Month: January 2023

Retirement as Utopia/ Life as a Game

Residing in a household where there are diverse reading preferences, I sometimes find myself catching enthusiasm for a book I would have never come across on my own.  Thus it was that I picked up The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia by Bernard Suits.  It is a book of philosophy – a very strange book of philosophy – wherein the speaker is, surprisingly, Aesop’s grasshopper (from “The Ant and the Grasshopper”).  Now, Aesop’s moral was that we should work hard like the ant to prepare for winter and not play around all summer like the grasshopper.  Suits’s Grasshopper, however, thinks that play is the thing – or, specifically, games are the thing.  And Suits spends much of the book on proofs and definitions concerning games, all of which are more interesting than you might think, though not the parts that fascinate me the most.

What I am most interested in is Suits’s chapter on utopia (as he defines it).  What would we do in a world where all our needs are met?  Basic physical requirements met, no need to earn a living, no need to prove ourselves?  Here is what Suits says:

For I suspect that playing (genuine) games is precisely what economically and psychologically autonomous individuals [read adequately housed, fed, and medicated without working] would find themselves doing, and perhaps the only things they would find themselves doing.  (165)

Now, the Grasshopper admits that people might do things like chop down trees or till gardens for the “fun of it,” but claims that our relationship to those things would change.  They would become games or play, and we would be happier for it.

Bear with me.  If a sufficiently funded retirement (and I mean sufficient to cover the basic costs of life sustenance, and not necessarily six cruises a year) can be thought of as a kind of utopia, what would it mean to think of our lives in terms of games, in terms of play?  Believe it or not, I think this is a serious question.  Would you be happier if you didn’t take life so seriously?  I’m talking about the day-to-day stuff here; this is not an argument for trivializing climate change or anarchy.

When we “play” games, we win and lose and still look forward to the next game.  It is not the end of the world if my husband beats me at gin rummy or a grandchild beats me at the very first level of a video game (as grandchildren always do).  I accept the terms of the game, including the fact that I might not win, and still enjoy playing it.

Camus said that the fundamental question in the face of life’s (seeming) absurdity was whether to commit suicide.  And once we decide to live (and he assures us that is what we should decide), we must somehow create meaning in a (seemingly) meaningless or absurd life.  Isn’t this what we do with games, with play – create some kind of pleasure and meaning from defining the terms under which we will play and then viewing the game in a positive manner?  Mightn’t life be easier if we could think of it as some kind of game?

When I was working, I always regretted that I could not take my work life less seriously – I could have worked longer and enjoyed it more.  But in work, one is less able to define one’s own rules, decide which games to play.  I have more latitude now, but am not sure that I am really taking advantage of it.

Now I am aware that while all work and no play can make Jack a dull boy, the reverse is also true.  That is why it is not just play, I am talking about, but games, where there is the pleasure of striving, but perhaps in a more joyful sense.  Think about playing a board game with friends.  You know it is not serious, but you lose yourself in the play of the game within the limits of the rules.  You don’t consider cheating to win; you don’t stay up at night over misplayed cards (unless you are a championship bridge player) or think you are a better person because you won.  You take the game as it comes and do your best and enjoy the experience.

The theologian John Dominic Crossan says that games are like life in that they have limits.  In life we have all kinds of limits – death being the major one:

I would suggest… that game is a very serious practice session for life and death, or, more precisely, for life towards death….  It is the joy of finitude and the laughter of limitation…. Game teaches us to enjoy the limitation posed by the game itself.  To destroy the limitation is to destroy the game.  Imagine baseball with as many balls as the pitcher wanted and as many strikes as the batter chose. (5)  The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story

The laughter of limitation.  I am reminded of Spinoza, my favorite philosopher, who says that “cheerfulness is always good and can never be excessive.”  Cheerfulness comes from joy and brings joy.  And looking at life as play would seem to be a joyful exercise.

The other interesting exercise that The Grasshopper stimulates is that of thinking about what exactly utopia would look like for us?  In his book, Suits somehow assumes that the government would be straightened out in utopia (which should be enough to worry us about his hold on reality, but he is – one must acknowledge – Canadian and that might make a difference).  What would utopia in what’s left of our lives look like?  What would constitute the best life we could live?  Old folks have lived a long time; we should have some idea of what makes life… joyful.  Suits says utopia  would be people playing games.  I do not entirely agree (after all the grasshopper dies because he has not prepared for the winter), but I think if I could see life as more game-like, I might be happier.

Rituals are one of the games I play in my old age; I create “rules” within which to live my life in such a way to meet at least some of my goals.  You might look at my short story, “Ritual,” to see one example of ways in which structure can add to life and what happens when it is interrupted.

