More on retirement
Retirement as a form of death?
One of my friends—who is also a college professor—says that the resistance to retirement is partly about a fear of death: to retire is to die, in a way. “The cemeteries are all full of people who were irreplaceable,” one of my friends (also my age) said.
And though death has been with humans since there were humans, retirement—at least in its current form—has not been with us always. It is, as Derek Thompson argues, an artifact of the modern structure of work. But it is also a way of thinking about oneself and one’s role in the lives of others, and so may be just another aspect of living in time, being aware of it and recognizing our own mortality. So, to put it in other words: retirement may be a relatively new (historical) concept, but the ways in which it is tied to our sense of our lives—of aging and death—may not be so new.
Forms of retirement
In her book Haven, Emma Donoghue tells the story of three monks who leave society—and their monastic lives-- behind and move to a barren island far off the coast of Ireland in the Atlantic Ocean. One might think that a monastery is already pretty much cut off from the sinful world, but no—for one monk, the monastery is still too tied to the pleasures of life: good food and drink; friendship; laughter. Only a barren island, difficult to get to, cut off from civilization, will do.
In Plato’s Republic, we see another form of retirement: The Republic begins with Socrates’s discussion of old age and retirement with an old man named Cephalus. “I enjoy talking to the very aged,” Socrates tells Cephalus, “for to my mind we have to learn of them as it were from the wayfarers who have preceded us on a road on which we too, it may be, must sometime fare. What is it like? Is it rough and hard-going or easy and pleasant to travel? And so now I would fain learn of you what you think of this thing, now that your time has come to it, the thing that the poets call ‘the threshold of old age.’ Is it a hard part of life to bear or what report have you to make of it?”
Cephalus tells him that many of the old men he talks to feel nostalgic for their youth and for the lost pleasures of “wine, women, and feasts and other things thereto appertaining.” They feel badly treated; they miss their youth.
But, Cephalus says, he is glad to be free of the “mad and many masters” of the passions and desires. Cephalus tells Socrates that temperate and cheerful people find old age only “moderately burdensome”; intemperate people will find both old age and youth difficult. Socrates wants to extend this story to a definition of justice; Cephalus tells him that he isn’t eager to argue and that he will leave the argument to his son.
Cephalus has left earthly concerns behind; he is not interested in debate or the hard work of winning an argument. The form of retirement that comes with old age for Cephalus is a form of relief, but only if you are temperate and can appreciate the freedom that comes with old age. Intemperate people court misery, whether they are old or young.
Freedom
Socrates, it’s safe to say, isn’t afraid of old age and death. Old age can bring freedom; death is something that happens to every mortal being and is its own form of freedom, according to the Platonic/Socratic tradition. Death brings freedom from want, desire, and the needs of the body.
So my friend’s claim that resistance to retirement is a form of a fear of death might be understood in the same way: if you’re lucky and you can do it, retirement shouldn’t be feared. It is just a normal aspect of a life—a life in which working is required and can, at some point, be given up.
If work is a necessary evil then this view of retirement and death makes sense. As one of my students said, “if you like doing it, it’s not work.” Imagine Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the hill—his punishment.
Now imagine that he’s been given a drug that makes him love boulder-rolling. Suddenly he no longer wants to be relieved of his task—it gives him something to do, and besides, he finds it satisfying. When the boulder inevitably rolls back down to the bottom of the hill and Sisyphus has to start over again, rolling it up the hill, he doesn’t despair. He’s happy. He’s no longer working—he’s doing something that he wants to do. People who don’t want to retire are like Sisyphus on drugs.
If they could be objective about it—take the God’s eye view of the situation—they’d see that they should throw off their burden. But because they’re tied to their first-person perspective, they can’t see that they’re just filling their time with something trivial and unpleasant. They’ve learned to love their punishment. And it gives their lives and days directions.
But an unwillingness to retire might also be a fear of freedom: the kind of freedom that comes from being separated from who one was, from being cut free from definitions, obligations, institutional identities, or the relationships that have defined us.
Death, old age and retiring
“Age is removed from us by an extent of time so great that it merges with eternity: such a remote future seems unreal,” Simone de Beauvoir observes in the last volume of her memoir, The Coming of Age. Death, she says, is easier to grasp than old age: “…the dead are nothing. This nothingness can bring about a metaphysical vertigo, but in a way it is comforting—it raises no problems. ‘I shall no longer exist.’ In a disappearance of this kind I retain my identity [even if I do not believe in an immortal soul]. Thinking of myself as an old person when I am twenty or forty means thinking of myself as someone else, as another—not the same self. Every metamorphosis has something frightening about it.”
Something similar might be said about retirement: when we start our jobs, most of us don’t think about retirement. When I first started teaching at Hamilton, I remember talking with faculty who had been at the College for 20 or 30 years, and I often thought, “these people are really behind the times,” or “Professor A really ought to retire. He doesn’t realize that the world has changed. And he’s unwilling to let go and let us—the young, hearty, and relevant—take over.”
Well, now I’m more like Professor A. I find myself telling students and other faculty about what it used to be like at the College; I wonder about the changes that have taken place here and think that it was better 20 years ago, when we didn’t have SLOs (“student learning outcomes”) or multiple and yearly assessment tasks; when students and other faculty saw me as important and relevant.
“When we look at the image of our own future provided by the old we do not believe it; an absurd inner voice whispers that that will never happen to us—when that happens, it will no longer be ourselves to whom it happens. Until the moment it is upon us old age is something that only affects other people,” Beauvoir remarks. And though we do not live through our own death, we do (if we’re lucky) live through our own retirement, our own old age, our own growing irrelevance. Though there are some societies in which the wisdom of age is appreciated, societies that value the new tend not to value that wisdom.
But I do like to think that I have wisdom to share with my students and younger colleagues, at least partly in virtue of my age and experiences. Though I often try to reassure my students or my young unemployed or frazzled colleagues that life will go on, and that things will sort themselves out, I know that some of them are thinking, “yes, it was so much easier when you were younger. You didn’t have to contend with x, y, z….” But it’s easy to think that the new and the now is entirely different from the past, and that the experiences of the young are totally different from those of us who are older.
True, old people and a fixation on what “used to be” or how “we used to do things” can be obstacles. And if education and teaching is really about the new and the next, then keeping relevant will become tiresome. Then, we might yearn for retirement. As one of my retired colleagues said, “I just got tired of keeping up with the new work in my field. And teaching stopped being fun because students can’t see themselves in us.”
Not wanting to retire might be an expression of a fear of death, as my friend said. But I suspect that death is a bit easier, since retirement requires redefining one’s life, facing the vertigo of not having a job, an office, a role to play in the institutions that have helped shape how we think of ourselves and what we have to offer. And yet, many look forward to retirement, and the retired professors I talked to all seem to think of this as a wonderful time of life. They don’t regret the loss of the boulder.
But here’s an interview with a 73 year old who says that he will never retire.