Cinemorphosis

Tag: mental-health

  • Invasion of the Digital Body Snatchers

    Invasion of the Digital Body Snatchers

    We should stop using the term social media.

    The phrase is almost comically dishonest. “Social media” sounds benign and convivial, suggesting a chatty little kaffeeklatsch where neighbors exchange vacation photographs, discuss their grandchildren, and recommend a good plumber. Pour some coffee. Pull up a chair. Let’s socialize.

    That is not what we built.

    The dominant platforms employ some of the most sophisticated behavioral engineering ever devised to keep human eyes fixed on screens. Algorithms learn which emotional buttons produce another swipe, another click, another minute of captivity. Outrage works. So does envy. Loneliness works beautifully. Add FOMO, sexual display, humiliation, tribal grievance, political hatred, and the irresistible pleasure of watching somebody you despise get publicly disemboweled, and you have a remarkably efficient machine for converting human weakness into advertising revenue.

    There is nothing particularly social about it. Much of the behavior is aggressively antisocial.

    Spend enough time inside these systems and something stranger begins to happen. People start becoming grotesque duplicates of themselves. Their opinions harden. Their language becomes more predictable. Their enemies become more monstrous. Their own tribe becomes more virtuous. Their emotional repertoire contracts until nearly every stimulus produces one of four responses: outrage, envy, contempt, or applause.

    To understand the transformation, forget Silicon Valley and think Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

    Attention Captivity Platforms perform a kind of digital body snatching. You enter as yourself intending to check one message. Forty-five minutes later, you emerge as an algorithmically engineered duplicate—scrolling, liking, raging, purchasing, and repeating opinions mysteriously identical to those of ten million other pod people.

    In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, aliens replace your personality while you sleep. TikTok and Instagram have improved the technology.

    You remain awake and volunteer for the procedure.

    This is why I prefer the term Attention Captivity Platform. It describes the transaction with considerably greater accuracy. Your attention is the commodity. Captivity is the business strategy. The platform is the machinery that makes the transaction possible.

    I considered other names.

    The Rage Dungeon has possibilities. It captures the experience of descending voluntarily into a subterranean chamber where strangers scream at one another until everyone develops hypertension.

    Algorithmic Asylum isn’t bad either. Everyone appears agitated, nobody seems particularly well, and the people operating the institution have discovered a profitable reason not to discharge the patients.

    The Hostility Feed gets directly to the product being served.

    And I have a particular affection for the Grievance Casino. You sit before the machine pulling the lever again and again, except instead of cherries and sevens, it dispenses stories confirming that your enemies are even more depraved than you suspected. Occasionally you hit the jackpot: somebody you already hate says something stupid.

    All of these names illuminate some aspect of the machinery.

    But social media illuminates nothing.

    Calling these systems social media is like calling a colonoscopy a spa treatment. The procedure may have its uses, but let’s not pretend we’re getting a hot-stone massage.

    Language matters because euphemisms conceal mechanisms. The phrase social media encourages us to think we’re participating in an electronic town square. Attention Captivity Platform forces us to ask the more uncomfortable question:

    If I’m the one being captured, who exactly is being served?

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Your Life Depends on Widening the Rest Stop Gap 

    Your Life Depends on Widening the Rest Stop Gap 

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

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

    Then you retire.

    The rest stop appears.

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

    REST AREA — 2 MILES.

    Instantly, your bladder declares DEFCON 1.

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

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

    REST AREA — NEXT EXIT.

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

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

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

    It assumes helplessness.

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

    You can create The Rest Stop Gap.

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

    You must keep telling your body and brain:

    We are not there yet.

    There is work to do.

    I contemplated this recently while suffering on my Schwinn Airdyne.

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

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

    Yet this suffering has a purpose.

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

    Nor is the objective to become lax.

    The goal is to find the edge.

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

    Walk to the edge.

    Learn where it is.

    Make friends with it.

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

    But exercise alone isn’t enough.

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

    The first pillar is physical challenge.

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

    The second pillar is intellectual challenge.

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

    The third pillar is social engagement.

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

    You need people.

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

    Actual people.

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

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

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

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

    You wake without an alarm. Excellent.

    You remain in your pajamas until eleven. Why not?

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

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

    Of course you’re still watching.

    What else would you be doing?

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

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

    Decay can be comfortable.

    That’s why it is dangerous.

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

    The rest stop gets closer.

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

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

    The objective is simpler.

    Keep enough road between yourself and the rest stop.

    Exercise.

    Think.

    Connect.

    Then get up tomorrow and do it again.

    The sign will eventually appear. It appears for everyone.

    There is no reason to take the next exit.

  • Mediated Persona Fatigue

    Mediated Persona Fatigue

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

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

    Then came YouTube.

    Then TikTok.

    Then Instagram Reels.

    The rare skill became an industry.

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

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

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

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

    The commodity is attention.

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

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

    Up came the social-media personalities.

    There they were.

    The faces.

    The voices.

    The incredulity.

    The histrionics.

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

    I felt immediate revulsion.

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

    But I suspect something larger is happening.

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

    The raised eyebrow once worked.

    So everyone raised an eyebrow.

    The dramatic pause worked.

    So everyone paused dramatically.

    Outrage worked.

    So everyone became outraged.

    The reaction face worked.

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

    Eventually the entire digital environment begins screaming at once.

    And when everyone screams, screaming loses its power.

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

    Something has to give.

    Perhaps the next form of charisma will be restraint.

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

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

    Perhaps understatement will become exotic.

    I hope so.

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

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

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

  • Congratulations on Your Retirement: Your Organs Have Been Notified

    Congratulations on Your Retirement: Your Organs Have Been Notified

    You should never have initiated your retirement.

    Unfortunately, this revelation has arrived several months too late.

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

    Technically, you could reverse course.

    Psychologically, you would rather fake your own death.

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

    No.

    The humiliation alone guarantees forward motion.

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

    Let us first look at your cash flow.

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

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

    The real danger is psychological.

    The mind and body are conspirators.

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

    Disaster.

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

    The bathroom did not create the need.

    Its proximity gave the body permission to stop pretending.

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

    Then you retire.

    The metaphysical bathroom appears on the horizon.

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

    Different parts of your body begin to shut down.

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

    Is any of this medically sound?

    Almost certainly not.

    That is beside the point.

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

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

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

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

    You are not merely leaving a job.

    You are driving home.

    The bathroom is getting closer.