Retirement Language: George Orwell And Yuval Noah Harari Walk Into a Bar?

Retirement Language: George Orwell and Yuval Noah Harari Walk into a Bar

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For a year or two after retiring, when someone asked what I did, I usually answered, “I used to be a Fire Chief.”

“I used to be.” I assumed this was an identity thing. Maybe I hadn’t entirely let go of the title. Maybe there was even a little vanity involved. Fire Chief does sound considerably more impressive than “woman currently arguing with her husband about the condition of the furnace room.”

Honestly, lately I’ve wondered if perhaps something else was going on.

Maybe I didn’t particularly like the limited linguistic choices available to me.

“I’m retired”…totally accurate.

It was neither impressive nor descriptive.

Sometimes the past tense (old title) contains more information than the (new title) currently in use in the present tense. Not so much “what are your pronouns?” More like, “What are your adjectives?”

In my head, I had more or less filed this question under identity issues, with perhaps a heaping helping of vanity, and moved on.

Then George Orwell and Yuval Noah Harari wandered into my head.

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George Orwell and Yuval Noah Harari walk into a bar.

Orwell says, “What happens when our language becomes too small for our thoughts?”

Harari says, “What happens when our old categories become too small for our lives?”

I look up from my drink.

“Have either of you tried being retired?”

They hadn’t.

In fairness, neither man was talking about retirement. (And before anyone sends me a snot-o-gram, I am absolutely not saying that either author is writing about the other or retirement.)

Unfortunately, my brain doesn’t particularly care.

This often happens when I read too many books at once. Two people writing decades apart about entirely different things end up sitting together in my head, having a conversation neither of them agreed to attend.

This time, these lads left me wondering whether retirement has become too big for the language we use to describe it.

Orwell Was Worried About Words

George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949. The novel gave us Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime and Newspeak, words that have long since escaped the book and entered everyday language.

Newspeak was the official language of Orwell’s fictional totalitarian state. It was deliberately designed to get smaller.

That was the sinister part.

If you systematically remove words and reduce their meanings, eventually people have fewer ways to express complex or dissenting ideas. One of Orwell’s characters explains that the purpose of Newspeak is to “narrow the range of thought.”

Orwell wasn’t simply suggesting that the person with the biggest vocabulary wins.

His concern with language ran much deeper.

Orwell was interested in the relationship between language and thought—and, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, what happens when language is deliberately stripped of its precision and range.

In his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, he argued that language and thought affect one another. Foolish thinking can produce sloppy language, but sloppy language can also make foolish thinking easier. His answer was precision: choose words because they accurately convey what you mean rather than reaching automatically for familiar, prefabricated language.

And that sent me somewhere Orwell almost certainly wasn’t intending me to go.

Retirement.

Because our vocabulary for one of the longest and potentially most complicated periods of modern life is surprisingly small.

You retire.

You are retired.

You enter retirement.

There. Apparently that covers it.

Meanwhile, Harari Is Worried About the Life We’re Trying to Describe

Historian Yuval Noah Harari has been looking at a different problem.

For much of modern life, we have operated with a reasonably tidy sequence.

We get educated.

We work.

We retire.

Education happened primarily at the beginning because what we learned prepared us for what came next. Then we spent several decades using those skills and eventually stopped working. I’ve actually talked about this strange paradox before. For much of modern life, we have operated with a reasonably tidy sequence. We get educated. We work. We retire.

Harari argues that rapid technological change, particularly artificial intelligence, is making that model increasingly unreliable.

New jobs will appear. Existing jobs will change or disappear. People may need to retrain repeatedly. The ability to learn, adapt, and reinvent ourselves throughout adulthood becomes increasingly important. In discussing AI and employment, Harari has specifically raised the question of whether people displaced from jobs will have the opportunity and ability to educate and retrain themselves for new ones.

So perhaps adult life starts looking less like:

education → work → retirement

and more like:

learn → work → learn something else → change direction → work → pause → retrain → contribute differently → start something → stop something → start something else

Which is messy.

But it also sounds suspiciously like quite a few people I know.

And then, somewhere around 65, we apparently take all that complexity and give it one name.

Retired.

That’s an Awfully Small Word for an Awfully Big Place

This isn’t just about changing careers.

We’re also living longer.

Retirement can now occupy decades of a person’s life.

And people can arrive there in wildly different circumstances.

Someone retires at 52 because they can afford to.

Someone else leaves at 61 because they’re exhausted.

Someone gets pushed out of a job they loved.

Someone works until 72 because they still love doing it.

Or someone retires and starts consulting.

Someone goes back to university.

Someone looks after grandchildren three days a week.

Someone becomes a volunteer executive director.

Someone takes seasonal work.

Someone starts a business.

Maybe someone spends six months travelling.

Someone finally studies archaeology.

Someone teaches occasionally.

Some of us make art.

Someone becomes a museum docent because apparently she has developed an inexplicable desire to wear a name badge near the Group of Seven. This one is actually me; I’d love to be a museum or art gallery docent!

