The Back Side

The Back Side

by Marco M. Pardi

mpardi.com

“The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened.” SAKI 1870-1916.

All comments are welcome and will receive a response.

I’ve had some experience with people who retired from careers. And, I’ve had experience with people whose financial circumstances provided a life in which they never had to work. I think there is an interesting difference between these two groups. For clarity, I’ve always viewed people who stay at home taking care of children and “keeping house” as career workers, in many ways working harder than those who can go to an office or other job site. And, although women have entered the workforce with as long or longer hours than men, they are often expected to continue performing most or all of the tasks assigned to women before work out of the home.

As early as the 1960’s figures began to appear indicating that, ultimately, retirement kills. A sudden feeling of being set adrift, or cast off and forgotten, a general decline in overall health, a loss of interest in things and activities of long standing, a loss of “purpose”, an increase in substance dependence, all pointed toward support for that conclusion. Until very recently women in Western societies had a lower life expectancy than men. And it wasn’t all attributable to statistical flattening due to death in childbirth. Women had to shift from caring for children to caring for adult men. And, someone still had to do the chores and the cooking and cleaning. Women may have changed the object of their efforts but their efforts remained essentially the same, albeit somewhat redirected.

And so I took an early interest, albeit academic, in the different post retirement lives of men and women, recognizing that women do not really retire. At first it seemed men died not long after retirement; figures published years ago gave male airline pilots about five years post retirement. The numbers in other professions did not vary that much. So it was easy to attribute the shortened life span to the nature of the work. Too easy. I met some airline pilots who outlived their life expectancy by several years and I began to wonder. Still, never having been in the life insurance business I did not have the data used by these companies to calculate policies and therefore could not look at a particular person and project a likely lifespan.

What I did begin to notice was a very distinct difference in social bonding between the two groups: Females tended toward a higher frequency of female group activity centered on shared interests; males had far fewer such bonding patterns and a higher probability of just staying at home and becoming sedentary. But before we rally to physical activity as a panacea, I would assert that a female bridge group is not particularly physically active – except perhaps for all the talking going on. The important variable here is not sore facial muscles but actively engaged personalities.

Of course, men also have card games. With a lifelong disdain for playing cards I can’t draw on personal experience with any groups. But my informants tell me male card games are quiet affairs, often lubricated by alcohol and, to a lesser extent, cigars. The game seems a venue for the extras, the booze and cigars, as much as an end in itself. So just how social the event really is becomes questionable.

Some readers will flash to the FOX-P5 gene, the gene which, in a complex context, enables vocalization. From mice to humans female mammals uniformly display a more active FOX-P5. This is not a criticism; it simply presents an apparently adaptive feature. One presumes then that the vocalization is a social event.

This raises a new angle on a question which has been with us for a while: Are social media replacing face to face contact? The answer is obviously Yes. But my interest pushes me to wonder if this is more pervasive and more in depth among males than among females. I suspect it is. Furthermore, I suspect this is a self validating activity which goes on to amplify itself; the more people (men, in this case) succeed in communicating electronically the more likely their next attempt at communication will be electronic.

I think the implications are serious. A group, retired males, which is already somewhat socially isolated as individuals is rewarded for hardening the isolation further. This must certainly affect even long term relationships with significant others such as children and spouses. And, in mirror fashion, it must affect one’s relationship with one’s self. Who am I but words on a screen? If those words can be deleted with a simple click, what does that say about me?

One writer, a woman I knew decades ago and with whom I have resumed communication in the past few years, writes an absolutely impeccable blog ( at:
foodfaerie | A topnotch WordPress.com site )

For a person like me, who appreciates the finest use of language, this blog is enveloping on many levels. Yet, it is not well known and there are few comments on each offering. She says she enjoys writing for its own sake even if no one reads her thoughts. But that’s a tough standard for me to meet.

I read an average of one science/technology book per week. With almost every page I hear my self thinking, Oh, this would be great to incorporate into a class discussion. But, I left college teaching four years ago. And still I’m constructing lectures and class discussions. My blog is not intended as a podium for me but as a forum for readers to interact. I suppose it is a grasp at some sort of social life in an otherwise very isolated existence. But the startling ratio of few respondents to many readers has me wondering if most readers are male. Is this retirement?

Some would say retirement erases a sense of purpose. As I’ve written earlier, the “purpose driven life” and the “find your purpose in life” swill drives me crackers. Ontology is not my field. But what am I doing here? And before I ask whether what I’m doing matters, perhaps I should ask where I got the notion anything I or anyone else does is supposed to matter. To whom, or what? Were my careers simply ways of distracting myself so I could get to this point, like reading a book on the subway? No, there’s no train going back where I came from. How and why did I get here? And where is everybody anyway?