Roy Keane is doing it in Glasgow. Tony Blair refuses to do it in the House of Lords. Celtic supporters and peers of the realm alike are unlikely to appreciate the comparison, but both men are grappling with similar conundrums: what do you do with yourself when you've passed your peak, but still have something to offer, asks Hugh Linehan.
In full "Groovy Dad" mode, Blair told the Daily Mirror last week that he would not be following Margaret Thatcher and John Major into the British upper house because it's "not my scene". With rather more dignity, Keane has pledged himself to the football club he supported as a boy.
Tony Blair is 52. Roy Keane is 34. Most of us mere mortals will have to wait a little longer before we face the same decision. But more and more of us will have to do so.
Thirty-five is young for a bishop, but old for a footballer. A 40-year-old is entering his golden years as a politician, having left them behind as a rock star. In the more mundane trades which most of us ply, there is a notional cut-off point - the legal retirement age of 65 - which cuts across class and profession.
But none of these things are set in stone. There are a lot of 60-year-old rock stars doing quite nicely these days, while footballers seem to be retiring earlier.
"By the time a man gets into his 70s, his continued existence is a mere miracle," said Robert Louis Stevenson. The idea of retirement at 65 was first mooted early in the last century, when life expectancy (for those who had made it past the high risk of infant mortality) stood at about that age. A healthy 20-year-old today can expect to live two decades longer.
That's a lot of pension money, not to mention expensive health care. So why should we still expect to be able to retire at 65? The Turner Report in the UK has already suggested that the age should be gradually raised over the next 30 years. With our younger population, the Irish are not facing quite the same pressures, but the landscape is changing fast.
Set aside for a moment the single biggest challenge in all of this - the vast numbers of people without any provision who will be reliant on the non-contributory State pension - and consider the impact on the culture of work.
With pension funds around the country in serious difficulties, early retirement - a realistic option for many during the 1990s - is already becoming either a privilege of the ultra-successful and those who work for the State, or a euphemism for involuntary redundancy. Will employees in the private sector be content to see their income taxes funding generous defined benefits for the public service, while they are stuck with making hefty payments to defined contribution schemes offering far less attractive terms?
If you are 20 years old now, imagine the future that awaits you. In 2050, you might reasonably expect that, after many years of happy employment with Acme Inc, you can look forward to at least two decades of comfortable retirement in some sun-dappled resort complete with seniors' skateparks, old-style chill-out rooms and on tap decaf skinny frappacinos.
A more likely scenario, though, is that you're still working, and for some young pup who's never heard of George W Bush or The Matrix trilogy.
The workplace around you seems shallow, vulgar and shrill (remember, you're 65). And you have another five years to endure. Either that or you're still perched in your comfortable senior position, refusing to budge until presented with your gold watch. But Acme Inc is over-populated with the corporate equivalent of Prince Charles: disgruntled 50-somethings festering with unfulfilled ambition.
Of course, if you're 20 and thinking about such stuff, then you don't deserve to be 20 at all (one of the paradoxes of discussing long-term issues such as retirement and pensions is that those who are most affected tend to care the least). And we are constantly told these days that nobody can expect a job for life.
But longer working lives will mean that we will have to radically rethink the way we currently think about careers. Workers in their late 60s have different skills, strengths and weaknesses. Will these be accommodated and allowed for? The omens aren't great.
In the West, we live in a deeply self-contradictory culture, with a rapidly ageing population enthralled by spurious notions of "youth". If demographic trends continue, we'll only be able to maintain the economic structures of our societies by inviting mass immigration from cultures with much younger populations, where, ironically, age and experience are often more respected. That is not a particularly healthy mix.
There is a more benign scenario, whereby employers will adapt to accommodate the skills of their employees in more flexible, generous and imaginative ways, and where our political establishment will have the vision to address long-term challenges before they become electoral firefights. To which I have just one small, bleak word: childcare.