To Cruise or Not to Cruise: That is the Question

To cruise, or not to cruise, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous travel, or to take arms against a sea (or river) of troubles, and by opposing end them? To dine: to sleep; no more (from seasickness); and by a nap to say we end a long shore excursion day. The heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d. To dine, to sleep; to dine and to nap some more: perchance to dream or play some cards: ay, there’s the rub; for in that nap of death what dreams and shore excursions may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause: there’s the respect that makes calamity of so long a life in retirement; for who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the Putin/Trump/Netanyahu and Xi oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely of a Bezos mega-yacht, the pangs of despised love for the many Musk pseudo-wives, the rule of law’s delay, the insolence of remote office work from onboard WiFi and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin from the naysayer of the cruising lifestyle? Who would burdens bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life dragging luggage from hotel to airport to hotel, but that the dread of something worse than death, the undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; and thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pith and moment with this regard their currents turn awry, and lose the name of action.—Cruise you now! The fair Viking Longships and Liners! Nymphs of the waves, in thy horizons be all my sins remember’d.

Shakespeare’s Act III, Scene 1 of his most famous play, Hamlet (or Hamnet if you prefer) offers us the famous soliloquy and the most famous lines in the English language. Hamlet is not asking “should I kill myself” in a narrow sense — he is asking whether existence itself is worth choosing. The opening question is whether existence is worthwhile. It then offers up death as a tempting solution — and then the nightmare catch, which resolves as a catalog of suffering and why we endure life anyway. Obviously, I have transposed the soliloquy into a referendum on one of the fundamental decisions of modern affluent retirement…are you a cruise person or not? It may seem trivial compared to death, but trust me, among retirement people, the choice of suffering through a cruise and all its attendant signs of frailty and lack of “freedom” versus the slings and arrows of schlepping luggage from one surface destination to another to see the world, is a very big debate that approaches the existential. Cruising to the retired is as attractive as death is to Hamlet, and not cruising is a sign of true stamina and independence. The debate involves a robust recitation of all the catalogue of sufferings that must be endured onboard or without the benefit of a continuous stateroom. And like the nobility of Hamlet and the Danish Crown, it is the growing mass affluent that must pursue this quandary…and they do.

We are now booked on two (one river and one ocean) cruises, both on Viking (not quite Danish…but close) over the next year. They will be cruises number six and seven for us and lest we think we are so very privileged, or for that matter, lazy travelers, we have met many couples who have racked up 30, 40, 50 cruises to their name. This time we have “sold” two other couples on joining us and pulled out all the cruising arguments to support the program…and successfully so. We have also encountered the “we don’t like cruising” contingent who have chosen not to be with us. And now we have spent time with the multi-cruise couple who espouse their version of the cruising lifestyle, which does not favor Viking and its noble origins.

Like Hamlet, the core psychological insight of the cruising debate is that humans are not fundamentally rational optimizers. We will endure confirmed misery rather than risk uncertain alternatives. This is strikingly modern — and yet Hamlet anticipates this loss aversion and status quo bias by 400 years. Travel paralysis is our central problem. The universality of suffering. Hamlet steps outside his personal situation entirely. He is not talking about his murdered father or his usurping uncle. He is talking about everyone’s experience of being alive. This is what makes the speech transcend its dramatic context and what makes it so perfect for the ultimate retirement conundrum. And just like in Hamlet, its all very dramatic and a tragedy of consciousness. Hamlet’s speech and the cruising debate both end on the idea that awareness itself — conscience, thought, self-reflection — is a kind of curse. The most intelligent, most morally sensitive people are the least capable of decisive action. This is Shakespeare’s bleakest and most enduring insight and it is modern retired man’s biggest fear. Four hundred years later this speech still resonates and is relatable because it names something true about human psychology that almost no one else has named so precisely: that we suffer not because we lack the imagination to conceive of escape, but because our imagination of what might lie beyond escape terrifies us even more than the suffering we know. We are all, in Hamlet’s formulation, cowards made so by the very act of thinking.

And aye, there’s the rub…to cruise is to be forced to think and perhaps overthink about cruising. We have gone pro, con, and now pro again on cruising and the variations afforded by rivers and oceans, islands and continents, Europe, Latin America and Asia/Pacific. There is so much to consider and so much to still debate because something Shakespeare missed in Hamlet is that Hamlet may have had a different take on the whole life and death issue if asked again in another ten years and ten years again after that. And that is exactly what confronts the pre-retired, early retired, semi-retired, willingly-retired, forcibly-retired and hopelessly retired. Perspectives change over time and circumstance. Is it the size of the cabin, the quality of the buffet, the availability of fanciful shore excursions or the existence or not of a casino that drive the decision? Mourn alone, commune together in bliss or gather with a gang? Sea days or stop-hopping? Port or starboard? Deck 4 or Deck 6? Those are truly the questions.