Should I Stay or Should I go?

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Should I stay, or should I go now?
Should I stay, or should I go now?
If I go, there will be trouble
And if I stay, it will be double
So come on and let me know

The Clash 1982

I remember the 1990s “mommy wars,” where Boomer stay-at-home moms and working moms suspiciously eyed each other’s different parenting and career choices.

With not too subtly disguised condescension, Stassi P.T.A. guardians of traditional motherhood demeaned the non-family loving careerists, while working moms could be heard asking stay-at-home moms sensitive questions such as “What do you do all day?”, the implication being watch soap operas, eat bon bons and drink wine to dull the senses.

One particular troglodyte neighbor said to my working wife as she started a short work leave of absence when we were balancing two careers and three boys four years old and under, “Now you can be a ‘real’ mom.”

That neighbor was never seen again, although bits and pieces of his DNA do occasionally wash up on Westchester County beaches.

What was particularly hurtful to those on both sides of the divide was that people felt the need to validate their own choices by denigrating the choices of others.

Ah, humans.

Luckily, now we Boomers are older and more mature so that kind of silliness is behind us.

Naaaah. Instead, we have only gotten meaner and have lost quite a number of filters, and we seem to be doing a similar dance but this time about whether or not to retire.

There are plenty of reasons not to retire and to keep working but I cannot think of any (haha, no, just kidding). You may have financial reasons, love your work, see your work as an essential part of your identity, worry you will be bored or maybe worried retiring raises the specter of your own mortality.

There are also plenty of reasons to retire. Your work may be physically demanding, intensely stressful, more boring than your after-work life, or you may want to explore and enjoy other things while still healthy. Maybe you just need time to fly your drones all over New Jersey each night.

I retired three years ago, after some of my friends and colleagues but before most of them, so I regularly become an involuntary sounding board as people try to figure things out for themselves.

Many ask “What do you do all day?”

Simple. Watch soap operas, eat bon bons and drink wine to dull the senses.

Joanne Lipman in the Wall Street Journal points out that even the question, “What do you do?” is a loaded one, for stay-at-home parents, people taking career breaks, gig workers and laid-off workers, not just retirees, and “seems to conceal a bundle of judgments: What’s your social status? What’s your income? What’s your education? Are you worth my time to talk to?”

It is certainly not worth your time to talk to me, let alone read this newsletter.

When asked what I do, I sometimes use the approach cited in Ms. Lipman’s article and claim I am gainfully employed as a “trophy husband.”

Admittedly, the impact is limited by my wife’s eye roll and pained sigh.

So what to do? Dunno. All of the reasons to retire or not retire make perfect sense on an individual level, but we each have to run our own race.

Maybe draw some inspiration with the rallying cry of “Ready, steady, slow!” that commences the start of the World Snail Racing Championships held in Congham, England.

Snails? Yeah, hold on. I’ll get there.

“Ready, steady slow” is probably solid advice for new retirees (and, frankly, slow is the kind of locomotion best working for our age group right now, other than backwards).

The race is run inside two concentric circles and the winner is the first snail to reach the outer circle - - world record for this 13.5 inch marathon is roughly two minutes.

As reported in the New York Times, “Some snails appeared to lock in on the finish line, making steady, if not speedy, progress. Others were quick off the starting blocks before opting to travel in circles.”

Sounds familiar. Each running its own race.

Some slackers glom onto the competitors ahead of them and try to sneak a ride to glory. Bad form but hey, snails are only human.

One of the race organizers, Nicholas Dickinson, said “we do take this very, very seriously. But we also recognize that it is slightly bonkers.”

Perhaps an apt description of retirement, if not life itself.

Between school and work, we go full throttle for 50 or 60 years and then all of a sudden have to figure out on our own whether to and how to ease up on the gas.

As for me, I liked a lot about my work, wanted to perform as best as I could and I think I was pretty good at it, but it was never a love of mine and never defined me.

It also was a very time consuming and highly stressful occupation and I felt that I had to be all in for my clients who expected (and deserved) 24/7 service, or else be all out for myself.

Mortality also pulls me in a different direction. On the cake for my 60th birthday my wife wrote “If not now, when?" Time is finite. There is a whole world out there and I was way more bored at work than I ever am now.

As the Ralph Fiennes character says in the movie The Conclave, “The greatest sin is certainty. Certainty is the enemy of union. Certainty is the enemy of tolerance.”

Of course, Popes seldom retire. Kind of like politicians.

I am certain that I do not know with certainty the proper course for anyone else but eventually we can all find the right path with a little exploration.

A new friend who I do volunteer work with summed it up best for me. I joked that she was so good at fixing a problem we ran into that she could have a whole new career ahead of her. She responded “No way! I’m having too much fun being retired!”