Oh, and What Do You Do?

There is one question that arrives early in almost every conversation, usually just after names and before anyone risks saying something genuine.

“Oh, and what do you do?”

It sounds friendly. It’s anything but. It’s not curiosity, it’s calibration. A quick scan to work out where you sit, how carefully to listen, and whether this conversation is worth investing in beyond polite nodding.

We pretend it’s small talk. It’s actually shorthand. A way of skipping the messy business of finding out who someone is by jumping straight to what they’re for.

If you answer with a job title, the exchange resolves instantly. The mental filing cabinet slides open. Consultant. Engineer. Director of something with a budget. You are indexed, weighed, and assigned a default level of seriousness. You could say something quite stupid after that and still be indulged, because the label is doing the heavy lifting.

If you say “I’m retired”, the system hesitates.

Not in a dramatic way. Worse than that. In a quiet, barely perceptible way. Like a screen freezing for half a second before carrying on as if nothing happened.

Retired isn’t an identity. It’s a blank space. It tells people only that you no longer do something that can be printed on a lanyard. It collapses a lifetime of judgement, experience, mistakes, competence and scar tissue into a single administrative outcome. Formerly something. Now… nothing in particular.

You can feel yourself fade slightly at the edges.

Not shunned. Not dismissed. Just… de prioritised. The conversational equivalent of being gently dimmed. You’re still there, still pleasant, still welcome. But no longer central to the exchange. You haven’t said anything wrong. You’ve just removed the hook they were planning to hang you on.

This is where the follow up questions arrive, almost on autopilot. “Ah. Keeping busy?” “Doing a bit of travelling?” “Got any hobbies?” They are not really interested. They are fishing for something that looks like activity, something that can be weighed, ranked, or at least politely admired without effort.

Because we don’t really know how to talk to people without first establishing their status.

This is why many retired people develop a sudden and quite pronounced distaste for small talk. Not because they’ve become antisocial, but because small talk is almost entirely about hierarchy. Who does what. Who’s important. Who’s busy. Who’s still in the game. Once you’re out of it, the whole ritual starts to look faintly absurd, like watching people compare rank insignia from a war you’ve already left.

There are moments when you’re tempted to answer more honestly. “I’m on permanent standby.” Or “I’ve gone freelance on time.” Or “I no longer do anything that appears on a spreadsheet.” All accurate. All guaranteed to kill the conversation stone dead and possibly have you gently edged away from the canapés.

So you stick with “retired”. The socially approved shrug. And you watch yourself become slightly less visible in real time, like someone slowly backing out of a photograph without anyone quite noticing.

The darker joke is that nothing about you has actually changed. You haven’t lost your ability to think, judge, observe, or contribute. You just no longer come with a status badge attached, and without one, many people don’t quite know what to do with you.

This isn’t about ego. It’s about how thin our categories are. We have no decent language for people who are not currently exchanging time for money that doesn’t sound either congratulatory or faintly apologetic. Lucky you. Must be nice. As if the only meaningful thing a person can do is be busy on someone else’s behalf.

Once you notice this, you can’t unhear it. How often “what do you do?” is really “why should I care?” in a nicer jacket. How rarely anyone asks what you’re interested in, what you’ve learned, or what you’ve changed your mind about. None of that fits neatly into the social machinery of polite conversation.

So retirement doesn’t make you invisible. It just removes the costume that made you legible. And without it, you start to see how much of everyday conversation is less about connection and more about sorting, ranking, and quietly deciding who matters.

Which is why a lot of retired people stop bothering with small talk altogether. Not out of bitterness. Out of clarity. Once you’ve stepped outside the status game, watching others play it can feel less like socialising and more like loitering near a scoreboard you no longer recognise or are interested in.

“Oh, and what do you do?”

It turns out it was never a very good question. It was just a convenient one.