Retirement: Don’t Believe the Stereotype

At the end of June, I will have been nominally retired for exactly one year. I’ve used the word nominally with considerable care, though I just as easily and accurately might have invoked the word ostensibly. 

What do I mean when I introduce these qualifiers? Well, people ask me quite a bit about how I’m doing in retirement, as if I’ve been afflicted by a terminal disease or chronic depression. There is a widespread connotation of retirement as an idle waiting room for those on the cusp of oblivion. I sometimes wonder how conventional wisdom arrived at such a desolate, enervated conception of retirement. Perhaps it’s by design, to keep us working longer.

I’m here to tell you that the stereotype of the retired idler bears no similarity to the reality of retirement, at least as I have experienced it. 

Let me give you a few examples that refute the popular prejudice. 

First, let’s consider health. My health has improved markedly since – to use the phraseology of the modern philosopher David Lee Roth – I threw in the shoes. I do more exercise now because I have more time in which to do it, and I also adhere to a more nutritious and health-conscious diet. 

In the last year, I have lost nearly 35 pounds. One acquaintance who hadn’t seen me in a while remarked that I am now “half the man I used to be, but in a good way.” I do not take Ozempic or any other weight-loss medication. I simply exercise and eat well. It’s not all that difficult; you don’t have to buy, often at considerable personal expense, a so-called “miracle drug” that comes with unwelcome side effects. 

Second, I have liberated myself from the chronically sedentary lifestyle of an information worker. Sitting on one’s ass for ten hours or more a day isn’t good for anybody, but there were many working days, due to scheduled commitments, when I seemed to have few alternatives. I realize now that I should have bought a standing desk, and I’ll probably get one even in retirement. Still, in retirement, there’s no need to be stapled to a chair in front of a desk for hours on end. I can move around of my own volition, on nobody’s clock but my own. 

Third, I have less stress in my life. We need challenges to keep us vibrant and vital, but there’s a big difference between self-imposed creative tension and externally enforced pressure. As I got older, I felt the external stress more acutely, and, frankly, I resented it. To make matters worse, the external pressure and ensuing stress weren’t helping my blood pressure, which has also improved in retirement. As a result of my improving health profile, I am now off some medication I took to help lower blood pressure.  

No More Self-Loathing Business Travel 

Fourth, I don’t have to trundle through airports, hotels, and convention centers on onerous business travel. Unlike the industry’s tech titans, I was flying commercial and hauling my own baggage (the physical kind, though sometimes the psychological variant, too), just like nearly everybody else who travels on business. 

I don’t think there’s anybody, ahem, of a certain age, who enjoys the rigors and stultifying routines of business travel. I know the mythology of the technological age strongly asserts that all aspects of modern life have improved with the ineluctable ascent of technological progress, but, if I may, I wish to lodge a protest: Commercial air travel has not improved; if anything, it gets more onerous and relentlessly unpleasant each year. I am not afflicted by deluded and saccharine nostalgia, but I know from hard-won experience that commercial air travel – for the hoi polloi like you and me – was more punctual, orderly, civilized, and respectful of the paying passenger in the 90s and the first decade of this century than it is now.  You could feel the coarsening and disrespect of the airlines grow as they became more cost conscious and increasingly contemptuous of their clientele. To be content with flying commercial these days, it helps if you’re a self-hating masochist. 

So, no, I don’t miss commercial air travel, not in the least.

Another advantage of retirement, at least as I’ve experienced it, is that you truly become a free agent intellectually. You can research any topic you want; you are free to learn about things you wanted to explore before but never had the time to do so; and you are equally free to develop and hold opinions that are truly yours, the result of your own investigation and reflection. 

The freedom to not have to answer to an employer’s objectives, to have the self-defined latitude to think and say whatever you wish, is truly a revelation. You realize how much we censor ourselves to conform and to get along in a world where economic precarity can result from expressing anything perceived by your employer as objectionable. 

Just to be clear, I’m not stridently ideological, nor am I partisan (I couldn’t care less about partisan politics, anywhere), and I’m not interested in the trivialities of the culture wars, which seem needlessly divisive and bore the hell out of me. I simply reserve the right to think deeply and independently – to loosely paraphrase Grouch Marx, I wouldn’t join any club that would have me as a member – according to my own precepts and principles. I’m not saying my principles are any better than anybody else’s, but they are all mine, not subject to conformity or groupthink.  

There’s a popular conception that rebellion and youth are yoked, that the young are inherently rebellious and the old (and presumably retired) are hidebound. Now that I have reached and experienced retirement, I view that dollop of conventional wisdom, like so many others, as woefully misinformed. The young can be rebellious, sure, but so can the old. The generational divide, promoted so indefatigably by modern media, is largely an illusion. It exists only as a strawman to flagellate the aging, who have diminishing economic utility, and to flatter the young, who will increasingly have the discretionary income that drives the consumer economy.

Independence of mind is not the exclusive domain of the young, nor is hidebound conservatism an inescapable terminus of the old. 

Make it Yours  

Despite the attempts of big media and the imposition of algorithms to broadly define and pigeonhole all of us according to simplistic and condescending stereotypes, we are, each of us, our own person, formed (and informed) by far more than superficial characteristics and surface identifiers. 

It is my view that as algorithms and AI combine to flatten and homogenize our digital culture, we will increasingly seek out voices that are undeniably human, possessing personal sensibilities, experiences, perspectives, insights, and, yes, even idiosyncrasies that automated intelligence will never be able to replicate. There’s a lot of value that can be derived from AI – I derive considerable value from it as a research tool – but it has the inherent existential limitations of any form of mechanized automation. It will never have the unique personality quirks, individual perspectives, and particularized insights that derive from lived experience. 

Retirement is not a death sentence, though death remains an inevitability despite the best efforts of Silicon Valley immortalists. While we’re here, though, we can be every bit as much alive and vital in retirement as we are in our day jobs, perhaps even more so. 

Retirement, like so much else in life, is entirely what you choose to make of it, presuming, or course, that you have the means to retire. But that, of course, is another story entirely, one that might become more salient as AI gathers force and is wielded extensively to restructure industrial and employment landscapes.