One of the unexpected indignities of retirement is that your opinions do not retire with you.
They remain disgracefully active.
Mine still get up early. They stretch. They peer through the curtains. They make remarks about roadworks, language, leadership, packaging, modern chair design, and the declining standard of signs in public buildings.
The difference is that nobody has scheduled a meeting to receive them.
This is probably good for civilisation. It is less good for me.
For years there were places where my opinion had somewhere to go. Not always welcome places. Sometimes it went into a room and came back with bruises. But there was a structure. A question would be asked. Someone would say, “What do you think?” and I would perform the ancient male ritual of pretending to consider carefully what I had already decided.
Then work ends. The machinery stops. And there you are, still full of views, with no official outlet except muttering at the news and developing uncharitable thoughts about self-checkouts.
There is comedy in this. There must be, otherwise we would all become unbearable by Thursday.
Being asked for your opinion is not only about ego. It is about belonging to the decision. When the asking stops, you discover how much of adulthood was made of being consulted.
That’s the free half. The rest — what I’ve actually decided to do about a head still full of judgement nobody’s requested — is for paying subscribers over on The Old Grey Thinker on Substack, where I write a few times a week about retirement, ageing, and the general indignity of no longer being consulted.
Read the rest and subscribe: https://theoldgreythinker.substack.com/p/nobody-needs-my-opinion-which-is
If it lands, there’s also a short guide — Nobody is Watching Now! — in the Library: https://greythinker.gumroad.com/l/nobody
And if you’d rather just buy me a coffee for the trouble: https://buymeacoffee.com/theoldgreythinker