I will never be able to retire. Several friends and I repeated this observation in a recent discussion. These friends are all Gen Xers, my age or slightly younger. We live in different parts of the country, come from very different family backgrounds, and have pursued different careers. We are all college-educated fathers born after the assassination of John F Kennedy and before the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. We have elderly parents still with us; each of us is in that now-familiar sandwich of middle age, mindful of responsibilities to still-young offspring and increasingly frail forebears.
The other similiarity is that, in classic Gen X fashion, we accept our fate with calm resignation and at least a dash of humor. Ours is not a revolutionary cohort. That doesn’t mean we don’t complain. We do. Unlike the young, however, we do not simmer with anger at the way we were robbed of what should have been ours. For the most part, we are not planning to “burn it all down” merely because the state has not provided the security we once imagined we would enjoy.
I am the son of two college professors. Two college professors who had tenure in California, and who retired with pensions. I felt born to teach because of the examples I saw growing up, and because I found I did have a natural affinity for lecturing. I also wanted the security of a tenured professorship. The idea of a part-time job (four days a week, thirty-six weeks a year) that paid handsomely with generous benefits and minimal supervision? It was not hard to want that.
I was 27 when I was hired full-time at Pasadena City College. In those first few years, I was still under the impression that I wasn’t going to live to see forty, so I did not give much time to retirement. In 1998, at age 31, I received tenure. I also got sober and started doing Freudian analysis several afternoons a week. I began to think that I might have an actual future. I started to contemplate a retirement plan.
Some numbers. At the time, a professor could retire after age 60 and receive a pension derived from the following formula: 2.4 x years of service = percentage of one’s final salary. I did some math. If I stayed until age 65, I’d have taught 38 years, and would receive 91.2% of what I’d been making before I retired. Given that I’d be Medicare eligible, and I’d have a private retirement account to supplement the pension, I’d retire with my full salary in perpetuity. (The state has generous cost-of-living adjustments.)
When I resigned, the health insurance for my family went away. I was in and out of psychiatric hospitals. I had to feed my family and pay medical and legal bills. With no alternative, I took the lump-sum cash-out of my pensions. That kept the family afloat a short while, but with disastrous tax consequences.
More numbers: I cashed out approximately 192K to pay debts, bills, and keep the family afloat. Today, more than a decade later, I owe 210K in interest and penalties to the IRS and the Franchise Tax Board. (Please don’t suggest offers in compromise. We have tried. Unlike those cute ads on the radio for “Optima Tax Relief,” the agencies are not as amenable to compromise as one is led to imagine.)
Here's the thing: it’s all my own damn fault. When I made the decision to go back to sleeping with students in February 2008, five years before I resigned, I set in motion a chain of events that would end with no retirement savings, massive tax debt, and a guarantee that my children would spend years in precarity. (They have always had a roof over their heads, food on the table, clothes on their backs. They have even had braces. That is due chiefly to their mother’s incredible determination, and to a lesser extent, to my dogged commitment to do what I could to make amends for the unforgivable.) Heloise will be off to college in less than three years, and I have no idea how her parents’ huge and ancient debts will impact her application for aid.
I am very grateful that I have found a way to make a living. Things have gotten a bit better since I started full-time ghostwriting, though the precarity and anxiety is a constant. I am grateful that I respond to guilt and anxiety like a plough horse to the whip. I work all the harder as a result of my worries, and all the more tenaciously because I know I have moral as well as financial debts I can never repay.
I am grateful too that my primary negative emotions are directed internally. Though the college did treat my family shabbily by throwing me out with so little, I accept the fault is far more mine than theirs. I am, to use the old AA phrase I borrow often, the architect of my own adversity. The self-hatred is because I know that I have created so much adversity for my children. Sometimes, I comfort myself – just a little – with the thought that they get to witness a reckless, self-indulgent, pompous fool reinvent himself. If nothing else, they will know I never stopped loving them, that I never quit, and – crucially – I never blamed anyone else for my predicament.
Self-loathing is tiresome, but in my own internal moral hierarchy, it ranks well above self-pity, entitlement, and bitterness!
My friends who will not be able to retire did not, as far as I know, behave as indefensibly and recklessly as I did. They have far more cause than I to resent the societal failures that have left them with no safety net. And yet, they too don’t complain. They get on with the task with good humor and a dash of resignation. They inspire me.
The debts are real. The consequences endure. And I keep on going anyway, with more good cheer than this essay suggests, grateful that my body is still strong, that my fingers can still type, that my strange brain can still compose sentences for which others will generously pay. I am lucky as can be.
The writer’s word processor is mightier than the Walmart greeter’s handwave.
No doubt you’d paid Union dues throughout the span of your teaching career, and they did not represent you or give you advice to take your case all the way to arbitration?
Employees who suffer from drug addictions and mental illness are usually protected and deserve to be heard and not forced out!