Herbert Hoover takes a strong position against retirement.

My son Chris sends that excerpt from "Hoover: An Extraordinary Life in Extraordinary Times" (commission earned).

Is it possible for an American to maintain good health while spending $65 a month on food?

I'm reading "The Fantasy of a Comfy Retirement Has Always Been a Mirage" (NYT), which begins:

On Thursday, a woman named Sharon from Minnesota called into C-SPAN’s “open forum” to express her despair about the cost of living. “I’m 65 years old. I’m legally blind. I’m on disability. I went to my doc, and I lost 28 pounds in the last year. I did not need to lose 28 pounds. I did not try to lose 28 pounds. I lost the 28 pounds because I cannot afford to eat anymore,” Sharon explained, speaking clearly even though she sounded near tears. Because of Trump administration cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and the high cost of groceries, gas and electricity, Sharon only allows herself $65 a month for food....

Of course, that sounds shocking and horrible. I have empathy for Sharon and do not like to see anyone struggling so hard, but I wondered whether it was a least possible to maintain your health while spending only $65 a month. Grok assures me that it is possible. I think we all know what this diet would consist of — lots of oatmeal, rice, beans, potatoes, cabbage, and carrots, along with some apples, bananas, and eggs. It's terrible to allow yourself to lose 28 pounds (that you couldn't spare) before switching to this basic diet or going to a food pantry, but not everyone has enough energy or mental clarity to make the adjustment.

Anyway, to be clear, I'm not saying the government shouldn't help people in this circumstance. On the contrary, I think the country deserves excellent food policy. I'm not a source of advice on what that would be.

"Retirement Plan."

An Oscar-nominated short, by John Kelly:

And here's David Sedaris brilliantly admiring it, in "The Dream of Finishing One’s To-Do List in 'Retirement Plan'/In John Kelly’s animated short film, narrated by Domhnall Gleeson, nothing’s off limits when it comes to thinking about the future—particularly when there’s so much left to do" (The New Yorker):

"Don't worry about, like, squirreling away money for retirement. In, like, 10 or 20 years, it won't matter."

"If any of the things we've said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant."

Elon's advice for near-retirees: Don't save money for retirement. https://t.co/cD54K9OLIJ pic.twitter.com/BHseG7hpn2

— Peter H. Diamandis, MD (@PeterDiamandis) January 9, 2026

That's not a big "if," is it? "If any of the things we've said are true"? He must have said many things, and only one of them needs to be true before his prediction clicks in. Seems like a sure bet. If we assume Elon Musk always tells the truth. And knows the future. But he doesn't know the future, but he confidently asserts his prediction. So we know he doesn't always tell the truth. And yet, in his world, he only needs to be right about ONE thing, for his advice to pan out... if he's right about that only one thing needs to be true concept. 

"There is a reason the world’s gardens are full of benches that nobody ever sits on."

"We aren’t built for leisure or built to relax. Rather, we are built to strive. We still need fulfilling work. The only difference, in retirement, is that we don’t have to worry so much about whether that work comes with a paycheck."

Wrote Jonathan Clements, quoted in "Five Pearls of Wisdom From a Legend of Financial Writing/Jonathan Clements, the longtime Wall Street Journal columnist, died this weekend. Here are some of his best ideas" (NYT).

Speaking of finance, I was just reading: "It was only last summer that women declared they were looking for a man in finance, 6-5, blue eyes. The goal posts appear to have shifted since then. Now, some social media users are extolling the virtues — with varying degrees of sincerity — of settling for a partner to whom they’re not initially attracted. Such a person, the thinking goes, will ultimately treat you better than someone who is more obviously desirable."

That's in "'Shrekking? Intelligence Gaps? When Did We Get So Cruel to Our Lovers? Social media users have coined new, even meaner terms for 'dating down'" (NYT).

"How the Hell To Teach Constitutional Law in 2025: Twenty Questions and No Answers."

Written by Eric Segall, at Dorf on Law.

I don't teach anymore, so I don't need to answer question like this, but I'd actually love the opportunity to work this out, and I'll bet there are a lot of younger law school graduates who have the energy and dedication and brains to figure out how to teach conlaw these days. Maybe those of you who are worn out should consider retiring. Oddly enough, when I decided to retire, it was the fall of 2016, and I was sure that Hillary Clinton was about win the election and that after she appoints the successor to Justice Scalia, with 5 strong liberals on the Supreme Court, constitutional law was going to become very boring.

