Early retirement is all about freedom. The New York Times had an interesting article this weekend about the dark side of liberation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/11/books ... laves.html
While it deals with the societal level, I believe there are parallels with the individual.
Liberation
I am not so sure how a scholarly book about death among freed slaves in the south in 1860's and present people who seek to be free of their working lives actually coincide. Please point out the logical connection. Freed slaves lived in a time where almost anyone getting any kind of an infection or illness would die anyway. These are modern times. If I stepped on glass, I could go to the emergency room, get stitches and some antibiotics and I would probably not die. Back in 1865, I might die of sepsis for a similar accident.
Liberation to a modern person in this society is not as fraught with dangerous ways to die as it did for those poor folks back then.
Liberation to a modern person in this society is not as fraught with dangerous ways to die as it did for those poor folks back then.
I'm glad you mentioned the apparent lack of connection. I was surprised nobody replied. Now that I read it with a couple of weeks of perspective I can see why.
We spent more than a year in South Africa just a few years after the fall of apartheid. On several occasions we met older black South Africans who lamented the change and wanted to go back to a life under apartheid. A few actually said they liked being told what to do and liked being taken care of. To us, this was shocking.
Note: The explosion of HIV and AIDS in South Africa coincided almost exactly with the fall of apartheid and the liberation of black and "colored" (as they are known in SA) South Africans.
Did some psychological factor connected with liberation somehow play a part in this?
The story of my father may help tie these disparate threads together. He was diagnosed with cancer six months after retiring. Again, liberation followed rather quickly by disease. Perhaps a coincidence.... but I don't believe it was. I believe they were connected.
We spent more than a year in South Africa just a few years after the fall of apartheid. On several occasions we met older black South Africans who lamented the change and wanted to go back to a life under apartheid. A few actually said they liked being told what to do and liked being taken care of. To us, this was shocking.
Note: The explosion of HIV and AIDS in South Africa coincided almost exactly with the fall of apartheid and the liberation of black and "colored" (as they are known in SA) South Africans.
Did some psychological factor connected with liberation somehow play a part in this?
The story of my father may help tie these disparate threads together. He was diagnosed with cancer six months after retiring. Again, liberation followed rather quickly by disease. Perhaps a coincidence.... but I don't believe it was. I believe they were connected.
Psychoneuroimmunology may help to explain some of this....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoneuroimmunology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoneuroimmunology
Interesting. Yes, freedom is a strange thing indeed. There's this nice quote by George Bernard Shaw "Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it."
I think that explains a lot about the problem with freedom. Once you are free from whatever it is you found limiting, the question is what are you free for? What now? With nobody else to blame, you are left to your own devices and if the Shaw quote holds any merit, this is the part that people are very afraid of. It's nice to be a smartass saying "Well, if I were free, I would ...", but once you're free, you kind of run out of excuses. Why don't you live the life you want, then?
Leaving the safe cushion called conformity is a tough thing to do. A big part of it is, I think, that you lose the comfort of "everyone else is doing it", you are no longer part of the herd and that is always scary to a herd animal like we are one. Excommunication used to be synonymous with a death sentence.
There's also a nice essay by Jack Parsons called "Freedom is a two-edged sword" that also goes into this topic (next to being a great diatribe for liberalism).
http://www.scribd.com/doc/33173072/Free ... dged-Sword
Basically, it boils down to: it's tough, but worth it.
Maybe these jitters freedom causes is simply the feeling of life running through your veins again, at least that's my favourite interpretation right now.
I think that explains a lot about the problem with freedom. Once you are free from whatever it is you found limiting, the question is what are you free for? What now? With nobody else to blame, you are left to your own devices and if the Shaw quote holds any merit, this is the part that people are very afraid of. It's nice to be a smartass saying "Well, if I were free, I would ...", but once you're free, you kind of run out of excuses. Why don't you live the life you want, then?
Leaving the safe cushion called conformity is a tough thing to do. A big part of it is, I think, that you lose the comfort of "everyone else is doing it", you are no longer part of the herd and that is always scary to a herd animal like we are one. Excommunication used to be synonymous with a death sentence.
