Category: Meaningful Memories

Youth is Wasted on the Young

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“Youth is wasted on the young,” a famous old person, who is now dead, once said. If they have the opportunity to see us now, I wonder if they say, “Life is wasted on the living.”

We can do just about anything and everything we want, but we don’t because everything is “SO BORING!” When we’re younger, we have the health and energy to do more, but we don’t because there is this “Is that all There Is?” mentality to doing extraordinary things. There are some exciting people to meet, places to go, and things to encounter, but most of what we experience in life could be characterized as mundane, trivial and meaningless to those with experience in such characterizations. To those who no longer have the energy of youth or the health necessary to do a number of things, they view youth as wasted on the young.  

Remember brooding in the corner, because that comically weak chin strap on your birthday hat snapped, while everyone else was running around laughing, screaming with joy, and just having a whale of a good time. Wouldn’t you love to redo that day and all of the other fun and frivolity that you missed because you thought life was “SO BORING!”   

I used to look forward to birthdays. I used to count the days until a bunch of people screamed “Happy Birthday!” to me with hats on, kazoos in their mouths, and party favors all around. I remember Batman-themed birthday parties, Scooby Doo parties, and a Shazaam! birthday party. My seventh birthday stands out, because I played my best friend, and biggest rival, in the most popular football video game of the era, and I beat him! It was such a great birthday party that it set a precedent that no future birthday could match. Every birthday after that “Sucked!” because they were “SO BORING!” Not even the “Welcome to the roads!” 16th birthday, the “Happy Bigenoughtobarday!” 21st, the dirty thirty, or the still-fun@40 birthday party could match that seventh birthday party. At some point, we all stop looking forward to birthdays, and we start to look back. No one knows what specific age this starts happening, but we lose our jubilant “This is my day!” smiles as our odometer clicks by.

The older I get, the colder I get. I’m freezing all the time now.

The older I get, the bolder I get. I used to pretend to love things they told me to love, “You don’t love The Lone Ranger?” they asked. I pretended I did, because I was a kid, and a boy, and they expected every boy to love their brand new, The Lone Ranger toys. Now that I’m old and bold, I want to go back in time and tell everyone I knew that I never loved The Lone Ranger. I was told to love it, and I was taught to like it, because every good boy does. I tried to like his horse Silver and his buddy Tonto, but everything they did was “SO BORING!” to me. I pretended to love Cheech and Chong later, because everyone expected me to love their risque, naughty brand of humor. Now that I’m old and bold, I can finally say they only had one joke that they did over and over in as many ways as they could think up, but it was one joke, and I never considered that joke that funny. Everyone expected me to love Animal House when I was in college, because laughing at that movie is what college-aged students do. Now that I’m older and bolder, I no longer have to pretend to like the guitar-smashing, the zit-popping mashed potato joke, or the uncomfortable in the blues bar joke that I’m expected to remember so fondly that I still get a tear of laughter whenever I think of it. I didn’t dare say any of that before, because everyone expected me to coat my love all over of it. I pretended that I did, because I wanted to fit in.   

One of the few joys of getting old is that we no longer have to play pretend. We don’t have to say we love things to fit in, to spare someone’s feelings, and we no longer feel that need to constantly prove ourselves. I no longer feel the need to enter into that crucial, seminal argument on the issue of the day, because I want everyone to know how well informed I am. I no longer consider it my mission in life to change minds. I now see it as pointless. “You think you’re going to change her mind today at lunch?” I ask. “You’re going to battle against thirty-five years of conditioning. She’s been dying to prove her bona fides on this issue, and so have you. You’re not going to get anywhere if you sincerely hope to change her mind.” 

They no longer expect us to love inconsequential matters now. They expect us to grumble about food portions, the cost of living, how much better things were in “my day”, and something about kids getting off my lawn. 

