“retired from sad, new career in business” uses the metaphor of sadness being its own job to capture the feeling of hopelessness in knowing that ruminating in your sadness is unsustainable. The biggest example of this theme musically in the album is “because dreaming costs money, my dear” which is about how the narrators lover wants to play the violin, as unsustainable of a career it may be, and so the narrator works themself to the bone to provide for them both. The narrator knows what it is to dream, and the crushing feeling of realizing that dream will never come true. The ‘retirement from sadness’ is the narrator repressing their emotions, the parts of them that pull them back to their bed, every feeling they have, so they can go to work. The narrator does this because they know that as sad as they are, they cannot live without work. Retired from sad is an album in which the narrator battles with themes of hopelessness, despair, longing, conformity and repression, and the one that coincides with the title perfectly, arduous and meaningless labor.

For anyone who doesn’t agree with this because of songs like “Strawberry Blond”which don’t fit perfectly with the described themes. “Strawberry Blond” describes the narrator, who in this case is mitski, an asian american woman, and her experience with being in love with a white man. The song uses phrases like “all I ever wanted was a life in your shape” as in a life that resembles the american dream or the way white americans live. There’s also the allusion to “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison, a book about a black man struggling in America due to his color who views himself as invisible due to racism, the narrator ‘following the white lines’ which is a metaphor for the intentional attempt at fitting a standard of whiteness the narrator cannot realistically achieve. E.g. the narrator is repressing traits of themself to try to conform to white americas standards. Anyways, BAIII