There's also a nice essay by Jack Parsons called "Freedom is a two-edged sword" that also goes into this topic (next to being a great diatribe for liberalism).
http://www.scribd.com/doc/33173072/Free ... dged-Sword
Basically, it boils down to: it's tough, but worth it.
Maybe these jitters freedom causes is simply the feeling of life running through your veins again, at least that's my favourite interpretation right now.
Felix... yes! It is both terrifying and exhilarating.
The Shaw quote is spot on. I especially like the herd analogy. No longer can we use status (everyone-else) as an excuse because we have no one to answer to but ourselves.
I can't imagine life without those jitters. It is the difference between simply living and being alive.
The Shaw quote is spot on. I especially like the herd analogy. No longer can we use status (everyone-else) as an excuse because we have no one to answer to but ourselves.
I can't imagine life without those jitters. It is the difference between simply living and being alive.
Re: Liberation
Today Krugman mentioned the study Jacob linked to in the 'how to measure health' thread and he made a few interesting points.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/09/opini ... style.html
Basically, white Americans are, in increasing numbers, killing themselves, directly or indirectly. Suicide is way up, and so are deaths from drug poisoning and the chronic liver disease that excessive drinking can cause. We’ve seen this kind of thing in other times and places – for example, in the plunging life expectancy that afflicted Russia after the fall of Communism. But it’s a shock to see it, even in an attenuated form, in America.
and
So what is going on? In a recent interview Mr. Deaton suggested that middle-aged whites have “lost the narrative of their lives.” That is, their economic setbacks have hit hard because they expected better. Or to put it a bit differently, we’re looking at people who were raised to believe in the American Dream, and are coping badly with its failure to come true.
---
People had certain expectations about how their middle years would play out. They were slaves to the system but the system set them free to fend for themselves. Their expectations proved to be very wrong. So wrong that it is killing them in the same way it killed real slaves after they were freed.
From the article linked above about, "Sick From Freedom".
He is also not shy about drawing out his work’s contemporary relevance. His dissertation included an epilogue about AIDS, another epidemic, he said, that broke out shortly after a moment of liberation (in this case of gay people), was blamed on the victims and was largely ignored by the federal government.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/09/opini ... style.html
Basically, white Americans are, in increasing numbers, killing themselves, directly or indirectly. Suicide is way up, and so are deaths from drug poisoning and the chronic liver disease that excessive drinking can cause. We’ve seen this kind of thing in other times and places – for example, in the plunging life expectancy that afflicted Russia after the fall of Communism. But it’s a shock to see it, even in an attenuated form, in America.
and
So what is going on? In a recent interview Mr. Deaton suggested that middle-aged whites have “lost the narrative of their lives.” That is, their economic setbacks have hit hard because they expected better. Or to put it a bit differently, we’re looking at people who were raised to believe in the American Dream, and are coping badly with its failure to come true.
---
People had certain expectations about how their middle years would play out. They were slaves to the system but the system set them free to fend for themselves. Their expectations proved to be very wrong. So wrong that it is killing them in the same way it killed real slaves after they were freed.
From the article linked above about, "Sick From Freedom".
He is also not shy about drawing out his work’s contemporary relevance. His dissertation included an epilogue about AIDS, another epidemic, he said, that broke out shortly after a moment of liberation (in this case of gay people), was blamed on the victims and was largely ignored by the federal government.
Re: Liberation
I once read that women with 7 or more children were the least likely individuals to commit suicide. Makes perfect sense. If you are the mother of 7, you would never have a free moment to contemplate the the luxurious option of suicide. Maybe you could have a drink or two, but then you would likely topple over and fall asleep on the laundry pile for just a minute, and then somebody would yell "MOM, MOM, MOM, Johnny just set the sofa on fire!"
Maybe what is going on here is not due to the symptoms of the economic downturn in terms of not being able to achieve the trappings of success, but rather due to the cause of the economic downturn which is the need for fewer workers. IOW, gut-level response to the core fact of your redundancy. The solution therefore being discovery of your own unique purpose. IOW, find your own 7 babies.
Maybe what is going on here is not due to the symptoms of the economic downturn in terms of not being able to achieve the trappings of success, but rather due to the cause of the economic downturn which is the need for fewer workers. IOW, gut-level response to the core fact of your redundancy. The solution therefore being discovery of your own unique purpose. IOW, find your own 7 babies.
