcissism drift, mukbang-hangout syndrome, performance anxiety, and algorithmic-brain dysfunction.

    The first problem is the demand for consistent content. Suppose I decide to make two fifteen-minute videos a week. Where does all that material come from? Inevitably, I start mining my own life. My anxious personality has provided me with plenty of comic misadventures, but I doubt it can reliably produce two worthwhile episodes every week.

    I see talented YouTubers run into this problem all the time. They need material, so they start digging toward the bottom of the barrel. A minor controversy becomes a major event. A molehill gets the full mountain treatment. Out comes the obligatory reaction video. Or we get some cutesy, self-referential meditation on the human condition that exists mainly because Thursday arrived and Thursday requires content.

    I know myself well enough to recognize the danger. The moment I catch myself digging through the dregs for “just something to say,” I’ll become too annoyed with myself to say it.

    The second problem is narcissism drift. You’re on camera. You’re talking about yourself. You’re watching yourself talk about yourself. You become the star of a program devoted largely to the continuing adventures of you.

    At some point, you have to look at yourself and ask, “What’s the big deal here? You’re just some schmuck complaining that somebody parked with a bumper sticking into your driveway.”

    Not every irritation is an essay. Not every confession deserves an audience. Not every personal experience contains some hidden philosophical treasure waiting to be excavated.

    My rule has to be simple: the personal story must lead to something universal. If it never escapes my own navel, it doesn’t deserve to be uploaded. Following that rule probably means I won’t make two videos a week. Maybe I’ll make one a week. Maybe one every two weeks. That seems preferable to manufacturing material simply because the channel needs feeding.

    The third problem is what I call mukbang-hangout syndrome. At some point, the creator stops producing meaningful content and starts hanging out with the audience. The channel becomes a parasocial living room. People eat, chat, open packages, answer questions, and keep one another company. The content is the hanging out.

    I can’t see myself doing this, partly because I don’t have the ego for it. Why would people want to hang out with me?

    My cousin Pete in Studio City recently said, “Jeff, you’re going to be sixty-five next month. Let’s have a big party.”

    I told him, “Pete, let me explain something about me. I don’t have the kind of ego that makes big birthday parties possible. The thought of dozens of people driving from afar bearing gifts to celebrate my birthday makes me feel chagrined and socially awkward. Let’s keep it small.”

    If I can barely tolerate the idea of holding court at my own birthday party, I’m certainly not going to hold court on YouTube while eating noodles.

    The fourth problem is performance anxiety. Few things are more demoralizing than uploading a video and watching it fail in real time. You get a spattering of views. Then YouTube helpfully sends you a notice: “This video is not performing as well as your previous videos.”

    I mentally translate this as: “Fix it, loser.”

    You start imagining the YouTube police arriving at your house to ask why you uploaded something so unpopular that you’ve become a liability to the platform.

    A poorly performing video feels like the grand opening of a restaurant where nobody shows up. The linen tablecloths are pressed. The napkins are folded. The menus are ready. The doors open.

    Nothing.

    Eventually, you want to turn off the lights, pack a suitcase, and check into an undisclosed hotel.

    And this leads to the fifth and most serious problem: algorithmic-brain dysfunction.

    Once you become anxious about performance, you start trying to please the algorithm. You notice what gets rewarded and begin changing your work accordingly. Out comes the Shock-Face Thumbnail, with your eyes bulging as though you just put your hand on a hot stove. Then comes the Catastrophe Title: “I Made a HUGE Mistake!” Then the False Binary: Seiko or Citizen?

    The more these tactics work, the greater the temptation to repeat them.

    Eventually, you risk becoming less like yourself and more like the algorithm. You’re no longer asking what you genuinely want to say. You’re thinking about audience capture, retention, thumbnails, titles, hooks, and whatever else might earn another burst of YouTube confetti.

    At that point, the algorithm isn’t merely distributing your work. It is changing your brain.

    Looking at these five impediments makes a respectable case for not doing any of this.