Much of the bulk of Segall's 20 questions is a longstanding problem in conlaw: There's too much material to cover everything or even to cover anything with enough depth. But the argument that we've got a special problem right now is summed up in the first 2 questions:

"My favorite part of Dead Week is getting up early, drinking coffee, and looking ahead to the long stretch of nothingness that fills the day."

"The nothingness doesn’t have to be slothful; sometimes I leave the house and sometimes I don’t, but the point is that it doesn’t matter. If I don’t go outside, I don’t feel bad about it, and if I do, everybody else I encounter looks equally confused and at loose ends, frittering away these leftover days. It is the only time of year when the days feel slow to me, when the time outside of whatever tasks I have to do does not somehow vanish into further worry and busyness. It is the only time I don’t feel like I am perpetually late to my own life...."

Writes Helena Fitzgerald, in "All Hail Dead Week, the Best Week of the Year/The week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve is a time when nothing counts, and when nothing is quite real" (The Atlantic).

The author "is a writer based… in New York." I presume that means New York City, and not just because I know it is the convention in New York to say "New York" for New York City and to specify "New York State" if you mean to refer to the state. There's no other state where people add "State" to the state's name. Imagine if in Oklahoma, you said "Oklahoma State" to signal that you didn't mean Oklahoma City. Anyway, I know that means New York City because the people on the street have a distinct look of being off from work. If the author goes outside she's struck by everyone looking at loose ends. New York City is such a workplace.

Anyway, for me, out here in Madison, Wisconsin, every day is the equivalent of a day in Fitzgerald's "Dead Week."

"For two hours, she talked about the civil rights movement and faith. And finally, she mentioned her old flame Bob Dylan."

"The singer-songwriter first proposed to Staples after a kiss at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival; she hid from him during a show at the Apollo decades later, fearing he’d ask again. They’ve remained friends, even taking daily strolls during a 2016 tour together. She’d heard rumors he would soon retire, finally wrapping his fabled Never Ending Tour. Staples knew he would hate it. 'Oh, Bobby: He gotta keep on singing,' Staples said. 'I could handle it more than him. I will call him and say, "Don’t retire, Bobby. You don’t know what you’re doing."'... Soon after Dylan’s proposal, Staples instead married a Chicago mortician; it was a quarrelsome relationship that ended when she changed their apartment locks. 'I married an undertaker, and that was the worst. They don’t have no feelings,' she said, deadpan...."

From "Mavis Staples Is an American Institution. She’s Not Done Singing Yet. After more than seven decades onstage, the gospel and soul great decided last year that it was time to retire. Then she realized she still had work to do" (NYT)(free access link).

"It’s rare to find anyone these days who actually wants to get to early retirement by living off beans..."

"... those people, with their stringent penny-pinching, are largely known in the community as LeanFIRE. A lot more people aim for CoastFIRE (a more measured approach that involves front-loading your retirement savings and 'coasting' on compound interest and working lightly until you’re ready to quit) or BaristaFIRE (quitting your job but buttressing your retirement with a side gig, such as that of a part-time barista, to receive health-insurance benefits) or FatFIRE (a luxurious, no-sacrifice approach to retirement, the polar opposite of LeanFIRE — and the subset to which Wong belongs). You might be tempted to regard early retirees as layabouts, soaking up sunshine while everyone else toils. But why not see them as brave maniacs, daring to build an entirely new vision of the world?"

Writes Amy X. Wang, in "Your Neighbors Are Retiring in Their 30s. Why Can’t You? Meet the schemers and savers obsessed with ending their careers as early as possible" (NYT)(free access link).

FIRE = Financial Independence Retire Early

I'm glad this article mentions the 1992 book "Your Money or Your Life" (commission earned). Here's a WaPo article from a couple years ago, "Why this 1992 personal finance book still has a cult following" (free access link).

The NYT article was the subject of yesterday's episode of The Daily Podcast, and it's an excellent listen, with things that are not in the article. I was drawn in by this part, going into the psychology of one of the "FatFIRE" retirees, Alan Wong, who looked at the question "who am I without work?" 

"Couples have less time on a grand scale while contending, suddenly, with more free time in their waking hours."

"Many disagree on how to spend it. 'I can do anything I want, but lack an activity partner,' reported Danny Steiner, a recently retired 70-year-old high school teacher whose wife does not share his passion for travel — a difference that really manifested only once it was an option. More time can lay bare the reality that some couples did better with less of it. 'Being together just does not feel as special as it once did,' said Martha Battie, a retired college administrator in Hanover, N.H. 'Whatever conversations or sharing we have seems to be forgotten, or not really heard from the start.' And more time means more exposure to whatever irritating habits were easily endured in smaller doses. Among the things that grated on her, Barbara had texted, was that Joe 'mansplains everything.' He had always been that way, she knew, but now she had to deal with so much more of it...."

