Something worth examining happened at a retirement dinner in London last spring. The dinner was for a man retiring after roughly forty years at the same firm — someone known to his colleague's family since childhood, watched and quietly studied over decades. The dinner was at a quiet restaurant in the City, with about eighteen people around a long table, most of whom were former colleagues from various decades of his career, along with his wife, his two adult children, and one younger guest who happened to be present.
What became visible, across the course of the evening, was a particular structural fact about the room that the speeches kept circling without quite naming. The man being honored had been, by every available measure, professionally respected for four decades. The eighteen people at the table represented, in some real way, the substantial bulk of the close relationships he had built across his adult life. The eighteen people were, on close examination, not close in the way the wider cultural register would understand the term. The eighteen people were former colleagues who liked him, valued him, were genuinely fond of him, and were also, on honest accounting, structurally calibrated to him in the work context rather than as substantive friends.
He received the various toasts. He laughed, accepted the gifts, gave the appropriate small speech in return. But in the small moments between the public performance of the evening, he looked around the table with a particular kind of quiet awareness that has, in the year since, been worth thinking about. The awareness was not, on close examination, sad. The awareness was, more accurately, the quiet recognition of someone who had just had visibly confirmed for him what he had probably already known for some time. The close friendships he had, in some real way, expected adult life to produce had not, in his case, been produced in any abundance. The eighteen people at the table were, in some structural sense, the result of forty years of careful, decent, professionally engaged adult life. The result was real. The result was also, by his own standards, not what he had been working toward.
What he shared after the dinner
A brief conversation happened after the dinner, in the small awkward window where the eighteen people were collecting their coats and saying the various goodbyes. He had had two glasses of wine. He was in the mood for a slightly more substantive exchange than the evening had structurally allowed for.
What he said, in roughly the time it took for his wife to find her handbag, was that the dinner had clarified something for him. He said that he had spent his thirties and forties watching the people around him invest in friendships that he could already see, at the time, were not going to deliver what they were ostensibly promising. He had watched colleagues maintain regular dinners with people they did not, in any substantive sense, enjoy. He had watched friends absorb considerable interpersonal cost in order to maintain relationships that had stopped being structurally rewarding several years earlier. He had watched all of this and had, somewhere in his late thirties, made a small private decision that he had not, until that evening, articulated to anyone.
The decision was that he was not going to do the same maintenance work. The decision was that he was going to invest his social energy only in the relationships that were, on his honest evaluation, producing the substantive engagement he was looking for. The decision was that he would, by structural design, end up with a smaller social network than his contemporaries, and that the smaller network would be more honestly reflective of what his actual relational life was producing.
He said that he had not, until the dinner, fully registered what the cumulative effect of that decision had been. The decision had produced, across the next forty years, the configuration he had just spent four hours sitting inside. The configuration was eighteen former colleagues, three of whom he would describe as substantive friends, and the rest of whom were professional warmth without substantive depth. He said the configuration was, on honest accounting, exactly what his late-thirties decision had been calibrated to produce. He said he was not, in any meaningful sense, regretful about the decision. He said he was, more accurately, finally seeing what it had been adding up to.
What he said about his contemporaries
What was more interesting, on close examination, was what he said about the people he had been watching in his thirties and forties, the ones who had been doing the maintenance work he had declined to do.
He said most of them were now, in their late sixties and seventies, in roughly the same configuration he was in. The maintenance work they had been performing had not, on the available evidence, produced the substantive friendships the work had been ostensibly calibrated to produce. The maintenance work had produced, more accurately, a larger network of warm acquaintances who were now, in late life, becoming progressively less available due to the various structural features of aging. The acquaintances were dying, moving, becoming ill, becoming preoccupied with their own difficulties, becoming structurally less available to perform the kind of social engagement the maintenance had previously sustained. The acquaintances, accordingly, were no longer providing the structural cushion they had been providing in middle age.
What was left, in his contemporaries' late-life configurations, was the small number of relationships that had been substantively meaningful all along, plus the residue of decades of maintenance work that was no longer paying any dividend. His own configuration, by contrast, did not include the residue. He had not performed the maintenance work. He had, accordingly, not built up
