Shake It Off!

...the antidote to ennui

Sometimes I think I’m depressed. Sometimes I think I am simply bored. But really, I think it is a sense of ennui that comes from being retired. Ennui is a term that feels like a 19^th century, hand on brow, refusal to eat, rainy day kind of picture of a woman in a long dress on a window seat in a crumbling mansion on a hill; or a guy in a frock coat and high collar standing listlessly by a hearth with a drinks glass in his hand pondering the embers of the fire.

But ennui is a describable state that feels like a car stuck in neutral and that is the way this world can feel these days. The dictionary says ennui is “A deep seated, lingering feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction resulting from a lack of excitement or purpose – a jaded, passive “soul-destroying” sadness, a “stuck in slow motion” feeling.” Or to call it by a big name – Existential Weariness.

Part of us thanks God that when we reach the end of our working life, we are able to slow down and do things that make us happy. But the other part of us mourns the loss of purpose that comes when we stop working. For decades we were people whose days were filled with purpose - at work, at home, in our communities. Now there’s a feeling of being sidelined and we have to work in a different way to reconcile our extra time with still being part of the struggling world. Different struggles as the years go by, to be sure, but at the risk of trying to justify what some have called boring days, there is a time and place for work and struggle and purpose and a time to relax and enter a new phase of life that allows us to grow during the decades (yes decades) yet to come in a different way.

When people retired at 65 and died by the time they were 70, retirement years were few and condensed. Now we retire at 67 and could live thirty more years! How we enjoy those years and how we fill them with meaning and joy is a dilemma not yet resolved, at least among the baby boomers now facing and yes, learning to enjoy them without guilt! Learning to live with ennui and also turn it into a positive is the story of our lives! We are a group that does not like the BS of saying we like to feel listless and boring but we also don’t like feeling guilty about working for 50 years and then enjoying our lives!

One of the other points about ennui that the dictionary makes is that it often happens to people who live lives of comfort! Well, that brings me up short. People who are still struggling to make ends meet (think gasoline and groceries and day care) don’t have time for the indulgence of ennui. They also are not yet at the phase of their lives when they can enjoy the indulgence of time to relax. And people who are working and taking care of kids and parents (and sometimes grandparents) don’t have the time or the energy to sink into listlessness and “dissatisfaction resulting from a lack of excitement or purpose.”

Two milennials and a GenX’er have three different responses to ennui.

1. Keep on truckin’! Taylor Swift, the ultimate Millennial, would tell us to “Shake it Off!”

I keep cruisin’
Can’t stop, won’t stop groovin’
It’s like I got this music in my mind
Sayin’, “It’s gonna be alright”

‘Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play
And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate
Baby, I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake
I shake it off, I shake it off !

2. Get Over It! AOC, another Millennial exactly two months younger than Taylor Swift, would say - “waah, waah, waah.”

3. Is There a Problem? Cillian Murphy is the GenX rish actor who starred in “Oppenheimer.” He will turn 50 this month. He is a periodically busy actor but in his down time, he says “I love being at home. My life is very simple. I read a lot of books. I watch a lot of films. I listen to a lot of music. I walk the dog. I cook with my family. Yes, I’m boring.”

What can we do about ennui/boredom/guilt/indulgence to keep on truckin’, shake it off, or just enjoy it? Take more iron? More protein? More ice cream? More chardonnay? More prayer? More trashy airport novels?

I read today that non-fiction book sales are falling precipitously these days, year over year. Booksellers and publishers are wondering why and theorize that perhaps we can read an AI summary or a major book about science or history and don’t need to read the whole 600-page book complete with footnotes. They point more eagerly to the rise in fiction success and I am right on board with that. Escape, escape, escape!

I also find that routine helps me out of the listlessness, the Existential Weariness. That does not mean I get up early and run five miles. But I do get up and feed the cats and read email and glance over the high culture that Google has to offer for the day and play a few online games like Wordle, Hurdle, Spelling Bee and Letterbox! And as a first-every-day bit of relationship, share my Wordle success with two people. Then it’s on to a bit of reading – fiction and non-fiction before paperwork of one kind or another. That works fine until lunch is over and then there’s usually a meeting or an event or two or errands to see to before dinner. Then TV, then sleep.

The ennui shows itself in the minutes early in the morning before I put my feet on the floor and the minutes after the lights go out at night. In those moments I have found that to ward off the dark side of ennui, I think about people who need to be in God’s care and the act of thinking about them and “lifting them into God’s presence” as a nightly litany, helps me go to sleep without falling into the recriminations of each day and the worries that are not solved late at night.

As retired or nearly retired people, there’s a balance to be struck between enjoying the phase of life we are in and

1. not succumbing to feelings of guilt stemming from being able to get to the very point we have worked all our lives to get to, and

2. not dissing people who aren’t there yet and still enjoy themselves, or

3. not crowing about our achievement to people who are not able to retire yet. This is a delicate balance for a generation trained to be mindful of others and not to be judgemental. Yes, our world is in a chaotic jumble and we wonder how we will survive. But we will and we find ways to overcome this jaded sadness and carry on throughout whatever years remain for us. Either we shake it off and keep moving or we find ways to get over it or we relax into it and enjoy our days!

I am talking to myself as much as I am talking to you! If it isn’t clinical depression then we can do things to have happy days, meaningful relationships, mind-improving and healthy-body activities. And it is up to us to find which ones work best for us as we walk the tightrope of age vs youth, struggle vs indulgence, self-pity vs triumph.