Retirement

1  Retirement

I am free.  I have retired.  After almost thirty years, I have voluntarily left my teaching toil in the vineyards of higher education.  I am not planning to carry on in that employ or a similar employ, or any other employ, for that matter, again.  Well, maybe on some occasion I will teach writing or literature on a part-time, temporary, just for fun basis.   I actually do fantasize about short contract teaching in some as yet unnamed exotic but comfortable and safe clime, an experience I have been fortunate to have enjoyed a few times in the past.  You should know, by the way, if you are contemplating retirement, that peregrination is evidently expected and almost obligatory for retirees.  In fact, one of the first questions folks asked when I announced my pending retirement was if I was going to travel.  I cringed a bit at such inquiries as I enjoy touring but very much hoped to avoid that and the other stereotypical retirement tropes which, alas, in their myriad forms, loom seductively.  I have, for instance, taken up sculpting.  And my also retired partner and I have joined the local senior center to take Tai Chi.  Can you imagine!  When I tell my non-retired friends this, often their first response, unmediated by sensitivity or conscience, is to laugh.  I take no offense.  I understand.  I understand. But even if I do indulge in a variation of travel disguised as employment, I have no plans to derive a sense of utility or comprehensive identity from these or other endeavors.   I tell myself that I have weaned myself from the tyranny of a need to be productive, of service, or fame.  I have registered for Medicare and have just started collecting a pension.   I can now relax.

Or can I?  That is what I thought until I read an article in the New Yorker by Patricia Marx on the “Golden Years” (New Yorker, October 8, 2012).   (I have always thought it ironic that a person named Marx writes the shopping advice column for the New Yorker.)    I read Marx in spite of my best anti-consumerist intentions.  And just so you know, I am no slouch in the Marx department. For a year or so in my late twenties, I lived in a socialist, co-ed, non-sexist, semi-vegetarian political collective whose do goodery was supplemented by study groups on Marx and others of his ilk.  And while I currently live as thoroughly a bourgeois life as I can afford, I have not abandoned myself to the worship of the material.  Still, I find myself fascinated by this guru of affluent consumerism’s considerations of the ins and outs of individuals and establishments that purvey prestige products and services.  I am attracted and repelled by discussions of the proper messenger and handbags, watches, linen, shoes and advice about gourmet take out, private schools, beauty spas, yoga institutes, and the like.  I know that Marx is not writing to the likes of me.  And yet . . . and yet, I am haunted by her presentation of the various options for modern retirement and wondering if I am doing it right. 

First, there is the problem of nomenclature, which in itself reveals the tendency of the times for many baby boomers: “Encore Career, Recareer, Rewirement, Anti-Retirement, Regenopause [clearly for women only]” are only a few of the phrases Marx presents as current descriptors. OMG, I thought, I am supposed to be having a second career!  Retirement is not an entrance into freedom and leisure as one leaves their job/career, a time for reflection, hobbies, and fun, as I thought it was, but a retooling for another commitment of time and energy to finally fulfilling and enriching myself.   We still want to “do” something.  What happened to all that talk about “being”? (I note, by the way, that family and friendship seem to play little part in filling the apparently yawning gap in personal satisfaction and meaning expressed by many of the retiring boomers. The much quoted sentiment that the only things that matter in the end are love and relationships is often cited but little observed.  Personally, I have long thought that, yes, people are perhaps all that matter at the end, but not necessarily in the meantime. )   

The implication of these terms for retirement is wearying enough, but also disturbing is that apparently, the new retirement requires expert assistance in the form of retirement coaches, which Marx goes on to describe.  Now I know that this coaches thing is not new for the baby boomer generation weaned on weed, psychotherapy and mood altering and/or controlling pharmaceuticals.  While we might have spent our youth acclaiming freedom of expression and individuality, we have been joiners.  We may bowl alone and not join Masonic and other lodges, but many of us did flock to therapists, Esalen, EST, encounter groups, and other workshops that promised fulfillment and self-actualization.  We may have not trusted our parents and elders, but we have depended much on the paid kindness of strangers.

So what’s a good time girl like me who craves to do the right thing to do? Why, after a lifetime of laboring for wage and/or profit, can’t I simply relax and be lauded and applauded for it?  The life of the mind and the swimming pool beckons. Isn't that enough?