I never thought I’d reach an age when I cherished life, but I never expected to be this old either. I didn’t expect to die young of course, but I didn’t expect I’d get this old either. I never thought I’d actually be grateful for decent health, because I thought that’s what old people did. I never thought I’d be happy to be alive, and greet each morning with a new-day smile. I never thought I’d try to make today better than yesterday, but I never expected to be this old either. “Youth is wasted on the young,” because they have the energy to live life and love it, they just don’t. 

We watch clocks when we’re young, because we can’t wait to get out of one place to get to another. We watch clocks to escape the great “youth-thief” we call school, and then we watch clocks until it’s time to get off work. When we finally get out of those places, we go to other places with the same faces, because everything is overrated, overhyped, and eventually, “SO BORING!” Do clocks move slower in youth and faster in our senior years? I don’t know, but I was never happier in life than I was when complaining about it. 

I remember when an old person told me that “We should be grateful for our health.” I was polite, and I said something like, “We do take good health for granted,” but I didn’t mean it. I thought good health was “SO BORING!” Now that my body is no longer the incredible, recuperative machine it once was, I appreciate moments of good health. 

Some moronic celebrity was going on and on about a late-in-life career choice they made, and I didn’t hear most of what they said. The late-in-life characterization stuck with me though, so I looked the idiot up and learned we were the same age? I’m late-age now? I’m over-the-hill? What’s the hill? What age is the crest of that hill? My boss confessed, “My better years are behind me now, I know that.” He was 40 at the time. If my better years are behind me, why do I enjoy life now more than I ever did? Why didn’t I enjoy my better years more? You don’t. We don’t. No one does. It’s natural, human nature, and the way of life. “Youth is wasted on the young.” You can mourn the lost years, regret that you didn’t do more, or you can try to live the best life you can live now to try to make up for it. 

“Life is what you make it,” an old stranger once told me. 

“Uh huh! Now, could you move aside!” I wanted to say. “I’m not going to appreciate my life or my good health, stranded outside Walgreens like this, where the weather is suboptimal. I can’t make it better, until my dad finally picks me up, and he’s already forty-five minutes late!” When I finally get to the place where I’m supposed to be I’m probably going to say, “This is SO BORING.”

The Hearty Handshake Handbook

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A stranger I’ve never seen before, and I’ll probably never see again, wouldn’t shake my hand, ‘Because COVID!’ I can only assume it was COVID, because he never said or gave me any hints that it was related. He just wouldn’t shake my hand. Fine, it meant anything to me, but what does it say about you? As Jack, the bellman, said, “COVID is over, and we have to get back to shaking hands again.” We’re men and this is what we do. I don’t like this any more than you men, but this is what we do. We look men in the eye and offer them a firm handshake, and firm does not mean that we drop them. “That’s for tough guys,” Bill, the waiter, told me one time in the break room, “and when I say tough guys, I’m talking about the rah-rah fellas in locker rooms, who don’t know nothing about what to do in the ring.” Even when I went through my most confident period in life, I wasn’t a big handshaker, and I didn’t really grasp the whole theatrical production of the hallowed first impression. First impressions, to my mind, are largely phony. I’m huge on second impressions and third impressions. I prefer to let the game come to me, and I can do some great, unforgettable when I’m immersed in the shadow of lowered expectations, but they taught me that that’s not the world men live in.  

I had my game all figured out at one point, until Ken dropped a big old, “I never trusted a man who wouldn’t shake your hand, and look you in the eyes while doing it,” on me. I’m not up to something, I wanted to tell Ken, and I never have been. I’m not shady, and I’ll prove that to you over the long haul, but you cannot say that to a man like Ken. Ken is a serious man, a man’s man if you will, and you don’t try to realign a man like Ken to suit your needs in his home. You shake Ken’s hand, and you look him in the eye, because that’s what he considers a respectful greeting from another man. To a man like Ken, handshakes build a connection between men, and as he says, it forms a level of trust that you cannot build with him in any other way in the initial greeting. A man like Ken sees through you when you don’t shake his hand and look him in the eye while doing it, and you won’t like what he sees.  

