I am thirty-eight and I have, in the last few years, been watching my parents retire. The watching has been, on every external measure, a watching of a successful retirement. The house is paid off. The savings are, by every reasonable accounting, sufficient. The health has held up better than most people their age can claim. The trip to Europe happened, twice. The grandchildren did not arrive, but neither of them has, on close examination, particularly held this against me. The package, by every visible measure, was the package they had been working toward across forty years of careful, disciplined, professionally engaged adult life.
The package arrived. The package, on close examination, was complete. What did not arrive, in any structurally adequate sense, was the life on the other side of the package. The life on the other side of the package turned out to be, more accurately than I have known how to describe to anyone who has not seen it firsthand, my parents sitting in separate rooms in the house they had paid off, scrolling through their phones, with the kind of low-grade silence between them that has been operating, on close examination, for considerably longer than any of us had registered.
I want to write about this because the standard cultural framing of retirement has, in my parents’ case, missed something structurally important that I have, in the last few years of watching, started to be able to articulate. The framing tends to treat the retirement package as the goal and the life on the other side as the natural consequence of having achieved the goal. The framing is, in some real way, almost exactly inverted from the structural truth of what actually happens. The package is the easy part. The life on the other side of the package is the part that requires, on close examination, an entirely different set of capacities that the package itself does not, by structural design, develop or test.
What I noticed first
What I noticed first, when I started visiting them in retirement, was the silence. The silence was not, in any dramatic sense, hostile. The silence was, more accurately, the absence of the small ongoing texture of conversation that I had, on retrospective examination, been registering as the background condition of their house for as long as I had been visiting it.
The texture had been there, in my childhood. The texture had involved the various small exchanges that two people who lived together had been performing, almost continuously, as the structural condition of being two people in a shared house. The exchanges had not, in most cases, been substantive. The exchanges had been the small ongoing maintenance of mutual presence that the wider register has not given particularly good language to. The exchanges had said, in effect, you are here and I am here and we are doing this together.
The texture, in retirement, was gone. The silence had replaced it. My father was in the den, watching the football or scrolling on his phone. My mother was in the kitchen or the sitting room, doing the same. The two of them were in the same house. The two of them were not, in any structurally meaningful sense, in the same room with each other. The not-being-in-the-same-room had become, in some real way, the default condition of how they spent their days.
I asked my mother about it, once, in the careful way one asks about these things when one is visiting one’s parents and does not, structurally, have any particular standing to be asking. She told me, with the kind of acceptance that I have come to recognize as a feature of her generation rather than as a feature of her, that this was just what retirement was. They were tired. They had spent forty years working. They were entitled to their separate rooms.
What she did not say, and what I have, in the years since, been thinking about, was that the separate rooms were not, in any obvious sense, what either of them had been working toward. The package they had built had been calibrated to producing a different outcome. The outcome had not, in any structurally adequate sense, been produced.
What the package did not, on close examination, build
What the package did not build, on close examination, was the capacity to be together in the unstructured time that retirement produces. The package had been calibrated to the structured time of working life, in which the various daily activities provided, by structural design, the scaffolding that the marriage had been operating inside. The work provided the daily separation. The work provided the topics of conversation in the evenings. The work provided the various small external pressures that the two of them had been navigating together, which had produced the small ongoing texture of mutual presence that I had registered in my childhood without being able to name.
The work, in retirement, was gone. The scaffolding that the marriage had been operating inside was, by structural necessity, removed. What was left was the marriage itself, in its unscaffolded form. The unscaffolded form turned out, on close examination, to be considerably less robust than the scaffolded form had been.
The two of them had not, across the forty years of working life, built up the underlying capacity to be together in unstructured time. The capacity is, on the available evidence, something that has to be built deliberately, across years, in the small unscaffolded periods that working life produces. The weekends. The holidays. The quiet evenings when the work pressures temporarily lifted. The building requires the two people to actually develop, across these periods, the substantive engagement that can sustain itself without external structure. The building is small. The building, accumulated across decades, produces a particular kind of marriage that can operate in retirement without requiring the work scaffolding that had been propping it up.
My parents had not, on close examination, done this building. They had been operating, more accurately, on the structural assumption that the marriage was a permanent feature of their shared environment that did not particularly require deliberate maintenance, and that the various external scaffoldings of working life would, by structural design, continue to provide whatever conditions the marriage needed to keep operating. The assumption was, in some real way, accurate during the working years. The assumption became, in retirement, inaccurate. The inaccuracy is what produced the separate rooms.
What I have been carrying since I started noticing this
I am thirty-eight. I have been carrying, since I started noticing what was happening with my parents, the particular kind of small ongoing concern about my own structural choices that this kind of observation tends to produce. The concern is not, on close examination, that I am going to make exactly the same mistakes my parents made. The concern is, more specifically, that the structural feature of my parents’ configuration, which is the failure to build the substantive engagement that would sustain itself in unstructured time, is the kind of feature that one cannot, on close examination, easily detect from inside the configuration while one is producing it.
My parents did not, in the 1980s or 1990s, register that they were failing to build the substantive engagement. They were, more accurately, doing what the wider culture of their generation had calibrated them to do, which was the building of the package. The package was the visible goal. The package was what their wider environment had been rewarding them for working toward. The substantive engagement was not, in any explicit sense, on the list of things they were supposed to be building. The substantive engagement was, accordingly, not built.
I do not, in my own case, have the wider environment calibrated to the building of the package in the same way my parents did. I have, more accurately, my own particular set of calibrations that the wider environment has been rewarding me for working toward. The calibrations include various professional achievements, various small accumulations of competence, various forms of independence that the wider environment of my generation tends to treat as the appropriate goals of one’s late thirties. The calibrations are, on close examination, almost certai
