When Mitt Romney's adviser Ed Gillespie claimed that Romney had gone into retirement "retroactively," did he know he was ripping a hole in the space-employment continuum? Just imagine the new vistas of reality opened up by the discovery that retirement can be retroactive! Screw Peter Higgs and his goddamn boson, let's give a Nobel Prize in Physics to Ed Gillespie!
If one can retire retroactively, this means that all of us, young and old, rich and poor, even living and dead, can be retroactively retired. In effect, all of our employment satuses (stati?) are in a state of quantum superposition. You might be flipping burgers at Burger King, but then again, ten years from now we might look back on 2012 and realize you were collecting $100,000 for whittling owls out of pinecones. Indeed, why even bother editing your resume? There are thousands of things you might also be doing in other superimposed realities that you will not become aware of until the quantum uncertainties collapse down into some definite state. We are like Schrödinger's cat, which is both alive and dead simultaneously until his cage is opened. We won't know if we were Walmart greeters, Nobel physicists, or douchebag politicians until our spokesman goes on a Sunday talkshow ten years from now!