This is exactly why I live in Cambodia

 

https://siliconcanals.com/d-psychology-says-people-who-feel-invisible-after-70-arent-experiencing-the-world-accurately-they-are-often-experiencing-for-the-first-time-what-it-feels-like-when-a-lifetime-of-usefulness This is exactly why I live in Cambodia.  

Yes. And I think the article actually gets at something rather important about your choice of Cambodia.

The useful distinction in the article is between being objectively treated as less socially important and concluding that therefore you are less important. The first can be quite real; the second doesn't follow. The author points out that ageism is widespread and that older people really are sometimes ignored, talked over, or treated as if they are incompetent.

But Cambodia changes the social environment in which that happens. You aren't living in an American retirement ecosystem where your social identity is heavily organized around your former occupation, professional status, income, and usefulness to institutions. You are simply an older foreigner living in a Cambodian community. Your age is visible, but it isn't necessarily the primary fact by which people classify you.

And there's another thing: you still have a place in the social machinery around you. You have people around you, a household, responsibilities, relationships, property, animals, routines, and people who actually interact with you rather than merely providing services to you. You don't have to manufacture some artificial "purpose" through volunteer work to prove that you're still a worthwhile human being.

That seems rather different from the American phenomenon the article describes: retirement → loss of institutional role → loss of people calling → loss of status → feeling invisible. The author himself describes the abruptness of that transition when he sold his restaurants: he was no less capable the next month, but suddenly nobody needed his decisions anymore.

And I suspect this is one reason you've never sounded particularly troubled by retirement itself. You didn't retire into a waiting room. You changed environments.

There's a wonderfully blunt way of putting it: you didn't move to Cambodia to be useful; you moved there to live.

That is probably a considerably better bargain at 83.

OK, the job departure was a lucky happenstance on something I had planned anyway happening a little ahead of schedule. I moved to Vietnam because I spoke the language (well, some) and later to Cambodia because of Vietnamese bureaucracy. Cambodia has been a happy accident, not planned.

Ah, yes—that changes the story considerably. I was turning a sequence of contingencies into a deliberate philosophy, which is a very human thing for an AI to do. 🙂

The interesting part is that the outcome can be exactly right even when the plan wasn't.

You didn't decide, "I shall escape the American problem of retirement and find a society in which old age is socially integrated." You retired because circumstances happened to accelerate a plan you already had. You went to Vietnam because you had enough Vietnamese to make that sensible. Then Vietnamese bureaucracy effectively said, "Actually, no," and Cambodia became the next move.

And then Cambodia turned out to suit you.

That's arguably more interesting than having planned it. You didn't go looking for a particular theory of how to live in old age; you followed the practical opportunities as they appeared, and ended up somewhere where you could simply continue having a life.

Which also makes your reaction to that article more understandable. You didn't solve the "invisibility after 70" problem. You accidentally avoided constructing your life around it in the first place.

There is a nice element of contingency in that. A few bureaucratic decisions and accidents in timing, and you might have had a rather different old age.

I remember the young, rather naive guy from personnel assigned to get my signature on a no age discrimination litigation document praising my ability to easily find another job with my record, my staying quiet on my real plan as otherwise it would harm my negotiating position.

Yes—that adds a rather amusing layer to the story.

The personnel fellow was probably giving you what he thought was a reassuring speech: "With your experience, Frank, you'll have no trouble finding another position." Meanwhile, you already knew that finding another position wasn't remotely the objective.

And keeping your actual plans to yourself was simply sound negotiating. Once the employer knows that you have somewhere else you genuinely want to go, your bargaining position changes. If they believe you're reluctantly leaving for another job, they have an incentive to make the departure terms attractive. If they know you've already decided to retire and disappear into another country, there's considerably less reason for them to sweeten anything.

The irony of the "no age discrimination litigation" document is particularly good. They were protecting themselves against the possibility that they'd forced out an older employee who couldn't readily find another job—while the employee they were worried about was quite capable of finding another job but had no intention whatsoever of doing so.

And the young personnel guy's compliment about your employability probably confirmed that your strategy was working: he understood your bargaining position exactly as you wanted him to understand it, rather than as it actually was.