by Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ Retirement is one of those things that reminds me a lot of the way Christians think about Heaven: everyone wants to get there but nobody has any idea what it will be like. It will just be good. Somehow. At least that’s what the Cow Pasture promoters and Streets of Gold marketers encourage us to believe. But I have always wondered why it would ever be a good thing to sit and do nothing.
Well, that’s my philosophy. But there are more reasons, both practical and philosophical, to substantiate my viewpoint, or so I believe. For one thing (let’s go to Heaven first), anybody who takes a moment to devote more than a teacup of time to the subject might well start asking themselves questions regarding the nature of Perfection. It’s a nice, maybe even comforting idea. Just think: every pillow in its place, roads without sinkholes, and the endless sound of harps played in magnificent unison by angels with (diabolically) pleasant looks frozen on their faces. And somewhere nearby, God him/herself breathing golden one-dimensional salvos onto the panes of immaculate windows that look out onto nothing and would reveal nothing behind them if ever you entered their rooms. But you wouldn’t enter, would you – or even dream of it – because Perfection will never argue the case for Curiosity, now will it?
A moment of Perfection here, another one there, spread out across 70-or-80-odd years of mucking about in the big factory and the pinched little garden – is fine. Like that goal you saw in the United vs Rovers match last Saturday. Or that tidy little tart you met in the pub and shagged till the early hours 50 years ago. Yeah, she was perfection. Whoever she was and wherever she went. One little lost shadow. I should have bloody married that one, you conclude, your scabby old countenance becoming like a triumph of plastic surgery as you relive the memory and wake up erect, or somewhat erect – your bed fleetingly in a different time zone from now: a dream of the past reawakened along with the flavorful kiss of a lost and cherished ghost. Yeah….that was a bit of all right !!. A little perfection goes a long way, but we don’t need too much of it.
And it was, because it swept across your brain like a zephyr over a springtime lake or a mahogany shadow in an old school room when the winter sun briefly blinked outside the frosty window. It came and went. My good fellow, wasn’t that my life that just passed by? We never get closer than that: a passing mood that seemed definitive once. So Heavenly Perfection would not appeal to me, I am afraid, at least not as I imagine it.
I have written before about how I would like the option of creating my own heaven. It would be full of football and dogs and beer and loose women and, finally, a beloved wife (which I have now). The suggested infidelities? Hey, remember it is Heaven’ (my Heaven) we are speaking of.
So now let’s switch to the prospects that await us (or you, because I won’t stop) in retirement. It is like that long awaited meeting before the parole board of life’s prison; that probation from any further serious reckoning, as long as you keep passing the urine test of docility. You are granted peace, you are at rest, you have been given a double wide in a corner of unoffending oblivion, lost in a countryside where the scarecrows never come to life at night – as long as you just keep quiet, oh just be quiet. Have the hard-earned and long-awaited rest of arms and legs, hands and feet that just don’t want to know anymore: the Retirement Officers will take care of your mind. After all, they bring cans of bleach to make you forget yourself and spigots to wash amnesia over you, over all of you, just for your greater content.
Just go away.
Except that now you can’t. The world has changed, and now you can’t retire anymore – says I. You can’t for a lot of good reasons. Just look, Mr and Mrs Prospective Retirees – at certain demographic facts to better identify the world in which we now live – the New Reality, if you will. In short – have you noticed? – men and women are not making babies; the ‘mothers’ have decided not to be mothers and are not reproducing anymore. The prospective newborns, little tadpoles of conception, are put on hold until — tiny things — they just dry up or are expelled, never having crossed the proscenium of the world stage. never brought into existence even if they had enough brainpower to want to, assuming anyone would ask their opinion. These babies are nothing less than the collateral damage of the New Reality in which women have better things to do than reproduce and their submissive husbands are either happy to agree or feel culturally coerced into doing so.
Anyway, in the past most of the babies never lived to see adulthood. Now they don’t even see the light of day. Same difference?
Ahem! If it sounds like I disapprove of the right of women to ‘choose’, I can assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. Though I speak passionately, it’s just my personality. In truth I really am more neutral on the subject than what I have written above must make it sound. Personally, I am not a huge fan of babies. But I won’t delete what I wrote in such sympathetic tones because I think it expresses a kind of pathos that ought to be acknowledged and hopefully felt. At least to a degree.
But it has to be accepted that families are not what they used to be. The whole dynamic has changed. And here a problem arises. Because as babies become fewer and farther between, the worrisome demographic fact is that old people are refusing to go quietly. The beneficiaries of modern improvements in healthcare, nutrition, and technology, these indomitable veterans of sunshine and shadow are living longer and longer. Nobody blames them for wanting to. By no means are most of them gasping and wheezing or sneezing phlegm onto the Christmas tree. Many are physically robust and sound of mind.