From "These Couples Survived a Lot. Then Came Retirement. For many relationships, life after work brings an unexpected set of challenges" (NYT)(free access link).

Can you imagine talking about your spouse like that to a NYT writer?! Joe ought to mansplain to Barbara about why she shouldn't talking-to-the-NYT-splaining about his mansplaining.

"He keeps repeating the argument that 'purpose-related tools' can make 'our democracy more workable.'"

"The word 'workable' is used so many times in the book that it becomes a poignant refrain — that of an optimistic, pragmatic liberal jurist who wants to believe that if only he is clear enough, he can get his fellow justices to recognize that they are ultimately committed to the same thing. Does Breyer, who is so attuned to the irreducible complexity of the world outside the Supreme Court, truly believe that the world inside is so simple? Given his decades of experience, I find it hard to imagine he does — but then he still seems flummoxed by the Supreme Court’s right-wing turn. At his most baffled, he starts firing off strings of rhetorical questions, asking plaintively how anyone could ever want 'a world in which no governmental effort is made to cure environmental, medical or safety-related ills?'"

Writes the NYT nonfiction book critic Jennifer Szalai, in "The Retired Justice Who Doesn’t Understand the Supreme Court/Stephen Breyer means well. Why is his new book, 'Reading the Constitution,'' so exasperating?"

Reasons why I'm not making an Amazon link for the book:

"Workism tells older Americans who might think otherwise that their job is core to who they are."

"Likewise, workism tells younger Americans that their job will define them. It is core to who they’re becoming. Read in this way, it is easy to see why older Americans are reluctant to simply 'step aside.' If they feel able... then the demand to leave is an attack on their essential identity...."

Writes David French in "The Hidden Moral Injury of ‘OK Boomer’" (NYT).

"The desire to deafen and respond with noise reflects a kind of discredit of the political discourse."

"We are not being listened to, we are not being heard after weeks of protests. So now we are left with a single option, which is not to listen to you either."

Said the French essayist Christian Salmon, quoted in "France’s Latest Way to Sound Anger Over Pensions Law: Saucepans/Protesters have been harassing the French government in clanky demonstrations that have gone viral in a country with no shortage of kitchenware" (NYT).

The noisemaking — "casserolades" — is over raising the age of retirement from 62 to 64.

Pan beating dates back to the Middle Ages in a custom, called “charivari,” that was intended to shame ill-matched couples....

A website created by a union of tech workers now ranks French regions for casserolades based on the level of cacophony and the importance of the affected government official....

Wikipedia has an extensive article "Charivari." It begins:

"Baseball set me up for life. I love it, and I respect it. But it was part of this culture of consumerism and overconsumption that began to weigh really heavily on me."

"Even when I retired, people said: 'You might be walking away from millions of dollars.' But I’d already made millions of dollars. Why do we always have to have more, more, more?"

 
Said John Jaso, quoted in "No More Spring Trainings/John Jaso walked away from Major League Baseball at 34, potentially leaving millions of dollars on the table. The sea was calling" (NYT).

"Yes, the French are... lazy. It’s just not in the way we lazily think."

I'm reading "Are French People Just Lazy?" by the historian Robert Zaretsky (NYT).

"What’s with all this whingeing about the raising of the retirement age? Ye gods, what a bunch of..."

"... lazy, workshy, good-for-nothing, stay-at-home, Deliveroo-scoffing, unproductive, couch potato cry-babies we have become. Well, you have become. I’m fine. Work is good! Work is fun! Work is what you were made for! What the hell else do you think you’re supposed to be doing with your time: surfing the internet for good deals on comfy tracksuits, posting your lunchtime sarnie on TikTok and nipping up to Scotland every three months to flip genders on a whim?... What do you want to do when you’re old, anyway? Work is the only thing. You want to play golf or bridge or mahjong all day or go on some awful cruise? Or sit alone in the pub staring into the bottom of one of the three pints you can afford, that you have to make last all afternoon?...  Come off it. We all know what happens when you retire: you die. Because the cessation of work famously accelerates the decline of physical and cognitive functioning...."

Writes Giles Coren in "Shut it, shirkers, retirement is deadly boring new/Those complaining about a proposed raising of the pension age might like to know working longer makes you live longer" (London Times).

"'It would be difficult to have two emeritus popes,' a French bishop, Jean-Yves Riocreux, said... adding that the major difference for Francis after Benedict’s death was 'now he can resign.'"

