What Else Are You Gonna Do

There is a small liturgy of excuses, and you have heard every line of it. "But I make a lot." "Numbers go up." "All I really care about is the money." "I make three times what you do." And the one that closes the conversation like a lid: "What else are you gonna do?" These are the things a person recites while he sells his life — by the day, by the week, by the month, by the year — until the morning he turns sixty, or sixty-five, or seventy.

And then one day he is standing there, an old man, when the employer that owned his decades sends him away. Released from servitude. Thanked, maybe, with a cake and a card the team signed at someone's desk. Unemployable now, used up, handed back to himself with his money in his hand — if there's any left after the long decades of rent and tax and the slow steady leak of a life. And the only question that ever mattered finally arrives, far too late to do anything with it: was it worth it?

It does not matter whether he saved a hundred dollars or a hundred thousand or a million or ten million. The number was never the variable. He is sixty-five, seventy, and only a few years remain, and they will not be the good ones — he already spent the good ones, spent them inside the building. He traded away the decades when his knees still worked without thinking, when his eyes were still sharp, when he could climb out of a car without bracing a hand on the frame, take the stairs two at a time, sleep a whole night without keeping an inventory of aches. Those years do not come back at any price, because they were never for sale. They were only ever for spending, and he spent them on this.

Because the body keeps a ledger the bank account cannot see. Somewhere inside those sold years the chronic things arrived — quietly, one at a time, conditions he had never heard the names of, that knocked once and then moved in for good. Long-term residents now. He has learned their names and their moods and how to arrange his days around them, hoping only that they won't bring too much pain, or too much shame, before the final exhale. He bought the money. The diseases came bundled with it, free of charge. They were always part of the price. The offer letter simply didn't itemize them.

"But I make a lot of money" is an absurd thing to trade a life for at any age, and it grows more absurd, not less, with every passing year, because the arithmetic runs backward to the way he thinks it does. The older he gets, the less of the asset remains — and the less that remains, the more each remaining unit is worth, and the faster he is spending it, against a clock he is not allowed to read. He does not have twenty-five years. He may not have ten. He has, with certainty, only today. And the far end of whatever is left will be a different country altogether: a worn-out body as a around-the-clock, full-time reality he cannot begin to imagine from inside a younger one.

And here is the grotesque part, the Kafka part: he knows all of this. He knows it at two in the morning, with the ceiling above him. Then the alarm goes at six forty-five and he snaps out of it, clocks in at nine, and reports to his standup — a grown man delivering a status update to a circle of other grown men, every single morning, like a child who was never once permitted to grow up, walking back into the same kindergarten he walked into yesterday and will walk into tomorrow, every day, until the cake.

His one hope, the thing he climbs toward for thirty years, is to someday stand on the other side of the bars — to hold the keys instead of sitting behind them, to be the one who counts the others in each morning and checks that the cage is locked tight. But this is the oldest illusion in the building, and it is a lie told to keep him climbing. It does not matter which side of the cell door you are made to stand on. If your presence is owned, if you are required to be there every morning whether you will it or not, then you are a prisoner too — a prisoner with a marginally better chair and the added duty of guarding the rest.

And what did he accept in exchange for the one asset that was genuinely his, the only thing he owned with real and unrepeatable value, the only thing he can never buy back at any markup? Money. Invented money, printed without his vote, inflated while he slept, taxed on the way in and clawed back on the way out by the lords and barons and governments who issue it, handed down to him as a temporary allowance, kept as a number in a distant computer — a number that will mean precisely nothing to whatever civilization stands on the ruins of this one a few centuries from now. He gave away time, which is real, in return for that, which is only agreed upon.

And knowing every word of this, he still chooses the game again this morning. He sells another day before lunch. He will sell another tomorrow. He kept asking what else there was to do, as though it were a real question, as though the honest answer were nothing. The answer was everything. Everything that does not issue a paycheck or a title — the morning that belongs to no one, the body while it still works, the years while they are still the good ones. It simply couldn't be invoiced, and so to him it didn't count, and so he never lived it. He called that a career, and inched along on schedule, comfortable and careful and certain it was the responsible thing, toward the grave — hoping the money buys a decent coffin at the end. It will. The coffin will be very nice. He will not be in any condition to enjoy it, and very soon after, no one will remember he was there at all.