Retirement creates a restlessness and a despair that can be overpowering. We are no longer in the workforce, stoking the engine of commerce that makes this liberal-democratic, capitalist country function. At cocktail parties where we once proudly proclaimed, “I’m a VP….” or “I own XYZ company…” or “I am on the Board of Directors of ….,” now we dodge the “So, what do you do?” question.
Admitting, “I’m retired” sounds like an announcement of taking lifetime membership in the growing ranks of the irrelevant, becoming a drain on the country’s coffers now that it has to pay us a pension (which we contributed to, lest they forget) and pay for our mounting medical bills as the rot of time catches up with our aging bodies. Younger people even complain, “I’m paying taxes to cover your medical care,” being unaware that for centuries working adults looked after their elderly family members. And, by God, I paid my taxes too – now I’m looking for payback, and I don’t want any young bucks’ subsidy.
In a fit of depression at this reversal of fortunes, I took a long drive out of town yesterday, determined to have breakfast in an unusual setting, splurge, and break the pattern of daily home-made oatmeal with a banana (a cholesterol lowering diet recommended by my doctor before he retired and left me a medical orphan). “Screw oatmeal,” I said, “and bananas, and doctors. I’m going to do what I damn well please today. Tomorrow, I may be dead.”
But the trip was no panacea. I had to drive through “Tent City.” Every town or city in North America has one now, a post-pandemic phenomenon, where those who cannot afford ballooning rents, or who don’t wish to pay rent anymore, set up tents and re-live Woodstock while guilting homeowners who have unused spare rooms not to be shared with strangers. Our Tent City is located on the grounds of an abandoned provincial prison whose young offenders were packed off to learn advanced criminology from their older cousins in Kingston; the decommissioned prison is slated for the construction of luxury condominiums. “Not so soon,” said the tent dwellers. “We need a place to live first.” And so they descended upon this prime real estate, setting up tents rapidly; the cops surrounded them just as quickly, not to stop crime within the tents but to stop the contagion from spreading to the ratepayers in the neighbourhood who pay the cops’ salary. And Tent City has created its own bylaws, where a “Tent King” extracts protection money from the dwellers; in addition, he peddles “extras,” so that the tent people can forget their miserable existence, one fix at a time.
As I basked in my luxury breakfast (for me)— a ham and veg omelette, sausages, toast and jam, fries, and a smoothie, washed down with liberal infusions of coffee—I wondered why I did not feel guilty for the tent dwellers breakfasting on day-old Timbits or stale tent air.
Then it hit me. There is nothing to feel guilty about, we are all products of a deliberately planned commercial enterprise called the Settlement of the Americas that’s been running for centuries, that we (consciously or unconsciously) bought into the moment we set out for the New World. Unlike the mother continent across the pond that evolved from tribal societies to fiefdoms and then to kingdoms before finally lapsing into social democracies when the party ended and the conquered got snippy, the settling of the Americas was part of a planned economic expansion of the former colonial empires of France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, and Great Britain. By releasing the potential of limitless new land for capital, and by exploiting the labour of the unemployed, imprisoned, and rebellious Europeans shipped off to the New World, great riches were to be made, and the Fall of Europe was to be avoided. And newcomers came (including me, many generations later) because the economic prospects were better. This transactional behaviour is encoded into the American (and I include North, Central, and South) psyche, to the extent that even relationships are based on economic value and gain – i.e., marriages, divorces, trust funds, inheritances, jobs, and friendships. Charity is valuable only if it comes with a tax credit. Loyalty died when you got on that ship or plane and headed west. And we accept all this as normative behaviour because that is all we know now.
Every one of us also takes another trip, an inevitable but personal one, up and down an economic pyramid – climbing one face from childhood to the peak during our working careers, and descending the other face during second careers, retirement, and old age. On every rung, we negotiate for economic gain as the pickings get slimmer towards the bottom. Even those tent dwellers have bought into this “pyramid scheme” and are somewhere on the lower downslopes of that structure, fearfully respecting the power of Tent King and following his rules without escaping to a government homeless shelter because there still must be a better economic deal for them inside their tent than outside.
So I ate my last morsel, burped contentedly, ignored the dent to my daily food budget from this extravagance, and said “Fuck it. I’m not going to embrace guilt. It’s a dog-eat dog world, however much we glorify it with beautiful pictures and manufactured moments of our lives in social media. I willingly bought into this way of life when I got on that plane 44 years ago, bidding goodbye to a home country with slimmer pickings. So suck it up and enjoy what’s left, buddy.”
These epiphanies come harder when one nears the “three-score and ten” mark, to realize that chasing the dream of economic success is sub-optimal, leading to periods of depression when we question “Is this all there is? Did I take the right path?” And our children will not listen to us because they are wrapped up in their own chases (taught by their parents); they will have similar revelations only after we are dead (if they have them at all!).
Welcome to the Americas, if you are a self-absorbed opportunist, interested only in Me, Myself, and I – you will thrive over here. And please, if you come, just keep rushing forward headlong, do not stop to think like I did yesterday while driving through Tent City.
