Why Are We Still Marching Toward Someone Else's Finish Line?
At 70, Leonard Cohen found out his manager had emptied his retirement savings. At 73, he went back on the road out of necessity, and gave the last decade of his life to some of his best work.
By 70, Leonard Cohen was supposed to be finished. Not in a bad way, but in the way you’re supposed to be allowed to be finished after a long life of doing whatever thing it was you were doing.
He’d written the songs, made the records, toured the world and come home. Then spent most of the 90s on a mountain outside Los Angeles, ordained as a Buddhist monk, up before dawn to sit in the cold and cook for the others.
He came back down, settled into a place in LA, and was, by his own account, about ready to retire. The savings were handled. Roughly five million dollars, built over a career, waiting for exactly this stretch of life.
But then it just… wasn’t there.
A message reached his daughter: tell your father to look at his accounts. When she said he was about to retire anyway, the man who’d flagged it told her he wouldn’t be able to.
He was right. The five million had been reduced to about a hundred and fifty thousand.
Cohen’s manager of seventeen years had been emptying the accounts for the better part of a decade.
There's a version of this story that calls the theft a blessing in disguise — the thing that forced him back out and handed him a late masterpiece. That version is popular, but I don't think that’s the greatest read on this story.
Nobody hands you a gift by robbing you at 70.
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What I think is really remarkable is how plainly Cohen took it. Asked about it later, he said he’d been devastated but not shattered. He wasn’t performing the catastrophe. He filed the lawsuits, won a judgment for nine and a half million he’d mostly never collect, and then did the only practical thing left.
He went back to work.
In May 2008, at 73, after fifteen years off the stage, Cohen walked out for a run of small preview shows in Canada. By his manager’s account, he’d been reluctant. He rehearsed three months first, then went back out for the money.
Eventually though, he stayed out for something the money doesn’t explain and just kept going.
387 shows over five years, three hours a night, long after the debt was covered. Whatever he was finding out there, the savings were never going to provide it. Call it purpose, or just the proof that he wasn't done.
You Want It Darker came out weeks before he died at 82.
He’d spent the back half of his life stepping out of that whole world. The mountain, the monk’s robes, fifteen years off the stage. He thought that was the ending. The robbery is what told him it wasn’t; something completely out of his control.
And he found out, at 73, with the worst timing imaginable, that the story he’d followed for his own life wasn’t really his.
Most of us are running some version of the same assumption.
That by now, we mostly know how this goes. We’re going to do what we have to do to get through this next set, and do the work to protect it. One day, we’ll be able to kick back and enjoy being past all that noise.
It's worth asking where that picture even came from. The deal — give your strongest decades to the work, and the security will be waiting at the end of them — was built on conditions a lot of us no longer have: pensions that paid out, employers that lasted.
Take those away and "retirement" stops being a finish line you're walking toward. It starts to look like a story you inherited from people whose world worked nothing like yours.
The thing that takes the plan out from under you, whether that's the money or the job or the role you thought you'd hold to the end, tends to take all of our assumptions with it. And it leaves you holding the question the assumption was built to keep you from asking: whether you're actually finished, or only assumed you were.
Somewhere along the way, we were handed this idea of a point where it’s all supposed to wind down.
Where the working is supposed to be over and the purpose along with it, where the rest of it is supposed to be rest.
Cohen reached that point and found nothing there waiting to switch off.
You don’t get to choose when the floor goes. And you don’t actually know where your own purpose runs out. You only know where someone else drew the line, and you can spend your whole life marching toward it only to discover it was never really there.
So stop taking someone else's word for where it is.
✌🏻 Miranda
Sources:
Billboard, “How an Embezzling Manager Caused Leonard Cohen’s Late-Career Comeback”
The Canadian Encyclopedia, “Leonard Cohen Goes Broke”
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