I think it was “Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau who summed up the Baby Boomer aging process by saying it would be really depressing to have a heart attack while wearing your faded 501 Levi jeans.

I get that, as a Boomer who was born at the peak of that demographic wave (think January 1954). It seems like 75% of the ads during every noon ESPN Sports Center broadcast are aimed at me and my Medicare benefits. On top of that, I also spent several years in South Florida (I turned 50 there), where half the houses (it seemed to me) were in a development with “villages” in the name.

Thus, I understand why people are reacting to that recent feature. “Shadow on the Sun,” that ran in The Lamp Magazine, “A Catholic Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts, Etc.” This long article by Sam Kriss isn’t a “news” feature, but I would argue that religion-beat journalists should dig into it.

Why? Well, as the Grateful Dead prophet Jerry Garcia put it — “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” And for millions of Boomers, the end of that trip is getting closer (like the Firesign Theater’s Antelope Freeway exit that never seems to arrive). Thus, there are lots of news hooks in this piece linked to death, dying and the Boomers, especially for reporters in Florida.

This brings us to The Villages, the largest retirement community in the world. The feature opens with a real-estate agent named Jason at the wheel during a tour.

Scholl Foot Care. Urology Associates. Cracker Barrel. Jason told me about The Villages. He explained that The Villages occupies around eighty square miles of central Florida, which makes it substantially larger than the island of Manhattan. It’s home to some one hundred forty thousand happy, active retired people, with more constantly arriving: this is the single fastest-growing metro area in the entire United States. It contains nine state-of-the-art hospitals, four gun ranges, two one-thousand-seat concert venues, and eight vast churches. It has more than fifty free golf courses, enough for you to play on a different range every week of the year. Ninety swimming pools, not counting the ones in people’s backyards. Twenty of them are Olympic-sized. Something like ten million square feet of commercial space, including a dozen sprawling shopping centers and over one hundred restaurants and bars. Residents also have their pick of around three thousand community social clubs. The Acting Out Theater Club produces its own original musicals. The Red Sox Nation Club has more members in The Villages than it does in Boston. The MAGA Club has hosted members of the Trump family. You can sail or scuba dive or line dance or learn the ukulele or discuss Ayn Rand. The Villages has its own radio station (W.V.L.G.), TV channel (V.N.N.), and newspaper (the Daily Sun), and somewhere north of eighty thousand homes. Jason couldn’t give me a more precise figure because it’s constantly changing. The Villages builds four hundred new houses every month.

What does this have to do with religion, morality and culture? Here’s the thesis statement, sort of, the reason that journalists of all kinds keep flocking here to capture The Ugly Truth of this kingdom dedicated to denying the realities of aging and, thus, mortality.

At least, I think that’s the thesis. Is there some kind of “village” world near you?

All those endless pastel suburbs. Those wrinkled bodies in the swimming pools, synchronized swimming. Happy people golfing over sad eerie music. Essayists love the place too: this perfect manicured Disneyland, just waiting for some millennial to dig down into its festering Lynchian heart of shadow. The right-wing politics, or the sex. Everyone knows that The Villages has the highest rate of S.T.D.s in the United States (it doesn’t), that residents attach colored loofahs to their golf carts to signal their wife-swapping preferences (unlikely), and that there’s a vast black market in Viagra (this one’s true). I was warned that I’d probably be pounced upon by some lubricious sexagenarian. (No such luck.) People treat it like a curio, a weird Floridian quirk, which it is: this city populated exclusively by the retired. But the real story goes deeper, and The Villages is not just a bubble.

Oh, and follow the money. We’re talking Big Business and people with political clout.

The U.S. has a total G.D.P. of twenty-three trillion dollars, but the assets of all American pension funds are nearly fifty percent larger: thirty-five trillion, a monstrous pile of money accumulated for the sole purpose of allowing Americans to have a nice time when they retire. These pension funds are the biggest players in the financial markets and the biggest investors in every level of the economy. The richest people in the world—the richest countries in the world — are utterly dwarfed by the sheer fiscal mass of millions upon millions of ordinary middle-class Americans’ 401(k)s.

I realize that I’m hitting readers with long block quotes, but that’s the best way to grasp the near-theological content of this long feature that was clearly meant to be a strong, depressing drink made with citrus and lots of alcohol, perhaps with a tiny umbrella stuck in the crushed ice.

Are there churches here? Yes. Do readers learn anything about them? No.

Is there a God? Well, there is a “god,” with a small “g,” who was the creator of this world.

The Villages is the size of a city, but it is not a city. Spanish Springs calls itself a town square, but there is no town. The Villages has no municipal government, no mayor or city council, no town hall, and no police department. It does not even have any meaningful city limits, and it’s not always clear where it begins and ends. The place sprawls indifferently over three Florida counties, which are all now effectively run by the Morse family. And while the U.S. Census Bureau recognizes a Census-Designated Place called The Villages, The Villages itself is substantially larger. Essentially, The Villages consists of all the land that has been bought and improved by H. Gary Morse and his descendants. But the Villagers don’t really talk about Morse and his family as people. They talk about something called The Developer, which is the closest thing this place has to a god.

It was The Developer who built this wonderland, and The Developer sets its rules.

Maybe it would help to talk to a priest at St. Timothy’s Catholic Church, which is one of the nine religious congregations that can be reached on one of the golf-cart paths that connect everything that matters in this pocket universe. Or maybe the rabbi at Temple Shalom? The pastor at the First Baptist Church of the Villages?

I would imagine that these clergy people know a thing or two about life and death, sin and redemption, in The Villages. And The Developer’s newspaper offers lots of ink — every week — about what is happening in the dozens of other nearby congregations.

So what’s it all about? My friend Rod (“Live Not By Lies”) Dreher offered his thoughts in a Substack essay called “Sunshine On The Pleasure Machine.” He has spent some time in South Florida.

But there’s not need to guess about The Big Idea. Kriss lowers the boom on these Boomers near the end:

The message of The Villages is this: that the true purpose of human life is to have fun, to drink and play golf, and you can only really experience the true purpose of human life once you’ve retired: when you’ve nothing left to do but exist. You are not old, because age is just a number. You do not need to be looked after. What you need is to start living your best life. When they were young, the Baby Boomers broke apart the multi-generational community: untempered youth, wild youth leading itself towards its own ends. Now, they’re doing it again. They have absconded from their duty as old people, which is to be the link between the future and the past — because the world doesn’t have a past anymore, and precious little future either. You are suspended in an infinite present. You still wear blue jeans. You will never die.

There are no cemeteries in The Villages. The ambulances are unmarked; so are the hearses. Nobody talks about the fact that every few weeks, a vaguely familiar face vanishes from the pickleball court. The most depressing thing I read about The Villages came from someone who’d worked in one of its hospices. By the time the Villagers die, many of them are broke. They’ve spent their pensions on margaritas and golf carts. Hospice care is expensive, so their homes are sold while they’re still dying, and someone like Jason will move some other retiree right in, another lonely person eager to start having fun. Most of the people who die in The Villages end up being cremated. This pleasure-machine, built to delight you with cheap drinks and dancing every night, also systematically burns stacks upon stacks of dead bodies. People who will have no graves to visit. People whose names are not written on any stone.

Whoa. Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind. Etc.

Read it all. I’d love to hear from religion-beat pros who see story hooks in this stunning story.

FIRST IMAGE: Golfer keepsake cremation urn, for sale at Etsy.com