That stranger I’ll probably never meet again had his whole routine down though. Before your hand is unholstered, he flips out a quick “Hello, how are you?” and it’s very warm, polite, and standoffish at the same time. ‘I need distance,’ that quick greeting said. ‘Because COVID, because have you read the literature on communicable diseases? Even if it’s not COVID, you could have something crawling all over you that will get on me with the proximity, and touch, required in a handshake.’ Hey, I wasn’t raised to shake a man’s hand either, but I learned, stranger I’ll never see again. They taught me over time that this is just what we men do to one another, and we learned this tradition from the Ancient Greeks, it’s in their art, so it’s just too late to go back now. And I don’t care about COVID, or the literature.

Another kid’s parent shot me a condescending ‘Haven’t you read the literature?’ smile when I went to shake his hand, but my hand was already out. He wasn’t as quick as the stranger I’ll never see again. He dropped his name in that space, and my hand instinctively went out. I apologized with my hand out, and I withdrew it in the shadow of his condescending smile. “No, it’s ok,” he said putting a hand out to shake it. He didn’t look me in the eye when he did it. His handshake was fastidious and obligatory. ‘I’ll let it go,’ I wanted to say, ‘but that would not have impressed a man like Ken.’

I’ve heard about power handshakes that involve the lefthand cupping the handshake, a power move. I’ve never experienced a cupper before, but I have to imagine that that would completely 360 Ken’s notion that the cupper was up-to-something shady, and yes, I meant 360 as opposed to 180, as Ken’s suspicions would return tenfold after a cupping. I’ve heard some handshakers move that left hand up to the elbow, and one famous/infamous handshaker went all the way to the shoulder. The higher the lefthand moves up, I’ve heard, the greater the power play. I don’t know how I would address such a handshake, but I can’t imagine a situation in which I didn’t consider that unnecessarily intimate.

No, when you meet a man who is not distracted or rushing off, you press palms with them for no longer than three seconds, you look him in the eye, and you drop an interested smile on them. When you’re in another man’s home, or in some other relatively subservient position, you wait for him to extend his hand first. If he doesn’t, that’s on him. If you’re seated, you stand, and there’s no reason to get too close, because no one likes a nose-to-nose handshake. If you’re sweaty, you just coughed, or you just wiped your nose, you discreetly wipe it off before extending the hand. There are rules, laws, and by-laws in this whole handshaking world, and you learn them as you go. Even if you think some of these rules are silly, as I do, you learn them and follow them, because it’s not about you. These things mean something really important to some men, and if you refuse to take part, you’ll mean nothing to them.    

You shake a man’s hand, because it says you’re glad to be here, and you’re interested in meeting them, and you look them in the eye to say, “Yes, I mean you!” The non-shakers accidentally send a message that reads, “I kind of dismiss you.” Even if your transgression involves health-related concerns, based on literature, it still sends that message that you’ll never be able to properly address. The old saying on gifts, ‘Tis better to give than receive,’ does not apply in the handshake world, for if you do not give respect, in a respectful handshake, you’ll never receive.

The three exceptions to the rule are age, gender, and culture. If you’re in a culture in which the handshake is not the proper greeting, then you respect and follow the rules and traditions of that culture. If the person you meet is female, then you follow her lead. If she’s a hugger, you hug, but most women are big on smiles and eye contact, and some of them flash a wave. Kids aren’t big handshakers either, but I often make a production out of shaking the hand of a young male, because I deem it a sign of respect. “Welcome to the club!” my handshake says. I try to attach some element of silly to it, because I know how uncomfortable those first few steps into this world can be, but I maintain that my handshake is serious. I usually follow their lead on how much seriousness or silliness I attach to it, but I think I’m doing my part to welcome them into this world of respectful first-impressions among men.  

