Nothing (but) Retired

   The question sometimes comes up when you call a friend and ask what he's planning on doing that day and the reply is, "nothing, I'm retired."  But the key to such an answer may rest in the addition of the word "successfully" because for many, retirement is a distant dream.  Said The Week: 45 percent of Boomers currently have no retirement savings.  A Gallup poll found that 74% of Americans plan to work past 65, with some Boomers becoming "workcampers" who combine work and retirement by buying an RV and touring a seasonal rotation of places to work....Between 2015 and 2030, the number of people 60 years or older worldwide is expected to grow 56 percent, from around 900 million to nearly 1.8 billion.  In China, alone, those over 65 are projected to spike from 8 percent of the population to 24 percent in just 30 years.*  For many of those "boomers," pensions and anticipated Social Security payments are either nonexistent or are falling far short of what will be needed to cover medical premiums or home and living costs.  So for many it's back to work, perhaps driving a school bus or working at a place or store which you didn't foresee as being in your future and wondering if this was how you were going to live out your life.  To hear "You're not getting any younger," can become a bit of a nightmarish phrase.  But this isn't the case for all retirees (and here I'm talking the more stereotyped retiree with seasoned white hair and sparkling white teeth, real or not), those happily planning the cruise ship vacation or the long drive to meet and spoil the grandkids, all without much of a care in the world.  Cathy Guisewite recently retired after a successful career of being a syndicated comic strip artist for 34 years (she's now nearly 70), comfortably settled with a merchandise empire and royalties flowing in, none of which has dulled her observations of how today's retirees are a bit different.  In her book Fifty Things That Aren't My Fault, she wrote: My generation ruined retirement...Nobody gets to get old anymore.  Nobody gets to quit.  My peer group is producing absolutely no plump elderly ladies in floral housedresses and tidy poufs of white hair.  No sweet, sleepy husbands in suspenders and slippers napping under the sports page in the hammock.  No one's sitting in a La-Z-Boy in the afternoon with a basket of mending and The Price is Right (the original black & white television game show from back in the day).  The oldies in my generation are hotter than the youngies.  Full heads of super-conditioned, tousled layers of black, blond, brunette, or chestnut hair...flat abs and awesome rears in fluorescent workout spandex.  Grandpas zooming past on cyclocross bikes, grandmas rocking aviator shades. 

    All of which brings me to the subject of slides.  Those of you under 40 likely have only a slight picture of what a slide might be, because even in their heyday they were not as frequently used as other photo formats such as prints and 8mm film cameras.  But Kodachrome and Ektachrome were the films of choice for many professional photographers (National Geographic almost exclusively used the latter); slides were more expensive to buy and required a projector and generally a portable glittery screen that one only saw in schools and businesses (and those screens were expensive so few homes actually had one, instead projecting the images on a sheet or a wall).   Again, here's how the creator of Cathy summed it up: We were the last generation of the film years...Thirty-six exposure rolls of film, thirty-minute photo processors on every corner...AND we were the first generation of the digital years...Thousands and thousands of pictures taken in the early days of digital.  Some saved on current computers, some on old obsolete computers, some printed, some transferred to now-unreadable CDs, some never even downloaded...Each time I proudly thought: "I'll never forget what's on this one" as I tossed it in the drawer...My parents' generation doesn't need to think about it anymore.  Their boxes of unorganized pictures will simply be bequeathed to the next in line.  My daughter's generation doesn't need to think about it.  Their pictures are shared or deleted instantly or stored for them automatically in the cloud.  My generation doesn't want to think about it.  It's too huge and hopeless.  My friends leave the room when I bring it up.  Nobody wants to be my photo-problem friend.  The thought of our billions of beloved pictures --unorganized, un-albumed, unprinted, unedited, unlabeled, un-downloaded, and unbacked up in various abandoned systems, stranded on various devices all over the house-- makes everyone a little bit sick.  The images that mean the most make us a lot sick.  We know they're there...somewhere.  Waiting...