    But there are two important counterarguments.

    First, I’ve spent the last ten years on my channel developing ideas about addiction, consumerism, timepieces, aging, and the stages of life. It would be foolish to throw away everything I’ve built simply because I’m frightened by the traps of becoming a YouTuber. I already have a body of material. Retirement will give me more time to develop it.

    Second, video gives me something that writing alone cannot. I’m physically present. I work from an outline or partial script, but I also improvise. My voice, body language, facial expressions, hesitations, peculiar phrases, and occasional mistakes become part of the essay.

    This matters more to me as Artificial Intelligence spreads.

    I call it the Human-Fingerprint Premium: the more synthetic expression surrounds us, the more valuable unmistakably human expression becomes. AI can generate oceans of polished language. What it cannot duplicate is the exact experience of a particular human being sitting before a camera, thinking through an idea and occasionally surprising himself with what comes out of his mouth.

    That may become increasingly valuable.

    So I’m going to make an earnest attempt at video essays after retirement. I don’t know how often I’ll make them, and I don’t want the demands of YouTube to determine the schedule. The essay has to justify the video, not the other way around.

    Still, there is one reality I can’t escape. Running a YouTube channel is a lot like running a restaurant.

    You can believe in what you’re serving.

    But the place stays open only as long as people show up.

  • The Waiting List for Napkin Folders

    The Waiting List for Napkin Folders

    One of the most valuable ideas in Steve Lopez’s retirement memoir Independence Day is that a meditation on retirement eventually becomes a meditation on something much larger: What does it mean to remain fully alive?

    Lopez keeps circling back to an answer that complicates the conventional retirement fantasy. Being fully alive is intimately connected to being useful to someone other than yourself. We don’t flourish merely because we possess freedom, comfort, entertainment, or an empty calendar. We need some evidence that our presence in the world matters.

    Call this the Useful-Self Principle: Human beings have a deep psychological need to exercise their abilities in ways that benefit others. Our inherent worth does not depend upon our productivity, but our sense of vitality often depends upon knowing that something is better because we showed up.

    Lopez considers this idea through the extraordinary example of Hedda Bolgar, a psychologist who continued working until she was 102. She told him, “What I grew up with was, if there’s an unmet need in this world, you try to meet it, and if there’s a problem, you try to solve it.”

    There is an entire philosophy of life packed into those two sentences.

    Bolgar didn’t regard the world as a giant resort constructed for her personal gratification. She looked outward. Where is the need? Where is the problem? What can I do about it?

    Seen this way, retirement is a fairly narrow administrative concept. You retire from a job. You leave the classroom, hospital, office, factory, courtroom, newsroom, or whatever institution employed you for thirty or forty years. You surrender the title, paycheck, meetings, deadlines, performance evaluations, and passwords you can never remember.

    But you don’t retire from the human condition.

    The deeper obligation remains: escape the gravitational pull of narcissistic indifference, discover what you’re capable of doing, and connect those abilities to something the world needs.

    Bolgar died at 103. Her longevity is remarkable, but the number isn’t the most interesting thing about her life. More important was the fact that she remained engaged with other people almost until the end. Her usefulness gave her an identity that survived the conventional expiration date of a career. She had somewhere to direct herself.

    I think about my grandfather.

    He had been politically active throughout his life. He marched with longshoremen in San Pedro in defense of union rights and participated in similar forms of activism. He had spent decades believing that citizenship required more than sitting in a chair and complaining about the government.

    Then, at eighty, he fell.

    His body never completely recovered. Eventually he entered a senior-care home in Palos Verdes. I visited him at least once a week until he died at eighty-five.

    What tormented him wasn’t merely physical decline.

    He hated feeling useless.

    He looked around at the other residents and recognized the same despair in them. Their meals arrived. Their medications arrived. Their laundry was done. People cleaned their rooms, changed their sheets, pushed their wheelchairs, organized their activities, and watched over them.

    Everything was being done for them.

