Welcome to High School Graduation 2.0

Retirement has less pomp and way more circumstances, but you still need to take the stage in stride

Like graduation, retirement gives you a fresh opportunity and all sorts of potential dangers — and you quickly find out that a lot of your previous lessons are irrelevant. So how do you thrive? Learn from prestigious scholars like Henry David Thoreau (“simplify, simplify”) and Curly from “City Slickers.” 

High school loves generalists. An A counts the same whether it’s in some boring subject or your life’s passion. But the real world doesn’t grade on a curve — it throws you one. 

That amalgamation of A’s won’t help once you’re competing with people whose talent far exceeds their GPAs. And if you don’t find your “one thing,” you may be drifting for years.

Retirement is an equal opportunity nonemployer. Pursue a passion, go back to being a generalist, mix and match, whatever. But if you don’t find something, you still might end up in “drifting for years” land. Or its neighbor, “gone too soon” land. 

Both ages can be brutal for those who crave feedback and reassurance. You don’t get exams and pop quizzes and all those ego-massaging gold stars. You might not even get the chance to emotionally prepare yourself for being (gulp) average. 

When you retire, nobody’s going to sit you down once a year and say, “Wow! You really do a great job on those Grand Slam breakfasts. A lot of people would lose their stamina after the bacon and eggs, but you plow through those pancakes like they aren’t even there!”

But there’s a wonderful trade-off: Nobody, including you, gets to obsess about your weaknesses. When notoriously lousy student Albert Einstein found one thing he thrived at, nobody cared if he was weak in zoology. 

Gallup researchers were writing 20 years ago that the best bosses focus on employees’ strengths — particularly when it comes to star workers. If they could work around weaknesses rather than dwelling on them, the potential was almost unlimited. 

I know newspaper editors who crammed young talent into a crime-and-city-council-meeting mold. The theory is that people should learn a little about everything, but that deadens their passion. I worked 45 years and never once started a story with, “The Pythagorean Theorem, a Wilhelm scream and Schrödinger’s cat walk into a bar …”

Retirement gives you a hall pass to be comfortable with yourself. The New York Times reported that older people (not necessarily retirees) have coped with the pandemic better than younger ones have. They do better in normal times, too, as our blind ambition surrenders to reality. “They have come to accept themselves for who they are,” the story says, “rather than who they’re supposed to become.”

If you were a sponge for information during high school and college, graduation starts Round 1 of squeezing that sponge, letting your mental CliffsNotes drip away so they can be replaced with more relevant information about parenting and promotions and polyps. 

When you retire, you squeeze that sponge again, and maybe get rid of a lot of bacteria you’ve built up. But too many people throw away the sponge. 

Yes, retirement lets you work for your favorite boss, but here’s the catch: A great boss doesn’t let you get lazy. About 25% of people 65 and older still have never used the internet, and that means their technophobe boss is letting them down.

Society is leaving them behind, with fewer entertainment choices, weaker customer service, less access to COVID vaccines, more isolation. If you do use the internet, try something new once a month: TikTok, Twitter, crossword puzzles, whatever. You may waste a couple of hours, but maybe you’ll discover something that enhances your life.

When you got out of school, you didn’t stop learning — you just learned in a different way. This is a great time for history to repeat itself. 

Murphy Slaw

Something old: A 79-year-old who begins one song with “When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school” just sold his catalog of music to Sony. Financial terms were not disclosed, but several other artists have brought in more than $100 million for their works. Here is Paul Simon decades ago, discussing “Mrs. Robinson” on “The Dick Cavett Show.”

Something new: The FCC already plans to make 988 a suicide prevention lifeline in July 2022, but a fresh proposal would let people text to it as well. Too bad the wheels of government grind so slowly; it might have been particularly useful during the COVID era (which we hope will have eased tremendously 15 months from now). Still, any lifeline is a good lifeline. 

Something borrowed: If you want to plug yourself in to another region of the country — or another country — consider Radio Garden. It features stations from Minot to Minsk, from Finland to Fiji, from Alabama to Bamako. There’s even Antártica FM (OK, technically it’s from the south of Chile, but come on).

Something blue: The long arm of the law caught up with Marc Feren Claude Biart, an Italian fugitive living in the Dominican Republic. It wasn’t all that hard: He had started a cooking channel on YouTube. The videos didn’t show his face, but police recognized the tattoos on his hands.