So, Mr. Stranger I’ll probably never see again, you ain’t Joe Cool, Mr. Snoopy with sunglasses on, and you never will be, with your COVID, learn-the-literature non-shaking hand codes of conduct, because shaking hands is just what men do. The respect you give will be the respect you receive.   

Know-Nothings vs. Mr. Know-It-Alls

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“You’re such a Mr. Know-it-all,” she said, he said, they all said.

“A know-it-all? Me? Are you serious? I’ll have to check my ledger, but I’m pretty sure I’m about seven I.Q. points away from a know-nothing.”

The first time someone accused me of being a Mr. Know-it-all, I did not know what to do. What defense are we supposed to mount? “Actually, Sandy, when you get to know me, you’ll realize I’m actually quite the dullard.” Prior to that charge, I was pretty sure my plight in life would consist of various insults regarding my lack of intelligence, so Sandy’s charge left me speechless. I thought it was absurdist humor on her part. You know that joke. The jokester holds the tongue-in-cheek preposterousness of their joke in, and they hold, hold, until ultimate seriousness is established, and then they break, “I’m just kidding.” I waited for that break, and not only did it never arrive, she turned to someone else to engage in an entirely different conversation, confident that her point hit home. The idea that she was serious only made the charge seem so absurd, ridiculous, and hilarious.

“She just called me a Mr. Know-it-all,” I whispered to the guy to my right, who knew me better, but he decided not to join in on the laughter.  

We all know a Mr. Know-it-all. They usually wear silk, magenta robes while smoking imported cigars, saying, “You’re just so unsophisticated” and “I don’t agree with you, because I choose to think deeper.” I knew I was not one of those, because I knew to be sophisticated, you had to have “a great deal of worldly experience and knowledge of fashion and culture.” To qualify for Mr. Know-it-all status, I also thought you had to be complicated, and when someone questioned the veracity of your claims, you said things like, “It’s complicated.”

I don’t care how you break down your definition of a Mr. Know-it-all, if you tried to tell my good friends and family that I was one of them, they’d laugh harder than I would, and they wouldn’t have been kind to me in their assessment. In an effort to appear objective, I must admit that if a number of people level such a charge there might be something to it, and I might be substituting an exaggeration of the term Mr. Know-it-all to clear myself of all charges.

***

In his BBC Science Focus Magazine article, titled The Hidden Psychology of ‘Know-It-Alls’: Why They Think They Know Everything, with a You don’t want to do it like that, you want to do it like this subtitle, writer Dean Burnett attempts to tackle the psychology of the Mr. Know-it-all phenomenon from the “Don’t you just hate them” perspective. He also tackles the issue from a “It turns out know-it-alls are always wrong for a variety of psychological reasons” perspective.

He concludes his article with the note: “It could be that to become a know-it-all, you have to know far too little.” It’s a nice, theatrical summary of his thematic “Don’t you just hate know-it-alls” piece, but if you “know far too little” aren’t you a know-nothing?

For those of us who make it a habit of reading articles from the other perspective, as some of us are inclined to do, we think Mr. Burnett loathes people who are right most of the time. We can only guess that he has been corrected, correctly, so often that he was probably pounding his keys when he wrote this article. We can all empathize, because it is annoying when we start in on a heart-felt discussion, only to have someone step in on our story and correct us on some seemingly insignificant fact. When it happens often enough, it can build a level of resentment that leads us to write an article on it.

We could be wrong, and since we’ve never heard of Mr. Burnett prior to this article, we must assume we probably are. Yet, we have to think that Mr. Burnett wouldn’t build such resentment for a know-nothing who is easily checked and always wrong. We have to assume that if Mr. Burnett decided to write an article on this subject after running into a lot of people who know more than he does, and his reservoir of patience for people who call him out dried up long before he sat behind a computer.

