The 7 Rules of a Highly Playful Retirement Boiled Down to 1

Geezing is the opposite of playing.

Source: Unedited image courtesy Barry Langdon-Lassagne licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. (2013)

Though it contains a half-million words and weighs more than a 12-pack, I cannot find the regular infinitive “to geeze” anywhere in my Webster’s Third International. So here I nominate geeze as a derivation of the deverbal noun “geezer.”

Now in Britain, a geezer is an ordinary fellow, a mate, one of the companionable crew who lights up a gasper on the pavement outside the pub during the interval in the match between Arsenal and Manchester United. In London, a geezer can be young. No disrepute attaches to the British geezer, not so in the United States.

In America, the geezer is usually both old and grumpy. (To be fair, though, it is not hard to meet a younger geezer. Think of the Debbie Downer in your social circle who searches for profundity by way of gravity.)

To give the flavor of geezing, let me point to a real incident, some years ago now, and before I could legitimately lay claim to geezerhood. My wife and I were crossing the international border, and I’d allowed the inspection sticker to lapse, not by much, but by enough to catch the attention of the American official. He was not at all happy with me.

To defend myself, I deployed an impersonation. Others may produce impressions of famous celebrities, leaning heavily on catchphrases and characteristic turns. That’s why it’s easy to hear a comic Sean Connery, say, or an Arnold Schwarzenegger. My wife will summon Marilyn Monroe’s breathy singing voice when I get uppity; “Happy Birthday, Mr. President!”

My schtick is a bit obscure: I do an impersonation of the actor who appeared in breakfast oatmeal commercials, Wilford Brimley, the one with the walrus moustache who specialized in the geezer. My Wilford Brimley fit the circumstance, and a white beard helped with street cred.

“Why, that sticker you’re pointing to,” I said, “now doesn’t it seem like not a couple of months ago that I updated that danged thing? ‘Taint right, I’ll tell you,” I told him. “You sure you’re seeing the date straight young fella?” He was sure. “Well, then I’ll guess I’ll just have to take your word for it.” My wife, in on the joke, chimed in at this point. “You are danged right you will, Grandpa!”

I detected the hint of an eye roll. And, as the gate lifted, the weary border guy said, “All right, you two, welcome home.”

I was playing at geezing, the character a little out of it, slightly vexed and cranky, impatient, and a bit preoccupied. You can imagine the cartoon geezer still complaining about last year’s Super Bowl halftime show, bare midriffs at a wedding, ritually listing physical maladies–the “organ recital,” or complaining of microchips in the vaccine. (“Just what is a microchip, anyhoo?”)

The comical geezer I was impersonating, however, drew from real-life grievances and identity politics spread perniciously by political commentators. And this is not funny at all.

Bad News Is Bad News

It is almost too easy to point to the real-life demographics of a real cable news network whose avid viewers, age 68 on average, are glued to the set for appreciably more than an hour a day. They are also less educated than average, more rural, less than 1 percent Black, less affluent, and inclined toward hard anxious beliefs in a variety of threatening conspiracies, including one that led to insurrection and another that insists that old-stock Americans are being invaded, encircled, and replaced by foreigners and racial minorities. That ruinous, racist, polarizing fringe meme gone mainstream recently inspired a sickening massacre only a few blocks from my home.

The main approaches of this news network prey on insecurity and then compound it by pushing the emotional buttons of fear and resentment. The sinister aspect of this? The news becomes a form of entertainment, horrifying, yes, but also thrilling and compelling.

It Is Hard to Look Away

I had the occasion to closely observe the editorial choices of another less sensationalistic and more reputable network news outlet that left me, alas, with similar impressions. And here is the circumstance. An elderly family member, a former encyclopedia editor who by habit filled in the Sunday crossword puzzle in ink the way one might make out a shopping list, suffered a disheartening left-brain stroke that scrambled her ability to read and made word-salad of her speech.

The incident left her receptive language untouched, however. And so, keen to stay connected with the world and experiencing the fear of missing out in its most elemental form, she consumed news eagerly in the ten-minute segments the channel offered.

These segments moved according to formula, beginning with some soothing tale, a heartwarming story about adopted puppies, for example, and then typically careening toward catastrophe. At her bedside, I noticed how the reports marched through a deteriorating litany—a bank heist, for instance, a lethal car chase, a kidnapping, nuclear proliferation, the potential meteor strike, and then finished off, let’s say, with the heat death of the universe. But after all, this came, invariably, the promise of uplift and rescue, “after the commercial break, triplets!” It is hard to look away.

The contrived emotional roller coaster, threat followed by relief followed by more menace, proved riveting. And unhealthy. The internet search version of this preoccupation with dismal news alerts has acquired a fitting term, “doom scrolling.” Doom scrolling leaves doom scrollers feeling thwarted, helpless, exposed, victimized, and isolated.

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Geezing is the Opposite of Playing

With these thoughts above, I do not mean to make light of two concerns—the physical and emotional challenges of aging or the just worry about the various pending trials which deserve our educated attention if public policy is to advance in the near and long term. I am not urging denial, ignorance, resignation, flippancy, or quietism.

Rather, I’m looking for the antonym to preoccupation with doom-for-entertainment, in a word, geezing. Geezing is the opposite of play.

While players keenly look forward to what’s next, geezers find dread. Where players court surprise, geezers find shock. Where players expect pleasure, geezers settle for distress. Geezing leaves geezers bewildered, weakened, vulnerable, and unsettled.

I cannot claim any special expertise in steps to a fulfilling retirement beyond personal experience. Other than that, I liked retirement so much that I retired twice! But I do know this.

Replacing that unsettling 72 minutes daily before the television with active play—reading a good novel, working on a puzzle, writing a friend, attending a laughter yoga group, hiking companionably, biking with a mate, practicing your silly celebrity impression in the mirror or with your pals, and a thousand other worthy distractions, will leave you more content, fitter, better connected, more understanding, and more poised.