Lately, I’ve been (once again) inspired by the concept of the “digital garden” as an alternative to a blog, but I haven’t had much luck figuring out what I wanted to explore in this way. I’m a long-time blogger, having started Theatre Ideas in the fall of 2005, and writing on it as well as a number of other sites since then. And while my blogging has always had an interdisciplinary slant, the central topic has always been theater.
In 2020, at the age of 62, I retired from my job as a Drama professor. At first, I kept very busy, first editing my late friend and mentor’s book Mark Twain and Me: Unlearning Racism, followed by several books I’d always wanted to write but lacked the time to do so: Building a Sustainable Theater, DIY Theater MFA, Play Analysis in Action_, and finally a full rewrite of my textbook Introduction to Play Analysis.
And then, well, I found that I was done writing about theater. Oh, I tried to continue, writing Theater Ideas (notice the subtle change from “TheatRE” to “TheatER” to differentiate the two blogs – clever, huh?) on Substack, and then on my own website in conjunction with my posts here on Micro.blog.
But over the past year, I’ve finally had to admit to myself that, well, I just don’t have anything more to say about theater. Which, after doing theater for over 50 years, came as a bit of a shock. I had successfully delayed having to deal with the Big Retirement Question “who am I now that I’m not working?” for five years, but now…here I am. Actually, the question isn’t about my identity, but rather “what is going to fill up the theater-sized hole in my mind?” I still love writing and I’d like to continue doing it, I still have a great deal of curiosity, but I haven’t been able to settle on anything long enough to have anything worthwhile to say about it. So instead I wander the halls of my mind, picking up random books as I go, and basically just bumping into my own intellectual walls.
Today, as I drove in to work out at Planet Fitness, I was listening to an episode of Derek Thompson’s excellent podcast Plain English entitled “How Metrics Make Us Miserable," in which Thompson interviews philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, author of the book The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. As I listened to Nguyen talk about the effects of two ranking systems dominating his discipline of philosophy (rankings of the prestige of journals, and rankings of philosophy departments – who knew? Is there something similar for theater journals and departments?), it gradually dawned on me that the real struggle of retirement, for me at least, may be that, after years of playing The Game, I looked up to see that the clock is at 00:00, the scoreboard has been unplugged, and so I have no way of determining “How Am I Doing?” If I spend one day painting the living room, the next day napping and watching the rain fall, and a third day writing a blog post, each day is equally OK. There’s not going to be an end-of-year evaluation in which my accomplishments are weighed.
So: I now find myself standing outside the toxic capitalist emphasis on productivity and prestige, and I had to answer to no one except myself. Which seems like it would be freeing, but it’s a horrifying thought, because I am way more demanding than any department chair or dean I ever worked for. I’m not someone who dreamt of retiring so that I could play golf or fish or garden or travel; instead, I dreamt of finally having time to read and write and think, but suddenly I found that I had exhausted my interest in my main topic in five years time! Now what???
Today, I thought: maybe that’s my topic, my digital garden, my learning in public: how to retire. Or rather, how do I retire? How do I play the game without a scoreboard, just for the joy of playing? It’s not anything particularly original – there are quite a few books and podcasts on this topic already, I suspect, and I have no intention of trying to break into that market. But it seems like it might help ME – might be a way to justify writing without worrying about whether anybody else is reading. Puttering with a Purpose!
There are a lot of ways to go with this, and platforms to use. Maybe that’s for next time. For now, we’ll see if this can keep my attention, and maybe I’ll even learn something about myself!