Something happened in a shoe shop last week that I haven't quite been able to shake.
I was buying walking boots. Nothing dramatic. The kind of errand that should take twenty minutes and generate no philosophical consequences whatsoever. But while the very helpful young woman explained the waterproofing and the ankle support and the aggressive sole pattern — all information I'd requested and was grateful for — a quiet voice arrived from somewhere in the mid-1990s and pointed out that I no longer have a salary.
I bought the boots. They're excellent. I've already worn them twice and my ankles have never felt more supported. That's not the point.
The point is that buying them felt strange in a way I hadn't expected and haven't been able to fully articulate until now.
Retirement, I think, was supposed to feel like permission. You've earned it — that's literally how people describe it. You've earned your retirement. The language implies that the spending phase is the reward for the earning phase, and therefore the spending should feel natural, self-evidently justified, perhaps even pleasurable in a way that's been deferred for decades.
What nobody mentions is that for a lot of us, the spending only felt justified because of the earning. The holiday was fine because you'd worked for it. The treat was allowed because you'd had a hard quarter. Remove the earning, and the whole justification structure falls away.
I don't think this is irrational. I think it's the entirely predictable consequence of spending forty years in a culture that attached self-worth to productive output, and then expecting that attachment to dissolve at a date of your choosing just because you've filed the right paperwork.
It doesn't dissolve. It just goes quiet. And then it turns up in shoe shops.
What I'm slowly, imperfectly working out is that the spending needs a new story. Not a salary to justify it, but something else — time well spent, experiences that deepen something, contributions that don't have a price tag. The boots are part of walking somewhere that matters, which is a different kind of legitimacy.
It's a work in progress. Eleven months in.
Read the full essay at theoldgreythinker.substack.com
If the writing helped, some readers buy me a Pot of Yorkshire Tea. I’m English and run my days on tea. It’s one of the ways I keep this work independent. I appreciate every kindness — truly.