Tag: life

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.

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.