"Retiring?" But I'm not tired yet!

Gutei’s finger

May 03, 2024

Hi everyone,

First of all, many thanks to everyone for their patience while I’ve been hacking my way through a bit of covid, then some acute bronchitis, and then the paper work for

<drumroll!>

RETIREMENT.

Seriously, had I known there’d be this much paperwork, I would never have thought about it. Worse, I was told — relentlessly and by my favorite professors — that I wouldn’t even be smart enough to do my job (asking Socratic questions) until I was about 70. Plato thought 55 might be close enough but I suspect, at this point, my professors were right.

But the stars had aligned for the move away from university life. I ticked over the officially sanctioned “best age” to start collecting Social Security and my pension and all that stuff. Plus, more immediately, the incompetent managerial overseers at UW-Milwaukee decided to close down the division I taught in — ironically (although that might not be the correct term to describe the inherently contradictory decisions made by business people about education) the UWM to-a-man-with-a-hammer-everything-looks-like-a-spreadsheet, Peter Principle’d management squad has been stressing the importance of retaining and mentoring students who were not properly prepared for university… and their solution was to shutter my division, the one filled with faculty whose expertise is exactly what they’re looking for.

As you’d expect.

Anyway, it seemed like a good time to fold my tents and disappear with the mo(u)rning mists. Time to re-tire.

As always, the cowgnitive dissonances began mooing loudly enough to annoy me — and that requires writing them down so I can get a good look at ‘em.

Here’s what I mean: retirement seems to mean three completely different things.

Re-tire-ment can mean:

Becoming tired again
Withdrawing or drawing back from society
Putting new tires on the car

Which put me in mind of a punny advertisement from the ancient days ago (The Fisk Tire Company put this out in 1907) which, for some reason, was still floating around in the back of my head.

And that triggered this etymological walkabout.

Also, people keep congratulating me on my retirement — which I can’t figure out, so I started to reverse engineer what they could mean. Which is when it got weird.

#1: Getting tired, again.

Now, why would I leave an admittedly tiring job, presumably to rest up after a lifetime of effort, in order to get re-tired — tired-again. I mean, the job makes you tired, so retiring normally implies the opportunity to stop being tired — but no. That’s not what the word says. It looks like it means you just get tired in new ways, or maybe tired again in the old ways. But then why would you congratulate someone for getting tired-again? Ack.

Seriously, I was lucky enough to have a job I actually liked and even got to work with people I mostly liked… so I never got tired of it.

Anyway, you get the idea.

Okay… or.

#2 Retiring/withdrawing.

Retiring also means withdrawing from your previous occupation which, in our culture is considered a thing for which congratulations are in order since, for most people, their jobs have been both an unhappy experience and, more deeply awful, an unhappy part of their identity. Marx got this part right: most people are alienated from their work (and so from whoever they happened to be at work, the identity their job required them to assume) and so retiring from a job means retiring from an alienated life and identity — the sort of thing that warrants celebration.

“Dude, congratulations.”

But (don’t tell anybody) I was never alienated from my job and the job never constituted my identity. I was lucky enough always just to be me in a particular occupation… so while I’m withdrawing from that occupation, I’m not withdrawing from a previous identity.

So, again, if retirement doesn’t mean retiring from something you hate, why does everyone keep congratulating me?

“Congratulations! You survived and can put it behind you now”.

But that’s not me.

(If you haven’t, Marx lays this out pretty nicely in his work on “Estranged Labour”)

Hmm.

Now, looking more carefully, I found that this word might be an echo of a much older, and foreign, 100 Years War: etymologically speaking “to retire” (as in, to withdraw) comes from the French, whereas “to tire” (as in, to become weary) comes from Old English which means that “retirement” turns out to be another Tale of Two Cities. Maybe that means Dicken’s, maybe it means Augustine’s version.

I don’t like either one of these.

Tire, as in to become weary? Nah. In retirement I have no desire to become re-wearied.
And retire, as in to withdraw or draw away from? Ack. I have neither need nor desire to draw away from … what? From a job I loved? From a personal identity that’s evolved in weird and mostly happy ways? Nah.

So stop congratulating me.

I think we’ll need to go back to #3, The Fisk Tire Company, and that terrible pun to make sense of this dissonance and here’s the reason: the worse the puns are, in my experience, the more likely they are to lead us into useful metaphorical territory.

So, Time to Re-Tire?

Hell yes. Let’s do it.

Let’s trade in these well worn and patched up old tires for a new set of steel belted radials that’ll keep me on the road well into the Go Granny Go stage of this adventure.

And here we are.

The Motley Cow

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