retirement and Enlightenment?
I read the article, “The Red Queen Fallacy,” from which the excerpt (below) is taken, on Brian Klaas’ very interesting Substack. In it he argues that people nowadays are too damn busy:
Too busy listening to Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen crying “Faster! Faster!”
Too busy in particular to experience what Klaas quotes Hannah Arendt as calling the “vita contemplativa,” a contemplative life.
And that raised for me a question—about us, in particular about retired us:
Has retirement and escape from the hustle and bustle gifted us older folks with the opportunity to achieve that “vita contemplativa”? In other words, have we—ex-hippies or never hippies—finally gained or regained the ability to chill or groove or muse or ponder or contemplate or meditate or, even, transcend?
In other words, is there a kind of enlightenment available in retirement? Or do obligations, destinations, family concerns and assorted projects—old or new—continue to intrude?
I feel, living in Manhattan, poorly qualified to answer this question, though I will probably have a go at it anyway.
But we would very much appreciate hearing your answer—in comments below or in short essays of your own for this site on whether retirement has or has not led you to a more contemplative life (send to WritingAboutOurGeneration@gmail.com).
— Mitchell Stephens
Here’s Brian Klaas:
There is an unsettling paradox that is central to modern life.
We are, in many ways, the most liberated people to ever live, free from endless toil in unforgiving fields, able to feed, shelter, and clothe ourselves with ease. Despite crushing inequality, we live in the richest period in human history. We have more control over our lives than any of our ancestors.
And yet, one of the most common, overwhelming sensations of modern life is frantic stress as we race—but often fail—to keep up. For too many, life feels like a treadmill without an off switch.
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Alice finds herself in a strange world, where everything seems to be backwards, a lesson she learns as she begins running with a mysterious character known as The Red Queen.
“The Queen kept crying “Faster! Faster!” but Alice felt she could not go faster.” No matter how fast Alice ran, she never got to where she was going. “However fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything.” Finally, the Queen propped Alice “up against a tree, and said kindly, “You may rest a little now.”
As Alice catches her breath, the Queen explains that life works a little differently in her strange country: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”
The parable of the Red Queen1 has become a warning for modern life, where many of us inhabit that same type of strange country. We too often experience our existence as a frantic race to keep up, a frenzy of typing fingers and stressful calendars, racing toward an unknown destination but never quite arriving.
This has given rise to a central delusion of 21st century living, what I call The Red Queen Fallacy. If you’re not hustling, you’re falling behind. If you’re not working toward a goal, you’re wasting time. And if you’re not racing to keep up, you’ll never get where you’re supposed to be going.
None of that is true.
But the Red Queen Fallacy helps explain why, as the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han puts it, “Haste, franticness, restlessness, nervousness and a diffuse sense of anxiety determine today’s life.” We schedule a dinner with a long-lost friend, only to find out that the next available window is in six weeks. Too often, in the meantime, we’re unthinkingly living a drive-thru existence. Efficiency is paramount because everything feels like a race that never ends.
Racing to keep up, we tend to find it exotic and eccentric when people linger without a purpose, when one wanders aimlessly, or when we see a stranger sitting and thinking in public without a smartphone as a distraction. The solo diner without a book or phone is seen as a weirdo; the person who wanders alone for hours in nature deemed a loner.
Constant hyper-activity hasn’t just defeated patient stillness and slow reflection—what Hannah Arendt called the vita contemplativa. Instead, the modern rat race has massacred it so much that many of us can’t even handle being forced to be alone, with nothing but our minds as company. . . .
