Of pianos and retirement and giant carnivorous rodents

The stock market over the last couple of weeks has gotten me thinking about retirement, in the same way that watching a piano falling from a crane would get me thinking about whether pigs can fly. Sure, that is a mixed-up metaphor, but don’t worry: I’m told that there’s gonna be an economic reset, and after that my joke will probably make all kinds of sense.

In the meantime I’ve been thinking back on what retirement has been over the years. Retirement seems to me to be a recent concept for humans. 

(I think at this point I’m supposed to make a joke about how cavemen didn’t retire, unless it was something like “Hey, Grug, you know, I’m getting tired of the giant, carnivorous rodent race. I think I’m going to slow it down, take it easy, maybe stop and smell the ferns…” at which point our hero looks up to discover his nomadic tribe has left him behind for the giant, carnivorous rodents to deal with.)

Instead of that hacky parenthetical joke, I’m going to reflect on the fact that, until the last 50 years or so, people didn’t “retire.” They “died,” from choices like “starvation,” or “consumption” (which seems like the opposite of starvation, but actually is caused by coughing a little blood into a handkerchief) (I’ll bet you didn’t realize that’s how to spell “handkerchief” until you just went back and looked at it, did you? Well, I didn’t.), or [trigger warning] “diseases that we now have vaccines for” (are you okay?).

And, even if someone did manage to accumulate the savings needed to stop working at 65, it was typically just enough to get them to the average lifespan of 66. My guess is “stopping to smell the flowers” was originally coined to describe the guy who has literally stopped moving and now could theoretically smell the flowers at his wake.

All this to say, I think it’s time we got back to what made America great, which was being so dirt poor that you couldn’t afford to stop working until you couldn’t afford to keep breathing. It feels like we’re finally moving fast in that direction - about the speed of a piano falling from a crane.

I don’t know what those weird white things are around the cartoon, but clearly it’s falling, right?

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