An Explanation: How I Got Here
I’m gearing up for a three-post week beginning on Tuesday. Several narrative possibilities were percolating in the roiling cauldron of my mind, and three have risen to the surface for further development.
Before then, however, I thought an exposition of a personal nature might be helpful for readers. As you know, I now work exclusively for you and for me. I am no longer employed gainfully by a corporate entity or other third party. In that sense, I am “retired,” but I ‘m uncomfortable with the negative connotations of that particular word. Look up “retired” in a dictionary. Its various meanings usually carry a grim finality that I, and many others in similar circumstances, would strongly reject.
When I finally threw in the shoes, to use David Lee Roth’s colorful turn of phrase, some people expressed the view that I was a little young to close up shop and head to the bocce court. I didn’t feel as though I was too young — when my father died, he was two years older than I am now, and my brother passed at my current age — but I came to understand that there is no universal, objective view of when one should retire. It’s an entirely subjective matter, with the ultimate decision governed by a variety of personal, professional, and financial considerations.
Some people reach a point in life where they would like to retire, but they can’t. These people are severely circumscribed; they don’t have the financial means to support themselves in retirement. They have to persevere with employment, trading their professional services for financial compensation in the labor market. I sympathize greatly with these people. They might have health issues, and they might wish to spend their golden years doing things other than working. They’re caught in a financial bind, however, and there are no means of escape. Some of these people will work until the day they die.
Others can’t see any personal purpose or meaning beyond their economic or professional function. The role they perform at work defines them. Without that professional identity, they are adrift in a sea of alienation and self-doubt. They have no other way to relate to the world. Fortunately, I wasn’t impaled on the horns of that dilemma, but I know people who are. My question: Do they come by this sensibility naturally or does external social conditioning gradually pull them in that direction? That’s what some might call a big question, so let’s leave it here for now.
Three different vignettes follow, selected from notable moments in my life where aspects or presentiments of retirement came sharply into focus. I will present these snapshots in reverse chronology, because the last one, the first one I experienced, resonated the most and stayed with me the longest. I’m unconformable with it because it’s essentially irrational. That said, I cannot deny the force of its influence.
Three Vignettes: Presentiments on the Road to Retirement
The first vignette is from just a few years ago. I was preparing to board a delayed flight (no surprise there), and suddenly lining up behind me was a gentleman I knew at an earlier stage in my career. He had founded and run a startup company that he’d sold for a considerable sum, and, at the time we stood chatting in the airport, he was active in angel investing. We got talking in the boarding area, and he told me that he and his brother (his company cofounder and business partner) were both effectively retired from the daily slog. He told me his brother recently attended a dinner party where somebody asked him what he did. His brother, technically astute but not necessarily graceful in the intricacies of social etiquette, replied honestly but brusquely. What said was, “Nothing.”
In the airport boarding area, we both laughed at this abrupt conversation killer. How, after all, does one respond to “nothing”? Asking somebody what they do for a living usually opens the door to polite conversation. In this case, the door opened to a brick wall. If I find myself in a disagreeable social setting, I, too, now have the option of playing the “nothing” card.
The second vignette goes back further, to the early years of my career. It’s a day when a long-term employee at a company for which I worked was retiring. The other employees in the office had gathered round to send him off to his post-career Valhalla. After he’d accepted his gifts and well wishes, he gave a brief talk in which he expressed ambivalence at the prospect of retirement. At this point, one of the others, who’d worked alongside the departing employee, interrupted, saying, “I wouldn’t worry about it. Nobody on their death bed wishes they’d spent more time at the office.”
Finally, we’re going way back to my childhood. I was about 12 years old at the time, growing up in a decidedly working-class, blue-collar area. Most of the parents (overwhelmingly the dads at the time) went to work locally at factories, warehouses, construction sites, and other local blue-collar gigs. Other than commuting, they didn’t do anything that would rise to the standard of business travel. One guy, though (a Scottish immigrant who bought two semi-detached houses on the street, one for him and his wife, the other for his son and his family), had an aircraft-engineering job that involved occasional travel to his company’s California headquarters. He was the only working person on that street who had any reason or need to travel for his work. On that summer day, though, the neighbors were gathered on the street to deal with some terrible news. The traveling aircraft engineer had died suddenly while on business in Los Angeles. He died alone in a hotel room, found the next morning by hotel staff when he failed to show for a meeting.
I can’t tell you why, but that news hit my 12-year-old self like a lightning bolt. The entire thing seemed horrible to me, not just the death, but the nature of it — alone, away from one’s family and friends, found by strangers who might see you not so much as a loving and loved person with a family but as a lifeless imposition and near-term inconvenience. Worse, and this is the part I can’t explain, a voice inside my head (maybe not a voice, but some kind of communication) seemed to be warning me, was insistently telling me, that this fate — which I found so appalling — could happen to me. Now, remember, I was 12 years old, in social strata where, even when I got to a working age, I likely would be working a blue-collar job, no travel required. I never forgot that frightening moment of admittedly illogical, irrational clarity. It transfixed me, leaving behind a permanent psychic impression. You can say, as I have said to myself more than once, that it was only a passing thought, of no possible material consequence — and I would, as a reasonable person, agree completely. How could I contend otherwise?
Still, in recent years, as minor health issues and my medicine cabinet expanded, I can’t deny the force of that long-ago admonitory bolt from the blue. It wasn’t the only reason I got off the workaday merry-go-round, but I admit it played a part. My job involved travel — I felt there was no way for me to do my work satisfactorily for clients without traveling — and I wasn’t willing to travel anymore. An aggravating factor was the debased nature of commercial air travel, which has gotten steadily worse and more fraught: flight delays, cancellations, increasing incidents of egregiously bad passenger behavior (including occasional fisticuffs at altitude). There used to be a basic decorum among in-flight airline passengers, and now it’s more like an unruly bus ride in the air. The in-air passenger aggression seems to have gotten worse since the pandemic.
It was time for me to pull back. I won’t die alone in a hotel room, nor will I entertain a deathbed wish that I’d spent more time at the office. I might however, depending on the circumstances, be tempted to reply with a plain “nothing” when asked what I do professionally at some future social gathering.
Fortunately, I don’t have to fly to conduct the business I’m doing here. Stay tuned for some potentially provocative views next week.