Better Than Nothing

Won't it be great to stop working forever one day?  You know, retire.  Spend your time laying around eating bonbons, and looking forward to your next nap.  On a yacht. Off an island somewhere.  Without a care in the world…

Sounds great, right?  I mean you worked hard, you sacrificed, you saved, and one day you will have earned the right to do absolutely nothing.

There's an Infinity commercial which ran all last year where a couple in a bookstore say, "How about a vacation in Bora Bora?"  After which they both stop and ponder the reality of that vacation, and say, "definitely not Bora Bora".  It's a pretty stupid commercial, and it doesn't at all dissuade me from wanting to go to Bora Bora, but the point is that sometimes, when you really think about what you thought you wanted, you realize you might not really want that.   Sure, for a while it would be great to just lay around on that yacht day after day, with nothing to do but eat, and play endless rounds of Words with Friends, but after a while, your image of infinite bliss might fade to one of boredom and possibly sunburn.  I mean maybe after you'd read a couple hundred books and maybe painted some pictures of the ocean, or learned to play the Ukulele, you might start to feel something was missing.  

And maybe all that solitude wouldn't be so great either.  Maybe you'd start missing people, all alone on that yacht with all those coconuts looking at you all day and waiting for you to do something.  Maybe you'd call your friends back home and invite them to come visit you, but they'd say, wow, I'd love to, but I work, or hang out with my grand kids or run the women's club at my synagogue.  And maybe after a few hundred naps, you'd start feeling sad, and a little aimless, and maybe you'd start cooking or making knickknacks just to fill the void.   And then maybe you'd start a little business of some kind….  Maybe making abstract coconut sculptures to sell to the tourists… or making coconut oil concoctions (because coconut oil is very fashionable).  And maybe people would buy them, and say they're wonderful, and you'd feel validated and appreciated.   And you'd meet new and interesting people who respected your coconut ingenuity and came to write articles about your "second act", and didn't think of you as old. And sure, fulfilling all those orders would sometimes be stressful, but also exhilarating!  

And maybe you'd take the profits from your business and start a foundation to research and develop new medicinal uses for coconuts, and you'd hire all the people on the island to help, and you'd feel really good about doing something that helped people.  And you'd discover that you were good at all kinds of things you had never even tried before, like marketing your foundation on the internet and writing research grant proposals.

Rush University recently published a study showing that having a purpose in life in the later years was associated with a "30% slower rate of cognitive decline" relative to those who didn't have one.  There are also studies showing that pursuing goals is very important to staying young and healthy both physically and mentally. So apparently doing nothing isn't healthy, and a good retirement plan isn't just about saving enough money.   

So maybe at some point you'd just sell the yacht, because the whole doing nothing thing is pretty boring, and you'd think about that Irving Berlin song,  "After you get what you want you don't want it", and you'd realize that what you wanted wasn't really to do nothing, but to have the freedom to choose what things you do.  And you can tell yourself that in the midst of all that nothingness, you finally found yourself, and it turns out that all in all, you're a person who thrives when NOT doing nothing.