    That sounds like care, and of course it was. But there was another side to dependency that became increasingly visible to my grandfather: almost nothing was being asked of them.

    Then he discovered a job.

    The cafeteria needed residents to fold napkins for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

    Napkins.

    Of all the grand human enterprises—building bridges, teaching children, performing surgery, defending workers, composing symphonies—we are talking about folding pieces of cloth before somebody eats meatloaf.

    And there was a waiting list.

    That waiting list has stayed with me because it reveals the Useful-Self Principle in its most concentrated form. Those residents weren’t desperate for napkins. They were desperate to be needed.

    Give me something to do.

    Let somebody depend upon me.

    Let there be one small corner of this institution that functions differently because I am here.

    When opportunities for usefulness become scarce, even folding a napkin can acquire dignity.

    I remember another moment in that cafeteria. A woman in a wheelchair who appeared to have dementia saw me and suddenly began shouting. She wanted me to rescue her. Take me out of here. Get me away from this godforsaken place.

    I looked at her and tried to reassure her. I told her everything would be okay.

    She knew I was lying.

    She was trapped, and some part of her understood it. What frightened her wasn’t simply the building. Her world had contracted. Other people determined where she lived, when she ate, where she went, and what happened next. She had become dependent upon strangers for the ordinary machinery of existence.

    I don’t know what remained intact inside her mind, and I don’t want to romanticize dementia or pretend that usefulness could have rescued her from neurological decline. But the memory has always represented something larger to me: the terror of becoming entirely acted upon rather than retaining the ability to act upon the world.

    That distinction becomes increasingly important as we age.

    The Useful-Self Principle should never be confused with the cruel proposition that human beings earn their worth through productivity. A bedridden person has no less value than a surgeon. A person with dementia does not become less human because she can no longer contribute as she once did.

    Human worth is unconditional.

    But the experience of usefulness is something different. It is one of the ways we feel our connection to other people. We teach. We repair. We cook. We listen. We volunteer. We write. We mentor. We drive someone to an appointment. We watch a grandchild. We call a lonely friend. We fold the napkins.

    This is why usefulness should not be treated as the broccoli of life—the dreary obligation we endure before finally earning the cheesecake of retirement.

    Usefulness is not the broccoli.

    It is part of the feast.

    The great opportunity of retirement isn’t merely that nobody tells you what to do anymore. It is that you can finally ask a better question:

    What needs doing that I am still capable of doing?

    Hedda Bolgar kept answering that question until she was 102.

    My grandfather understood its importance when he watched elderly people compete for the privilege of folding napkins.

    Perhaps that is one of retirement’s most important lessons. We spend decades dreaming about the day when nobody will need anything from us.

    Then the day arrives.

    And we discover how desperately we want to be needed.

  • No One Wants Your Beautifully Written Blog Post

    No One Wants Your Beautifully Written Blog Post

    As I have continued writing my blog and adapting some of those pieces into video essays for YouTube, I have begun to understand that writing and video are not simply two delivery systems for the same material. They make different demands on an idea, attract radically different audiences, and increasingly occupy different positions in a culture saturated with algorithmic and AI-generated language.

    The first lesson is what I call the Medium Stress Test. An idea that works perfectly well as a blog post may die the moment I imagine myself sitting in front of a camera talking about it for eight minutes. Writing gives an idea certain protections. A reader can stop, reread a sentence, skim a paragraph, or admire an interesting digression. Video is less forgiving. The subject needs momentum. It needs stakes. It needs a reason for someone not to click on a video of a bear breaking into a Subaru.

    This makes the video essay a useful test of my own material. Before I record, I find myself asking harder questions. Is there really an idea here? Is there tension? Does the argument develop? Is there something at the end that wasn’t obvious at the beginning? The camera is a ruthless editor. It stares back at me without encouragement and asks the question every writer would prefer to avoid: Is this actually interesting?