So…if we encounter them at age 75 or even 80, mightn’t we ask why they sought an early retirement at age 62? Suppose they are 90 and packed it in when they were 65. This means that they have been loitering around for a quarter of a century. And doing what? Now I don’t know about you, but it is hard for me to imagine anyone sitting on a sofa for 25 years folding and unfolding their hands. Of course, you can argue, they have ‘earned’ their rest, their terminal sabbatical into the Land of Nod. And you will insist, rightfully, that they make themselves useful in many ways, such as looking after the grandchildren while the parents shoot off to Vegas or Abu Dhabi. Maybe they do. And maybe, far from wasting their leftover time, they take long walks, write the books which everyone believes they have inside them just waiting to be written, or maybe join strange religious sects and give the SS check to the High Priest Messiah. Who knows?
But they need to do something. Let me illustrate the difference between the past and now. I lived most of my early life with my grandparents. My grandfather joined the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Company when he was 18 and retired from the same outfit when he was 65. In all those years he had managed to move from the telephone poles on gelid wintry days in small towns to a snug-enough office in the West Virginia state capital. He lived for 7 more years, collecting his Social Security which he had paid month after month, year after year. They were only giving him his own money back. The system figured he’d snuff it by the age of 72 or 73 and he proved them right. At this time, the post-war Baby Boomers were going strong and everything was just purring along.
My grandfather had always wanted to ride a motorcycle and he did that. He had always wanted to play golf, so he tried that too. He was a ‘ham radio’ guy, and he could talk to people in distant places. He had a tall tower up beside the house and he’d climb to the top like Jack and the Beanstalk and work on getting the signal better. He was as comfortable up on that tower as I was sitting on a bar stool. Eventually he moved to Florida to join the rest of the relocated family and died of cancer. This same story was told a million times in those days.
But now it’s different. The scales are now weighted down by the gray hairs, blue hairs and white hairs. Places like Florida are packed with senior citizens. Some live independently, some in assisted living facilities, and some in nursing homes.
I say put as many of them back to work as possible. I am 75 and I teach online, edit multitudes of documents, and write blogs and books. I work out with the weights and do kickboxing aerobics. I also drink beer and go without sleep. But my life is rich because I have a purpose. In fact, I try to make as many people dependent on me as possible. I try to matter, even to the point of making myself indispensable in deadline situations. I work seven days a week. My day starts at 5.30 and ends at midnight, with a power nap or two in between. I walk my dogs four times a day.
This does NOT make me a hero, and that’s not the point. It keeps me ALIVE. It keeps me RELEVANT. And I plan on doing this until I die unless I become senile and can’t talk or think straight. If I become incontinent but can still form words with my mouth, they can give me a special seatless chair and I can shit in a bucket while I jabber on and on. My regimen is my life jacket, and if I stopped, if I allowed myself to slip quietly away from the fray and stop matching wits with clever, competitive people 40, 50, and 60 years my junior, I would curl up, let out a loud fart, and coak.
I have no intention of doing that. It doesn’t mean I won’t suddenly die, but I won’t die of boredom. And when I Do die, there will be a few people wondering where in the hell I went. It doesn’t mean they’ll come to my funeral, and I wouldn’t want them to. Let’s stick to business.
The point is that older people should not be encouraged or even allowed to stop functioning if the best interests of society are to be served. It is also in the best interests of themselves. So they have to either bag groceries at the supermarket or learn new skills. Sure, they’ll bitch about it for a while, so we’ll need to hire bugle boys to make the morning rounds. But once they revive, retrain and reestablish themselves at work, just as feisty and sassy as they want to be, they’ll be happy. Like me.
However, there is yet one more problem we may have to contend with. Already, due to AI robots and the diminishing need for ‘human resources’, there is talk afoot (serious talk) about simply paying people a stipend just to stay home and not work. They reckon even that will be more cost-effective than repositioning them in the company or handing out mops and buckets and telling them to ‘Git crackin’.
I don’t even know if it is worth pointing out the hypocrisy involved in filling school kids’ brains with all that bullshit about ‘self-esteem’ and then paying their parents to stay home, accept their welfare ‘salary’, and….and what? Pick their noses? Covid brought some families together, but the divorce rates soared as well; evidently a lot of married couples got along fine as long as they didn’t have to actually spend time together. And here I am not speaking of elderly people who may or may not want to work, but rather those in the prime of their lives who should and need to be working. Not just to earn a wage or salary but for purposes of self-actualization and self-respect.
Imagine: you go to the company and say “Please let me in. I can file papers. I can wash the windows and vacuum the carpet!” – and the CEO (who of course still has his job) sends his very official-looking Personal Assistant out with a message: “Now Mr. Anus, what did we tell you Last Week??? We transferred your monthly allotment. So go away. Don’t force us to physically restrain you. Hey Dirk!! Bobo!! I think we’ve got a problem here!!!!
Can you imagine the alcoholism that would come from all this? It makes me want to get drunk just thinking about it.
And remember, life expectancy is going to go on increasing. By the end of this century, people will be regularly living to 125 or more. And unless the young folks start gobbling viagra by the handful, babies will become a thing of the past. We will be reduced to visiting them in baby zoos. So my advice: Young People, start gittin down with serious intentions. Put your back and ass into it. Make a Baby, goddamn it! Old People: Jump start your life again. You are needed, and Heaven can wait. So go out and Plant Things in the pasture they want to exile you to. And build your own Heaven – not out of golden celestial parking lots, but from the engines of your mind and the sinews of your heart. Just Do It.
