The contract was never written down. That was the first problem.
You understood the terms perfectly well, mind you — everyone did. Work hard, be reliable, accumulate the right things in the right order, and eventually life would reward you with something that looked roughly like peace. Security. A sense that it had all been worth the effort. The specifics were vague, but the general shape of the deal felt solid enough to build a life on.
So that’s what you did.
For decades you showed up. Made sensible decisions. Deferred the indulgent stuff to later, because later was when everything would click into place. You watched other people cut corners, take shortcuts, ignore the rules entirely — and you felt quietly superior about it, in the way only someone following the rules can feel quietly superior. You were doing it properly. The right way. The whole way.
And then retirement arrived, and you sat down to collect what you’d earned, and the universe looked at you with something that can only be described as polite confusion.
Nobody cancelled the contract, exactly. It just turned out the small print was written in a font nobody could read, in a language that doesn’t technically exist, with provisions that change depending on which decade you happened to have been born. Apparently this is fine. Apparently everyone knew this. You were the last to get the memo.
The silence is the part they don’t prepare you for. Not the bad kind of silence — just the particular quality of quiet that descends when you’ve spent forty-odd years in motion and then the motion stops, and you realise the motion was never actually getting you somewhere. It was just the motion itself. The destination was always here. This Tuesday. This cup of tea going slightly cold on the windowsill while you try to work out what the brochure got wrong.
The answer, it turns out, is most of it. And yet here’s the strange thing: once you’ve accepted that the brochure lied, the Tuesday becomes considerably more interesting.
Not what you ordered. Better, in ways. Bewildering, certainly. But the material for some very good notes.
The world has apparently decided this is how it works. I’ve decided to find it funny. Most days it is.
More of this — the observations, the lunacy, the things nobody puts in the brochure — over at theoldgreythinker.substack.com. Come and read along.