Re: Liberation
I think this is where swinging on vines as jacob mentioned in his journal is important.
One way is FI not for its own sake but as a means to something else as or more difficult than FI e.g. having/raising/homeschooling/adopting children, writing a book, going back to school, saving the world, higher networth goal etc
One way is FI not for its own sake but as a means to something else as or more difficult than FI e.g. having/raising/homeschooling/adopting children, writing a book, going back to school, saving the world, higher networth goal etc
Re: Liberation
I think we need to be careful about reading too much meaning into these statistics, as there seems to be some cherry picking of data and a lack of historical perspective.
Suicide in developed countries invariably increases during times of economic stress and unemployment -- this is nothing new: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/05/ ... ssion.html
But as these graphs show, the recent increases are really not that dramatic and follow a period of decreasing suicides from 1980-2000: https://www.afsp.org/understanding-suic ... nd-figures
"From 1986 to 2000, suicide rates in the U.S. dropped from 12.5 to 10.4 suicide deaths per 100,000 people in the population. Over the next 12 years, however, the rate generally increased and by 2013 stood at 12.6 deaths per 100,000."
So 1986 and 2013 were almost exactly the same with a trough in the middle. But where were the articles circa 2000 about how much progress society had made in reducing suicide? It wasn't really news then and it isn't really news now.
Looking at more of those facts and figures, you can see that suicide rates for whites and males has always been higher than non-whites and females. So, again, this is probably not really news unless you pick a trough and project linearly upward from there.
***********************************************
While I have not done the research myself, my gut instinct ist hat the rise of middle-aged suicides has a lot to do with the entirety of Generation X reaching middle age. It was also a bane of the last "Nomad" generation, the so-called Lost Generation of Ernest Hemingway, which was "the most suicidal cohort in American history." Essentially, the nihilism of our youth turns inward if it has not been conquered. See:
https://books.google.com/books?id=j8QfW ... es&f=false
Suicide in developed countries invariably increases during times of economic stress and unemployment -- this is nothing new: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/05/ ... ssion.html
But as these graphs show, the recent increases are really not that dramatic and follow a period of decreasing suicides from 1980-2000: https://www.afsp.org/understanding-suic ... nd-figures
"From 1986 to 2000, suicide rates in the U.S. dropped from 12.5 to 10.4 suicide deaths per 100,000 people in the population. Over the next 12 years, however, the rate generally increased and by 2013 stood at 12.6 deaths per 100,000."
So 1986 and 2013 were almost exactly the same with a trough in the middle. But where were the articles circa 2000 about how much progress society had made in reducing suicide? It wasn't really news then and it isn't really news now.
Looking at more of those facts and figures, you can see that suicide rates for whites and males has always been higher than non-whites and females. So, again, this is probably not really news unless you pick a trough and project linearly upward from there.
***********************************************
While I have not done the research myself, my gut instinct ist hat the rise of middle-aged suicides has a lot to do with the entirety of Generation X reaching middle age. It was also a bane of the last "Nomad" generation, the so-called Lost Generation of Ernest Hemingway, which was "the most suicidal cohort in American history." Essentially, the nihilism of our youth turns inward if it has not been conquered. See:
https://books.google.com/books?id=j8QfW ... es&f=false
Re: Liberation
I don't believe the dates match up. The study defined middle aged as 45-54. The first GenXers turned 45 in 2010. Suicides and overdoses shot up a decade before they (we) hit middle age.Dragline wrote:
While I have not done the research myself, my gut instinct ist hat the rise of middle-aged suicides has a lot to do with the entirety of Generation X reaching middle age. It was also a bane of the last "Nomad" generation, the so-called Lost Generation of Ernest Hemingway, which was "the most suicidal cohort in American history." Essentially, the nihilism of our youth turns inward if it has not been conquered.
-
jacob
- Site Admin
- Posts: 17140
- Joined: Fri Jun 28, 2013 8:38 pm
- Location: USA, Zone 5b, Koppen Dfa, Elev. 620ft, Walkscore 77
- Contact:
Re: Liberation
http://livingafi.com/2015/11/06/done-detoxing/ ... seems to have solved that problem?