We're Old, Retired -- and Apparently Invisible

Retirement | Lifestyle | Generation gap | June 12, 2024

This Week's Quote:

"To be an overachiever, you have to be an over-believer" 
     - Dabo Swinney

Karen
It was a June afternoon in the Rockies just after I retired when we agreed that we must be turning into ghosts.

We had been cycling in the mountains since breaking camp before dawn, and we decided to splurge on a private room in a hostel. We checked in and headed through to the bike-storage area, walking our rig by young hostelers congregated in the common spaces.

We must have been a sight: two bedraggled 60-somethings pushing a tandem bicycle laden like a pack mule.

Except no one seemed to see us.

We crossed the living room, where 20-something hikers with ruddy faces studied their computer screens. No one looked up. We inched through the kitchen, where others were sautéing onions for a group meal. “Excuse us. Sorry to interrupt,” one of us said as we squeezed through. “That sure smells good.”

They turned a bit, giving us space. But not a word. Not a “How’s it going?” nor “Where’d you come from?” nor “Cool rig.” Nor eye contact.

“We’re invisible,” Steve whispered in the hallway. In our room, we plopped on the bed and laughed. “Nobody even acknowledged our existence,” I said.

“We’re too old to see.”

We had noticed a growing feeling of being unseen before, but nothing like this. The episode inspired our secret code words for similar incidents. “We’re invisible,” one of us whispers, and we smile wryly as we recall our hostel encounter.

It’s a code we’re using more often these days as we move deeper into retirement and more often sense that younger people in the same room are looking right through us.

We stepped into a bustling reception at an art gallery a few months ago and instantly saw we were the oldest by decades. The chatting, laughing young crowd parted for us as we headed for the wine table—averting their eyes, it seemed, after giving that quick look that says, “What are these old people doing here?”

At an open meeting at a local nonprofit to which we contribute, we got the same feeling. The staff’s youthful energy was inspiring, but no one approached us.

Sometimes the feeling isn’t so much invisibility as irrelevance. I was with some younger gal pals recently, standing in a tight circle drinking coffee at an event. My friends chattered about their insanely busy workweeks, asking each other how they balance their professional lives with raising children and volunteer work.

Nobody turned to me. I had decades of that frenetic pace. I did it; I survived. Perhaps I might have had a few tips to share? Nope, I thought silently. I’m retired. Too old to be relevant. Unseen.

I’m thinking more often of how my 90-year-old mother must have felt when I pushed her wheelchair into a restaurant. She was sharp mentally but had suffered a bad fall. A restaurant employee turned to me and asked. “Where would she like to sit?”

I turned to my mom, asking her, “Where would you like to sit, Mother?” She wasn’t invisible to me.

To be fair to young people everywhere, not all of them ignore us. At a Montana hostel last year, several geology students about to head into the mountains saw us and eagerly chatted us up in the common room. We asked about their studies and they grilled us on how we managed logistics during the bike trip we were on.

Back in San Francisco, we seem quite visible to many good friends young enough to be our children or grandchildren. We have some over at our house nearly every week. A group in their early 20s had us over for their Super Bowl party this year.

Maybe we’re at a stage where we need to take more initiative with people much younger than we. When I do reach out to younger people and pick their brains, I find they have so much to offer. How about asking their opinions and seeking their advice instead of waiting for them?

We’re certainly going to need younger people more as we navigate retirement. My dad, who lived to nearly 97, increasingly made friends with younger people as he aged. “My friends die off,” he would say, “so I need to make new, younger friends.”

Steve
It happened again at an upscale restaurant near our house recently.

“Are we just imagining this?” I asked Karen.

It was a rare evening of dining out, and by evening I mean 5:30 p.m. There were still many empty tables, yet we were having a heck of a time getting our server’s attention—to order drinks, to order food, to request water refills.

We could see him over there, tarrying cheerfully among young diners at other tables. But my hand gestures had no effect.

“How can he not see us?” I said. Karen grinned and uttered the code: “We’re invisible.”

We later couldn’t flag our server down for even the bill, so we vowed to enjoy the restaurant’s ambience until he saw fit to free up our table for prime time. It took him about a half-hour.

That was plenty of time for us to debate the invisibility theory. Perhaps our server was busy with tables we couldn’t see or had duties other than waiting tables? Maybe the younger tables had tipped him ahead? Had he pegged us as cheapskates when we didn’t order an entire bottle of wine?

We’ve added such debates to our protocol. After invoking the invisibility code, we ask: Are we imagining it? Is this, in fact, happening to everyone here and not just us? Have we been experiencing this kind of unseen-ness all our lives and are just now discovering it?

And the hardest thing to admit: Maybe not everything is about us.

“OK, boomer,” I can just hear it when we lament our newfound invisibility. We’ve gone through life thinking we’re special, and are only now discovering we’re not so different after all.

We may be oversensitive because our visibility is part of our continuing quest to find a new post-workplace identity, an existential task many retirees wrestle with after leaving the work world.

If we’re only imagining invisibility, we’re in good company. We polled some retired friends our age and they quickly vouched for the sense of often being unseen. One observed that the panhandlers downtown often don’t seem to bother approaching seniors.

And it isn’t just us baby boomers who feel an encroaching irrelevance. A long-retired minister I know talks sadly of how church leaders no longer listen to his ideas about the ministry. Several professors emeritus have lamented to me that their college successors didn’t seek their advice. Retired editors know very well that they’re yesterday’s news, but that doesn’t stop them from bemoaning their untapped expertise.

I heard the no-one-listens-anymore refrain so often in the past few decades that I began calling it “The Old Man’s Lament.”

That would never be my lamentation, I vowed at the time.

Credit goes to Karen Kreider Yoder and Stephen Kreider Yoder, published in Wall Street Journal April 3, 2024
 
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This Week’s Author, Mark Bradstreet