From "Benedict’s Burial Leaves Francis Alone, and Unbound/Liberal supporters of Francis, a pope never shy about exercising power, now anticipate a late-breaking season of change" (NYT).

"[A]fter the flurry of hard-right rulings this June, many professors had their 'own personal grieving period.'"

"But they quickly turned toward 'grappling with how we teach our students' to understand the Supreme Court’s reactionary turn.... A professor must say what the court claims it’s doing, then explain what it is actually doing, which is often something completely different. This technique can disillusion students, leading them to ask why they’re bothering to learn rules that can change at any moment.... Students confront a legal system in a crisis of legitimacy led by an extreme and arrogant court. Still, they must slog on, most gathering substantial debt as they go, pretending that 'law' is something different from politics, a higher realm of reason and rationality where the best arguments prevail.... My father, Nat Stern, retired from a 41-year career at Florida State University College of Law in May.... When I asked him why he decided to retire, he told me that he had no desire to explain the Supreme Court’s conservative revolution as the product of law and reason rather than politics and power.... 'For the bulk of my career,' he said, 'I’ve felt I could fairly explain rulings and opinions that I don’t endorse because they rested on coherent and plausible—if to me unconvincing—grounds. In recent years, though, I’ve increasingly struggled to present new holdings as the product of dispassionate legal reasoning rather than personal agendas.'"

Writes Mark Joseph Stern in "The Supreme Court Is Blowing Up Law School, Too/Inside the growing furor among professors who have had enough" (Slate). 

I got there via David Bernstein at Instapundit, who says: "We all know that left-learning lawprofs would be dancing in the streets if SCOTUS were equally aggressive to the left. And indeed, while Stern portrays discontent with the Court as a question of professional standards rather than ideology, he does not manage to find a single right-leaning professor to quote in his article."

I remember just before the 2016 election, when I was making my decision to retire.

"I was an older woman and I couldn’t get hired. I always wanted to travel the world, write and take photographs. I thought why not take 10 years and go?"

"If I run out of money and I’m not a famous writer, I’ll come back and be a Starbucks barista or a Walmart greeter." 

Said Heidi Dezell, 57, quoted in "Want to Retire in Portugal? Here’s What to Know, as Americans Move There in Droves. Retirees are drawn by a low cost of living, healthcare, a sunny climate and tax incentives" (Wall Street Journal). 

For some, Portugal’s newfound popularity comes with a cost. “Americans are challenging the loudness scale,” says Susan Korthase, 71, founder of the Americans & Friends in Portugal Facebook group. She moved to Portugal from Milwaukee in 2010 and says she now sees the “Californiacation” of Portugal. “You hear them in restaurants,” she adds. “Americans laugh with an open mouth and they laugh out loud. Other nationalities have a quiet chuckle.”...

We're being updated on trends by a newspaper that can't spell "Californication." They're writing about laughing while not perceiving the contents of the portmanteau. Maybe the Americans who laugh too much for Milwaukeean taste are getting more of the jokes. 

I think every person in this article is female. It ends with the story of Linda Correll, 52, an Ohioan who found a small apartment in Porto where "When it rains heavily, all the water comes into my apartment."

“I don’t know if I have met any men over 50 who came here by themselves,” says Ms. Correll. “You get a lot of couples, but single women are much more common for some reason.... It’s a safe country, and the people are friendly,” she says. “The healthcare, the food, the whole vibe is the reason I’m here. I don’t have any desire to go back to the States to live.”

She says "for some reason," and then she, unwittingly, gives the reason. You're leaving your home country for some very bland comforts and no excitement. But maybe this article will prompt some older male Wall Street Journal readers to quit their job now and retire to Portugal. There are lots of health-and-safety-loving Midwestern ladies there longing — in their leaky apartments — for a man maybe something like you.

ADDED: For those who think the Red Hot Chili Peppers coined the word "Californication," here's the Wikipedia article, "Californication":

"The Covid pandemic caused many Americans to reconsider whether they really wanted or needed to keep working."

"Fear of infection or lack of child care kept some workers home, where they discovered that the financial rewards of their jobs weren’t enough to compensate for the costs of commuting and the unpleasantness of their work environment. Older workers, forced into unemployment, decided that they might as well take early retirement. And so on."

That's the myth of "the great resignation," recounted by Paul Krugman in "What Ever Happened to the Great Resignation?" (NYT).

Krugman shows that the great resignation did not happen and observes that's a reason for 1. higher interest rates and 2. more immigration.