    The thing with slides is that while most of us kept the slides, packed neatly in their boxes of 24 or 36 and as Guisewite said, never labeled, we generally didn't keep the projector (the bulb burned out and who the heck makes bulbs for slide projectors any more so why not just add it to the dozens of others sitting on the shelves at the thrift store), which meant that one had to hold each slide up to a semi-clean window and try to figure out what exactly was on it (negatives were a bit easier because you would never figure out what that reverse image was all about or if it was even in focus).  But slides not only had a high resolution (none of this grainy pixel stuff) but for the most part held their color over the years.  Anyway, 45 years later, I'm going through them and discover all sorts of treasures such as relatives and friends looking as if they had gone swimming in the fountain of youth.  I put a few batches together (yes, you can still purchase plastic sheets meant to hold several dozen slides at a time, complete with holes like college ruled paper meant to slip into a 3-ring binder...gasp!) and off they went to various people; perhaps they would chuckle or reminisce or feel sad that time had passed by so quickly.  But for some reason I had kept them, neatly boxed as if purposely guarding them (or so I'll tell them) vs. just being too busy (or too lazy, truth be told) to take the time to go through them one slide at a time...
    

From the syndicated comic strip, Cathy by Cathy Guisewite

     It's nice to have time to do this, to go through such things and reflect on how brief life can seem; but on the other hand, this is also not indicative of all retirees, even the successful ones.  Take Bill & Melinda Gates, retired for quite awhile these days but perhaps busier than ever (their foundation to eradicate poverty and diseases has given away $45.5 billion to date) and with an even brighter outlook at how much about life is about looking ahead in the long term.  Said Melinda Gates in an interview with Fortune: Optimism is fundamental to our work.  We have to be able to see the reality of what’s going on in the world, and to know that and to listen to that.  But we have to believe in the world getting better.  And we do believe in the world getting better because it is getting better.  And we have to hold that belief in progress and help others hold that belief so they’ll come along on the journey with us.  Because look, the journey we’re on is not a solo journey.  Many, many, many partners need to be at the table to create, for instance, a new vaccine or a new technology that’ll benefit everybody.  The interview continues with Bill adding: I’d say that kind of optimism is particularly important now where there’s a kind of turning inward [politically speaking], and the trust in various institutions is down a lot.  A lot of the things we do take a long time.  I mean, we’ve been working on an HIV vaccine for over 15 years, and it’ll probably be 10 more years before we get there—so 25 years in total.  Malaria eradication, if things go well, is 20 years away.  The polio effort started in 1988; we didn’t get engaged until 2000.  You know, it’s a long journey.  Optimism is a key part of it to engage people.  Added Melinda: It's not at all a naïve optimism.  It's a realistic optimism.  We're trying to envision the future -- as leaders envision the future of where their company or their mission will go.  And for us it's a mission that all lives have equal value.

    My brother often jokes about doing nothing ("retired," he jokingly adds) although he is one of the busiest people I know.  Sitting still is rare for him and even when it does happen he is nose-deep in a book (he reads at about 3x the number of books I read and often those books are on rather complex subjects such as historical biographies and such).  Retirement is often as varied as a rainbow, beautiful and yet sometimes not as rosy or as pleasant as imagined.  But a rainbow is also all a matter of how one is viewing it.  Do you see stripes in a rainbow and if so, how many?  Aristotle saw only three colors, as did many early Islamic scholars; later eras worldwide decided that there were actually five colors; and by Isaac Newton's day it was decided that the number of colors should match those on a musical scale which meant seven.  Scientists of today now realize that seeing such distinguishing stripes or counting the number of colors is a human trait (the colors are continuous and have no dividing lines), a phenomenon caused by our brains wanting to box and categorize things...we make the rainbow have "stripes."  Perhaps we are doing the same with retirement, deciding that it's time to call it quits or time to get busy, or time to do nothing if we have the choice.  It's a slippery slope society seems to make for us, and one on which we can easily slide...if only we had a projector.


*Ironically, the article also mentions this: In 2018, the crop of newborns was the lowest since 1986 — about 3.78 million, continuing a downward trend that some are now labeling "the baby bust."  The dramatic birth-rate decline is occurring at the same time that America's second-largest generation -- the 77 million–strong Baby Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964-- are moving into old age.  One reason for this might be the dim prospects facing many now entering the workforce.  Said Bloomberg's Josh Petri in the daily brief on November 8, 2019: U.S. unemployment is hovering near a five-decade low and workforce participation is at the highest level in six years.  Yet half of Americans are struggling to get by: Some 44% of those age 18 to 64 are low-wage workers, according to a new report.  That’s 53 million people who aren’t reaping the benefits of a supposedly booming economy.