I write this as a former know-nothing who supposedly became a “Mr. Know-It-All” to some, but I learned. I learned to avoid the bullet points of a Mr. Know-it-all, because I learned that everyone loathes a Mr. Know-it-all.

If I were commissioned to write an article on know-it-alls, I would avoid Mr. Burnett’s populist, “Don’t you just hate them” clapter angle and try to focus on the gestation cycle of the know-it-all, as I know it.

Who are the know-it-alls that we’ve all come to loathe, and how did they come into being? My guess is they followed a path similar to mine. For all of the conscious and subconscious reasons listed in Mr. Burnett’s article, the know-it-alls I know are uncomfortable, insecure types who seek to prove their newfound knowledge. We, like presumably Mr. Burnett, grew tired of them correcting us, and when we did our research to call these people out on their corrections, we found out that … we were wrong. It is so embarrassing that it can prove humbling to the point of that thin line that separates humble from humiliating, and we never wanted it to happen again, so we went out and gathered ourselves some information.  

We sought information outlets, and we found good, great, and no-so-great outlets. We gobbled up all that information up like the nutrient-deprived individuals we were. Were we right, no, but we were learning, and the learning proved intoxicating. Did we lord this newfound information over others? We might have, but it wasn’t about that for us. We wanted to prove ourselves to ourselves that we were no longer dim-wit bulbs. We were never those gifted intellects who have known nothing but certitude and confidence in our intellectual abilities. Those types rarely need to prove themselves in these arenas. We did, because we just got sick of being run over. 

We learned everything from the “important” to the silly and inconsequential to try to avoid being called a know-nothing ever again. We wanted answers to the five Ws on the ways in which the world worked. Our motivations were not altruistic of course, as we wanted to prove ourselves, but when we saw our friends wrestle with their own know-nothing stigmas, we thought we might be able to help them out. We were eager to share all of the information we were gleaning. 

“[Know-it-alls are] individuals who will enthusiastically lecture you about any topic or area,” Mr. Burnett writes, “despite blatantly having little to no expertise in what they’re talking about. And often, even though you do.”

We’ve all been in those conversations with a group of let’s say four-to-five people, and we’ve heard them drop all the typical platitudes and takes. We stand in the middle of all that, politely listening and waiting for people to finish. “Hey, have you ever heard this [different perspective on a topic we all thought we knew so well]?” we ask when they are done. 

“Okay, Mr. Know-it-all,” they say with exasperated fatigue.  

“No, I’m not saying you’re right or wrong,” we say. “I just thought you may have never heard that perspective before.” The other perspective is the cookie they were supposed to chew on, and they’re supposed to say, I don’t think that’s right, but what an interesting perspective. Let me chew on that for a bit. 

We love it when others open up other avenues of thought, and sometimes we make the mistake of thinking others love it as much as we do. We think it might ignite another thought process in their head and stimulate further conversation. It doesn’t, because those who loathe Mr. Know-it-alls loathe different perspectives, because it challenges their worldview. Mr. Know-it-alls learned the hard way that some of the times it’s just easier to go along to get along.

Mr. Burnett argues that Mr. Know-it-alls base their assumption of superior knowledge of a subject on a psychological quirk we call the ‘naïve realism’ phenomenon, “[Naïve realism] describes how people instinctively assume that their perception of the world reflects objective reality. In actuality, everything we perceive and ‘know’ about the world has been filtered through a complex mesh of cognitive biases, sensory shortcuts, shifting emotion-infused memories, and more.”

This is undoubtedly true, but isn’t that what we call a quality conversation? If you bring your subjective insight into a conversation, and I bring mine, it might be possible for the two of us to arrive at an interesting conclusion that leaves us both stimulated and satisfied. Even if we don’t, different perspectives can result in different perspectives that might act as a linchpin for greater insight. It might also lead to an interesting conversation. No? I’m the Mr. Know-it-all here? 

