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"And so what do you do?"
Conversation allowing, this question follows swiftly upon most introductions. That is unless the answer has been supplied in the introduction as in: "This is my friend, Delilah. She is an agent with the CIA."
What someone does for a living seems to create a cultural niche which allows us hang a lot of assumptions on them. Level of education, intelligence, status, income, even religious or political affiliation; all these we often infer from one's occupation.
There are a couple of reasons why these inferences may have outlived whatever tentative legitimacy they once possessed. First, the retirement speech that begins "Looking back over my 30 years here at Maxoworks . . . " is swiftly becoming a thing of the past. Someone beginning their "life's work” today, in the early years of the 21st century, can expect to have 5, 10, maybe even a dozen different jobs during their careers. So the response "I'm a graphic artist with Pixar," is most likely temporary and incomplete. The current "artist" may end up, a few years down the road, wearing a suit in the board meeting of a multinational corporation, selling sketches on the street in Paris, or creating flame resistant textiles for NASA.
"So what do you do?" suddenly becomes more complicated.
But while multiple occupations are one complicating factor in the “what do you do” game, "no occupation” can be equally perplexing. The issue is not so much the unemployed, as it is the retired. The unemployed can define themselves as being "between jobs at the moment," or as "reassessing their options." Our culture is OK with that. It is seen as a pause between identities. But being "retired" is a life space we have never really fully defined. In the days before vaccines, antibiotics, microsurgery and the insurance programs to pay for them, retirement was a brief span of years after your "work life" before you died. However, my father lived 30 years after retiring at age 70. This extended retirement seems to be an increasing trend in the industrialized world.
More and more we seem to be facing retirement with tolerable economic and physical reserves. But I wonder if we are emotionally ready for it? There is a certain smugness in the responses that the newly retired bring to the question "So what do you do?" "Nothing!" they smirk. "I'm retired!” I’ve even seen T-shirts to that effect.
It is a perspective that seems to work for awhile. Still, I remember, in the days before “digitized" bedrooms, when "Go to your room!" was a punishment. When “doin' nothing" was a banishment from human society; an acknowledgement that to do nothing was to be nothing. And this is the existential crisis that needs attention when the bloom fades from the "Doin' Nothing!" retirement rose.
I have noticed that AARP has been running commercials that focus on retirement as a "new beginning." That is certainly a step in the right direction, but I still worry about a kind of whiplash as we move from a profession designed to enhance income and reputation, to a life experience that provides an opportunity to explore the maturation of the self. The problem is that, in all honesty, most of us spend our lives trying to succeed at “a job," which may or may not have a great deal to do with the oracle's admonition to "know thyself." This unfortunate path leads to, upon retirement, our sharing our skin with a stranger.
I have a couple of suggestions as to how we might slip into that skin a bit more easily. In the interest of full disclosure, while quite eligible, I have not yet retired, and have been in the same job, teaching, for almost 45 years, 35 at the same university. Still my unique situation has given me some experience with my first major suggestion: Practice retiring.
By “practice retiring” I don’t mean calling in sick and going to the movies - that is the “Doin’ Nothing!” phase and needs, it seems, no practice. Rather, I mean practice doing things differently than in your previous experiences. As I mentioned, today's young job seekers will have this "opportunity" thrust upon them as they negotiate the swiftly evolving job market. I have been fortunate to teach what used to be called Radio-TV-Film. As a result I have had to move through various incarnations of that world. “Image production and distribution” has moved from developing film in a darkroom with batches of distinctly aromatic chemicals, and then cutting the processed film with razor blades and gluing the ends together to make a “whole thing”; to a new world of pushing buttons on a flat piece of glass called a smartphone or tablet to achieve the same results. The message analysis side of the discipline has fragmented into a variety of areas ranging from incredibly sophisticated algorithm-driven marketing to the equally sophisticated albeit well-nigh impenetrable ramblings of French philosophers from the last century. The point is that every few years the latest and greatest new technology or critical perspective would raise its head and we would scurry around trying to imagine the world from that new perspective. That is very similar to what I mean by "practicing retiring.”
Practicing retiring means practicing seeing the world from new perspectives and imaging what in that world might be fun and engaging. It means letting those new perspectives lead you to newly enriched lives. Most recently, and perhaps furthest removed from my professional training, I have become a professional author of coloring books for adults. [http://www.colormechilledout.com]. The experience literally has me looking at the world differently. My professional background in photography and television had me looking at the world through the eyes of a realist - how does one capture the reality before the lens most honestly? When you are in coloring book mode, you see the world as broken up into spaces to be colored. It is an experience not unlike those refracting glasses that were popular back in the psychedelic 1960s, but without the munchies. So rather than creating images that duplicate reality, I attempt to create images that allow others to reinterpret an imagined reality. Practicing retiring is a similar process as we practice seeing the world through new eyes, eyes beyond the blinders of our old “real jobs."
Second suggestion - and perhaps most important: Let the trivial remain trivial. A couple of weeks ago I saw a couple - seemingly of retirement age - nearly come to blows over whether it was better to get loose garlic heads or those already packaged in boxes of three. The debate seemed to revolve around the benefit of testing the individual heads for firmness, or supporting the notion of the consistency of quality one could assume from mechanical sorting, processing and packing. I fear it would have been worth my life to step between them and assert “You realize these are only heads of garlic, right?” The sad truth may be that in the diminished world of their retirement, garlic heads might actually seem that important.
That is not to say that garlic heads are necessarily unimportant. When we cook a standing rib roast we insert peeled garlic cloves into slots that have been carved into the meat. Yummy! So, in that instance, the quality of the garlic used in the recipe is important - but not important enough to fight about in a grocery store! It is not an important enough issue over which to raise your voice. It is, in almost every rational assessment of life, trivial.
Bottom line: if you hear someone - particularly in a public place - raising an argumentative voice - and if, to your embarrassment, you realize that the voice is yours, stop it. First, there is a public nuisance issue here. Think of all those times in restaurants or at symphonies when you asked your partner, or yourself. “Can’t they make that kid shut up?” When “the kid” is you, shut up, or take yourself out to the car until you calm down.
But more importantly there is an existential garlic issue involved here. Before proceeding with a “loose versus packaged” type of harangue I need to ask myself a couple of questions. First, is this my battle? Or even my concern? Or am I "helping" someone else see the light, by giving them the "benefit" of my insight? Rarely do people actually want that type of assistance, and on those infrequent occasions they will ask for your help. Wait for it.
Secondly, just how trivial is this issue? How important is this garlic moment in the grand scheme of things? And what does my angry passion about these particular garlic heads say about the state of my life? There is, of course, the chance that I will proceed, certain in my conviction that the relative merits of garlic heads warrant my untoward and boorish behavior. But at least I will have given harmony a chance.
And it does all come back to Foster Harmony. Retirement is, by definition, the rest of our life. We are learning that we need not fill it with “Doin’ Nothing!” We can fill it with a variety of activities that enrich our lives day by day, that make us wiser, happier and more fulfilled. There will also be heads of garlic. Let us remember which is worth arguing about.
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