Full disclosure: I’m a guy, but I swear it’s like some men have Benjamin Button syndrome, only it’s not physical, they just become more and more infantile and childlike as they age. This guy, I suspect, has a bad case of just that.

Retirement lasts exactly one afternoon before a man discovers that relaxing full-time doesn’t come with applause. Thirty-two years of corporate sacrifice apparently convinced him he’s earned a personal sabbatical from reality. So now he sits, heroic and sedentary, surrounded by hobbies he’s too tired to begin, wondering why his working wife is unimpressed by his performance art titled «Resting After Doing Nothing.» She comes home after a full day to find her husband marinating in the couch and mystified that dinner didn’t cook itself.  

He insists he «helped for years,» by which he means he ate efficiently and existed quietly in the background. Now that the household runs without a paycheck for scenery, his confusion grows. In his head, retirement meant leisure. In hers, it meant redistribution. He’s baffled that she wants a hot meal instead of congratulations for his decades of effort. She, meanwhile, is too tired to explain that microwaving soup doesn’t count as oppression.  

His new enemies are the grocery list, the vacuum, and the haunting realization that «I worked hard once» doesn’t exempt anyone from basic living. In a touching act of defiance, he considers finding a new job, not for money, but to avoid learning what a sauté pan looks like.