If you’ve ever reached a point where you thought you knew-it-all, you encountered another know-it-all who may have been a know-nothing, but they dropped that one, tiny little “What was that again?” nugget on you that shifted your perspective on the matter just enough to make you think they were not such a know-nothing after all. I love that. I love when someone manages to disprove all of my preconceived notions about them.

As an alleged Mr. Know-it-all, I appreciate my species in one respect. When I meet a different genus of my species, I see it as my intellectual duty to defeat their thesis to bolster mine, and in the process, I gain greater understanding of my philosophy on an issue.

Some of you might read this and think, I’m not a Mr. Know-it-all, or a know-nothing. I follow a fundamental understanding of the way the world works, I just don’t lord it over my friends, family, or co-workers. I’m just Larry.

“Ok, Larry,” we say almost instinctively dismissing the ‘D) none of the aboves’ who strive to achieve the hallowed nothingness status to avoid the ridicule of believing in something. Larry strives to avoid being a know-it-all, and it’s pretty obvious that he’s not a know-nothing, but as we watch him drive away, we realize he’s probably a Mr. Bumper-sticker-guy. Mr. Bumper-sticker-guy covers every inch of his bumper with stickers, because he has no outlet. He doesn’t correct anyone, because he fears someone perceiving him as a know-it-all, but it eats at him in a way that could lead some to believe that he might be a know-nothing, so he wears T-shirts that say important stuff, and he informs those driving behind him that he is kind of a big deal. I’ve learned to avoid Mr. Bumper-sticker-guy more than Mr. Know-it-all, because Mr. Bumper-sticker-guy often walks into a conversation packaged in a pressurized swimsuit.  

On those rare occasions when a Larry cannot maintain his silence, we see him transform from mild-mannered Larry into Qualifier Man. Qualifier Man’s powers are cased in efforts to appeal to everyone all of the time. He can’t talk about the temperature of the water in the cooler at work without prefacing his comments with at least three qualifiers. His qualifiers please us, because he’ll openly admit that he doesn’t know enough to know what he’s talking about, but after about three or four displays of his prowess, his qualifiers become tedious. “Just say it!” we mentally scream at him. By the time Qualifier Man finally begins his “it’s just my opinion and feel free to disagree” characterization of the temperature of the water, he’s too late. We’ve already summarily dismissed his opinion in the manner his qualifiers require.

Larry makes sure that we know that he knows that others’ opinions differ from his, and he concludes that buildup by offering up a milquetoast opinion that tries to appeal to all of the people all of the time. “Just put your stuff on the line,” we mentally scream when he’s done, and while we’re all thinking that, his advocates, his opponents, and probably even a Mr. Dean Burnett dismiss him. The important note here is that we do not seek to dismiss Larry, but it’s a natural reaction to his “I could be right, or I could be wrong,” and “I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with what you’re saying,” qualifiers that take so long that we don’t like him or dislike him. We dismiss him. Say what you want about all of the Mr. Know-it-alls, but you respect them for taking a stand, believing what they believe, and being unafraid to say it amid the “Don’t you just hate them?” crowd. When you’re debating how Latin American grain prices affect American farmers, is Larry your go-to-fella? No, you go to that blowhard, Mr. Know-it-all, because you almost accidentally respect his opinions more, even when you disagree with them. 

“If you’re going to be wrong,” my 8th grade teacher taught me, “be wrong with conviction!” She said that after I wrote an assigned opinion piece in which I carefully considered all opinions all of the time in that paper. Mr. Burnett alludes to the idea that a Mr. Know-it-all strives for respect, and we can see that, but respect is a nebulous result. In a world of Dean Burnetts, hating those who correct him, I would suggest that the art of gaining respect has less to do with being correct (though a lengthy track record of being wrong will lead to a Mr. Hot-Air characterization) and far more to do with a confident presentation, or “going after it with gusto” than being a pleasant, nice Qualifier Man, who fears being a Mr. Know-it-all, ever will.