Poe's Law and Other Fanciful Axioms Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Nostalgia americana: Click for the heady romance of heroic struggle. It's not so much real or fake, but facial or cynical reading: I never understood the French desire to retire as soon as possible and then have a decade or 2 or 3 to do what you really want on a pension. I always thought work was foundational to sense of self and I'd do it til the end. Now I just hope AI won't take that future away. Okay, so: That was Thomas Chatterton Williams↱, perhaps best known at this point as the author of the notorious↗ Harper's↗ letter↗ against "cancel culture", has checked in on the French retirement dispute, and somehow or other, working until the day he dies is the future he hopes AI, or, apparently, the French, won't take away. Even acknowledging↱ his glibness vis à vis physical labor, Williams is apparently an opponent of retirement. And, as he goes on to explain↱, he is "surprised … how many Americans think the French way is best". "Even a fair pension," he writes, "would require too much downsizing to be desirable", and while it is easy enough to understand the basic concern about retirement age compared to life expectancy, he is both coming from a more affluent consideration than so many Americans or French scrabbling for economic security and their next meal until the day they die, and also apparently failing to understand retirement. We might describe such perspicacity and skill of assessment as extraordinary, but apparently we are to take Mr. Chatterton Williams seriously. ____________________ Notes: @thomaschattwill. "I never understood the French desire to retire as soon as possible and then have a decade or 2 or 3 to do what you really want on a pension. I always thought work was foundational to sense of self and I'd do it til the end. Now I just hope AI won't take that future away." (thread) Twitter. 17 March 2023. Twitter.com. 18 March 2023. https://bit.ly/3n5aum9