    That pressure is good for me. Video forces me to compress, sharpen, and dramatize ideas that might have survived comfortably on the page in a more leisurely form. In that sense, making videos does not compete with my writing. It interrogates it.

    The second lesson is harder for someone who has spent most of his life teaching writing to accept: people are far more willing to watch than read.

    A blog post that receives twenty or thirty visits over the course of a month can become a video that receives more than a thousand views in twenty-four hours. These numbers are not subtle. They do not require advanced statistical analysis. The audience has voted with its eyeballs.

    I could respond by lamenting the death of reading, shaking my fist at TikTok, and retreating into my study with a copy of The Brothers Karamazov. That might be emotionally satisfying, but it would not alter the numbers. If I want my ideas to travel beyond a small circle of dedicated readers, I have to reckon with the culture that exists rather than the one I would prefer to exist.

    But I don’t think the migration from prose to video can be explained entirely by shrinking attention spans. Something has also happened to written language itself.

    Call it Linguistic Flattening.

    We now inhabit an environment in which algorithms reward familiar forms of expression while generative AI can manufacture competent prose in industrial quantities. Certain words, rhythms, transitions, metaphors, and argumentative structures circulate so widely that they begin to lose their fingerprints. The writing may be polished. It may be grammatically impeccable. It may even be clever. Yet increasingly it produces the eerie sensation that you’ve read it before.

    Social media accelerates the process. A successful phrase gets repeated, imitated, parodied, optimized, and reproduced until language that once seemed fresh acquires the smoothness of a pebble handled by ten thousand people. Generative AI adds another machine to this process. It absorbs rhetorical patterns and reproduces variations of them at enormous scale. What begins as voice becomes mannerism; mannerism becomes formula; formula becomes cliché.

    This does not mean great writing will disappear. A writer such as Helen Lewis can still attract a large readership because readers recognize a particular intelligence behind the prose. But even a writer of her stature can reach vastly more people by appearing on a popular podcast that subsequently circulates on YouTube. The contemporary audience increasingly wants not merely the argument but the person making the argument.

    This leads to the third lesson, and perhaps the most important one for me: the Embodied-Fingerprint Principle.

    When I write a blog post, readers encounter my language. When I make a video, they encounter me.

    My voice enters the argument. So do my cadence, facial expressions, pauses, gestures, irritations, hesitations, and improvisations. I may begin with a script, but I inevitably depart from it. A sentence occurs to me in the moment. I emphasize a word differently than I expected. I become amused by my own example. Something happens between the prepared language and the person speaking it.

    That something is difficult to reproduce.

    Generative AI can imitate prose styles. Algorithms can identify successful formats. Other writers can borrow rhetorical devices. But the peculiar combination of a person’s face, voice, timing, vocabulary, temperament, physical presence, and spontaneous thought constitutes something closer to an individual fingerprint.

    This may become increasingly important as artificial intelligence makes polished language cheap. For most of human history, a well-written essay provided reasonably strong evidence that someone had sat alone and struggled to produce it. That assumption is disappearing. A perfectly competent thousand-word essay can now materialize in seconds.

    Video changes the evidentiary equation. There is a human being sitting in front of you, inhabiting the language.

    The Embodied-Fingerprint Principle therefore suggests that the apparent limitation of video is actually its advantage. Ideas cannot be separated cleanly from the imperfect human creature delivering them. The body becomes part of the authorship.

    This realization changes the way I think about my YouTube videos. I originally regarded them as adaptations of my writing, a secondary format for people who would rather watch something than read it. I now think that hierarchy may be wrong. The video essay is its own form, and it allows me to do something the blog cannot fully accomplish: combine written language with embodied presence.

    The Medium Stress Test makes the ideas stronger. Linguistic Flattening makes distinctive written language harder to preserve. The Embodied-Fingerprint Principle gives me a way to resist that flattening by putting the person back inside the prose.

    So I will continue writing. I need writing to discover what I think.

    But increasingly, I may need video to prove that someone is still there doing the thinking.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.