New Year’s Resolutions in Old Age

The title of my blog site (When I Come to be Old) comes from a list of Jonathan Swift’s resolutions, made when he was a young adult, about how he was determined to act (or more specifically not to act) when he was old.  His list is worth reviewing by us seniors, just to see how the younger set may perceive us (no comfort there).  This new year, however, I am more interested in thinking about what kind of resolutions old folks should make about themselves?

What kinds of resolutions should old people make?  If you do a search on the web, most of what you will find are suggestions to improve your mental or physical health: take up crosswords, walk at least a mile a day, eat more vegetables.  Yes, of course.  These are common sense maintenance items, and we all are fully aware that learning a foreign language will work our brain harder than watching Brit Box.  I surely make such resolutions, but they usually (in my case) take the form of the negative.  No more than an hour of TV per day, no dessert unless I have walked three miles that day, no more than one restaurant meal a week – and so on.  Games we play with ourselves which (hopefully) make us a little healthier without undue deprivation.

On my doctor’s suggestion upon my query about any possibility of avoiding my mother’s dementia, I have gone back to French. (I once knew enough to pass a translation exam for a graduate degree, but those brain cells seem to have disappeared.) I am using Duolingo and pledged myself to a modest fifteen minutes a day.  I don’t have to worry about reminders; Duo is a pest.  I also continually contrive and amend reading lists and rules (e.g., at least one literary work of fiction or nonfiction for every mystery novel).

But how about other hopes and goals other than those aimed at life extension?  There are at least a couple of other categories.  How about creative endeavors?  Not to be published or hung on our grandchildren’s walls, but for our own satisfaction in doing something which draws on our experience, something, perhaps, that we have always wanted to do.  Most of us know what that means for us – which could be anything from adventuresome cooking to bonsai gardening to a full-length novel.  Here, too, I have found it necessary to set concrete goals for an enterprise which is not concrete at all in its reason or its results.  When I first started to keep a journal over twenty years ago, my resolution was ten single-spaced pages per month – and if I put it off, I had to write all ten on the last day.  It never came to that – but since that time I have produced the minimum (usually far more).  Similarly, when I started a blog, it was with the determination to post a blog at least twice a month and a new story every six weeks.  I have succeeded, at least on the average.

But there are more personal ambitions to do with our states of mind – our souls, if you will.  One of my resolutions this year is to start going back and reviewing my journal from the beginning to see what I can learn about myself.  (See my blog, “Rules of One’s Own,” for the wonderful Marion Milner’s advice in this regard.)

And how about resolutions that have to do with the very fact that we are aging, facing changes we cannot (wholly at least) control, coming closer to the end, however we might define it?  “Do not go gentle into that good night” was a resolve, made not by an old man, but by a younger man (Dylan Thomas) on behalf of his dying father.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my children making resolutions for me.  And I don’t want to spend my last years in a “burning and raging” against the “dying of the light.”

Kay Boyle was already old when she formulated her “Advice to the Old (Including Myself).” Boyle, like Swift, warns us about not dwelling on old times or regaling others with our aches or disappointments – but she ends with a challenge to battle despair:

Have no communion with despair; and, at the end,

Take the old fury in your empty arms, sever its veins,

And bear it fiercely, fiercely to the wild beast’s lair.

This is a different kind of battle – not against inevitable death and age, but against self-generated despair, not against the reality of existence but against an antagonistic attitude toward what is.  For me, it is not so much a battle (who wants life to be a battle?) as a matter of – resolution.

Resolution is a word with many meanings; at the new year, we often mean it in the sense of “firmness of purpose.”  But it can also mean the “solution to a problem” (as in “the dentist resolved my toothache”) or the “degree of sharpness with which we can see something” (think of the resolution level of your monitor or TV).  All the senses of resolution are related: firmness of purpose is only of use if we can see sharply enough to define the issue we are trying to resolve, and know what action on our part will “resolve” it.

Old age is, in itself, not a problem.  Grief or despair about the changes that old age brings can be a problem and is worth resolving.   But before we can resolve it, we must examine and define it.  Yes, bad habits can come with age and these need to be guarded against (just ask Jonathan Swift), but that is true of all times of life.  And again, perhaps the real sin is to despair at the facts of existence. I spent my childhood wishing to be older; I spent much of my middle age looking forward to retirement.  I am trying hard not to miss the opportunity to enjoy and make the most of my old age.  My resolutions will be to understand my own nature and changes (read the old journals), learn (French and patience, although not necessarily in that order), and work toward some form of resolution with age, provisional though it may be.

For a fictionalized account of a different kind of resolution, you might try “Nothing New.“