Old age

I used to think retirement might actually be something to look forward to. No more shitty job. No more rat race. I'm beginning to think that may be another one of my delusions.

From Philip Roth's Everyman:

But then something unforeseen happened, unforeseen and unpredictable: he had lived close to three quarters of a century, and the productive, active life was gone. He neither possessed the productive man's allure nor was capable of germinating the masculine joys, and he tried not to long for them too much. On his own he had felt for a while that the missing component would somehow return to make him inviolable once again and reaffirm his mastery, that the entitlement mistakenly severed would be restored and he could resume where he'd left off only a few years before. But now it appeared that like any number of the elderly, he was in the process of becoming less and less and would have to see his aimless days through to the end as no more than what he was--the aimless days and the uncertain nights and the impotently putting up with the physical deterioration and the terminal sadness and the waiting and waiting for nothing.This is how it works out, he thought, this is what you could not know.

Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.