And all of these people can answer the question What do you do? with the same word.

Retired.

That word tells us what they stopped doing.

It tells us remarkably little about what they’re doing now.

Maybe This Is Why I Keep Tripping Over New Words

I’ve been writing about retirement for a while now, and lately I’ve noticed something peculiar.

I keep needing other language.

Transition.

Identity.

Continuity.

Participation.

Competence.

Second adulthood.

Reinvention.

Place.

Belonging.

I recently disappeared down an academic rabbit hole because I discovered researchers distinguishing between function and participation. Being capable of doing something isn’t the same as having somewhere meaningful to use that capability.

Then I stumbled into Japan’s Silver Human Resource Centers and found researchers describing something that wasn’t quite work and wasn’t quite leisure as Place 2.5.

I’ve wondered whether work can act as a kind of competency container—somewhere all the things we’ve become good at have somewhere to go.

I don’t necessarily think any of these words is the answer.

I’m beginning to wonder whether the fact that we keep needing them is the interesting part.

Maybe we’re trying to achieve greater resolution.

We May Have Changed the Life Before We Changed the Language

This is where Orwell and Harari unexpectedly end up sharing my imaginary bar table.

Orwell was interested in what happens when language becomes inadequate—or is deliberately made inadequate—for expressing what people are thinking.

Harari is interested in what happens when technological and social change make old models of education, work, and adulthood increasingly inadequate for the lives people are actually living.

I’m interested in retirement.

And perhaps we’ve changed life faster than we’ve changed the language we use to describe it.

We’ve added years.

We’ve loosened the old expectation that everybody leaves work at roughly the same age.

We can work from almost anywhere.

We can return to school at 60.

We can start businesses at 70.

We can work, stop working, work differently and stop again.

We can spend twenty or thirty years after our primary careers doing things that don’t fit particularly neatly into either work or leisure.

Meanwhile, we’re communicating much of modern life in increasingly compressed ways.

Texts.

Posts.

Reaction buttons.

Emojis.

Tiny bios.

Drop-down boxes.

Employment status: Retired.

Useful, certainly.

Complete?

Not even close.

So What Do We Mean When We Say Retired?

I’m not proposing that we abolish the word.

I rather like being retired.

Nor do I think we need to convene an international committee to produce 37 officially approved varieties of retirement.

I’m simply noticing how much territory we’ve asked one word to cover.

Perhaps that’s why I keep encountering people who are technically retired but don’t look particularly retired to me.

Perhaps it’s why someone can miss work without wanting their job back.

Why someone else can leave a career and still desperately want somewhere to use what they know.

Why another person can retire and discover that what disappeared wasn’t merely employment. It was place, people, routine, competence, identity, and a reason to put on pants before noon.

And perhaps it’s why the question “What do you do?” gets strangely complicated after retirement.

George Orwell and Yuval Noah Harari didn’t walk into a bar to explain retirement to me.

I dragged them there.

But between Orwell’s interest in whether language gives us sufficient precision to express our thoughts and Harari’s questions about whether the old stages of adult life can survive extraordinary technological change, they left me wondering about something I’ve apparently been wondering about for months.

What happens when the way we live changes faster than the language we have for describing it?

And more specifically:

Has retirement become linguistically too small for what it now contains?

I don’t know.

But I’m starting to think retired may be one hell of an overstuffed suitcase.

And we haven’t even sat on it yet.

Related Reading

If you enjoy following ordinary observations that turn into bigger questions, you might also like:

• Identity After Retirement — Was the Elephant Actually Wearing Pyjamas?
• The Last Analog Generation
• Pygmalion Effects and the New Reality Of Retirement Expectations

• Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949.
  This is the source for Newspeak and the deliberate shrinking of vocabulary and shades of meaning. The appendix, “The Principles of Newspeak,” is especially pertinent; Newspeak is designed to reduce the means available for expressing unorthodox thought.
  Nineteen Eighty-Four — Orwell Foundation
• Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.” Horizon, April 1946.
  This provides the other half of Orwell: not simply fewer words = fewer thoughts, but the reciprocal relationship between language and thinking. Orwell argues that inaccurate thinking produces degraded language, while degraded language can in turn make clear thinking more difficult. He ultimately argues for precision, not vocabulary for vocabulary’s sake: “let the meaning choose the word.”
  Politics and the English Language — Orwell Foundation
• Harari, Yuval Noah. 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Spiegel & Grau, 2018. Chapter 19, “Education: Change Is the Only Constant.” Harari contrasts the older life model—roughly, an early period in which you learn and establish yourself, followed by a long period in which you rely on accumulated skills—with a future requiring continued adaptation. He argues that rapid technological change makes it increasingly difficult to know what knowledge or skills will remain useful decades later. The emphasis therefore shifts toward learning how to learn, coping with change, mental flexibility, and repeated reinvention.
• Yuval Noah Harari on what the year 2050 has in store for humankind — WIRED