Visiting Death
overcomingbias.com
overcomingbias.com
1. The author seems to have some anxiety and finding the source of that may help. Being needed, feeling important, being able to remain passionate about something, interests in growth and growing vs declining and giving in to the decline, feeling like their mental or physical skill is not up to par anymore, etc. Finding the source may help them remedy or replace the growing gap between existing and desired state.
2. Work and its inherent rewards can be addictive and a high impossible to replicate elsewhere. Not being allowed to do it anymore. In many professions that’s a reality ans scary. If you’ve been a surgeon or a pilot or a performer your whole life, losing the high of the work is very hard to impossible to replicate. In those professions a decline in performance is a massive liability and the end of a career can be quite sudden. If they have not found alternative sources of dopamine, retirement can feel like death.
3. Many of us have a compulsion to do things. For some that’s to be useful, for others to create, still others to compete and be the best or richest in something. The downside of useful careers is that usefulness is more easily replaced and forgotten. Creation leaves you with a reputation and by product you can pass on as your legacy, competitiveness marks history or wallet sizes, but usefulness leaves you used, unless you capitalize on it.
We had a family friend who was incredibly kind and excellent in their risky and very useful profession. They dedicated their life to that profession and did not have kids as to not lose advancement, and the moment they developed a form of mental decline, they were quickly retired replaced, and likely forgotten. Useful professions are replaceable just as useful tool products are. Capitalize and expand your portfolio of dopamine sources, before you are left used.
To me, most of these things are a feature not a bug. I am not just comfortable, I love who I am.
I suspect there are different types of retirement that are diametrically opposed to this type of experience.
> First there is the issue of vacations foreshadowing retirement, which is a partial death. By the age of retirement, your profession has become a big part of who you are, and the justification of your existence. So when you stop working, you end that pretty big and central part of you.
This is primarily a feature of Protestantism: if you don't do good work, you don't get in to Heaven. Other religions have nice little hacks for getting around this gamification of over-employment. I recommend finding one or two of them and incorporating them into your own life: after all, we should probably enjoy what little we have while we have it.
My mom's dementia kicked in very shortly after retirement, after a brief period of very bad depression.
Work -- even (especially!) if it's fun work -- is a core part of human existence. Protestant work ethic or not, we don't do well with excessive idleness.
My comment was in reference to someone who had trouble enjoying a vacation with their family because being away from work for even a short interval was “a partial death”. Is that not on its face absurd? It’s reminiscent of those biohackers who sometimes say sleep is like dying—no, sleep is an investment in improving the quality of your future awakeness.
In those terms, you’ve interpreted my suggestion to mean something like a culture of insomniacs should try out medically-induced coma for a few months. No, I’m saying we all need another hour of sleep every now and again.
> I haven’t posted as much lately as it is summer, and I’ve been doing a lot of family trips
I mean... I hope his family doesn't read this?
Some people bury themselves in work, some people go hard into religion, some people forget with substance abuse.
This is existential dread and I’d say it’s more common than not, and that your perspective is the rarity.
The beautify of life is that we each get to choose for ourselves if it means anything, and what that meaning is if so, and people judging others for what they’ve assigned to their own life, as justification, holds no water.