Category: Philosophy

Sprinting & Age

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Yesterday, I realized we’re all sprinting to old age. Today, I realized that those lucky enough to make it to old age should probably refrain from sprinting. The aging process is a relative progression, as we’ve all met young sixty-year-olds and old forty-year-olds, but no matter how old we are, we occasionally receive reminders that we’re aging. The aging process rarely hits us in an “Oh, my God I’m (fill in the age here)!” one day in the mirror. Aging is often more of a gradual process that hits us in tiny, little, and seemingly insignificant hits, every day.

We fell on a Tuesday doing something we’ve done our whole lives. We tripped trying to skip a stair on a Wednesday, and we’ve skipped a stair since our legs grew long enough to do so. (Mental note, skipping stairs may no longer be in our repertoire.) On Thursday, we caught ourselves making old man sounds when we sat, but we can’t even remember when we started doing that. We admired a beautiful person on Friday, and someone informed us that we’re probably too old to continue doing that. “It’s just odd,” they said, “considering the age gap.” Someone considered it inappropriate on Saturday, and on Sunday someone found it “Absolutely disgusting” that we should admire the beauty of a 20-year-old. “Because you’re old enough to be her grandpa!” they say. The progression didn’t occur that quickly, within one week, but on some days it seems like it does.  

We all know we’re aging on a physical, superficial level, but mentally we’re not so far removed from that energetic, wildly enthusiastic 20-year-old who was afraid to talk to girls. When they add, “And you should know better than to stare at a 20-year-old woman,” we realize how far removed we now are. We do “know better” on one level, we know how old we are, but their scorn is a painful reminder of how much we’ve aged. We do the calculations in our head, and we realize they’re right. We are, in fact, that old now. The realizations that we’re that old now are not about any of one of the matters listed here. It’s about all of them. It’s about that big old snowball that’s been accumulating over the years without notice.

***

“You know you’re old when you fall and no one laughs,” a comedian once said. You know you’re old when they surround you after a fall, and they’re not there to point and laugh. They’re there, because they’re concerned. You know you’re old when their raised eyebrows suggest that you might want to refrain from such activities in the future. You know you’re old when no one laughs about it later, even behind your back. People didn’t laugh when we fell when we were very young, and somewhere along the way, it turned full circle. People aren’t laughing anymore. They’re concerned. It’s humiliating. The science of their silence involves a calculation of our age and the impact of your fall. It’s no longer funny. It’s so disturbing to some of them that they consider it alarming.

“What happened?”

“He was sprinting.”

“Ok, well, he probably shouldn’t be sprinting at his age,” they instruct one another.

You know you’re old when you’ve become the subject of group concern, and the group addresses the subject of their concern in the third person, as if to suggest that they’ll take care of this whole matter going forward, because it’s obvious that we can’t anymore. They addressed us in the third person when we were young, implying that an authority figure should’ve seen to it that that didn’t happen. Everything in between involved laughter, directed at us in the first person, because they knew we were old enough to know better but young enough to sustain the damage of our stupidity. We might feel some warmth when we realize how much these people care about us, but that fades when we realize their resolutions mirror those family members make when our loved ones reached a point when they were no longer capable of caring for themselves. They have no problem telling us when we’re too old to oggle, but no one instructs that we’ve reach a point where it’s considered ill advised to sprint until it should be obvious to everyone involved.

***

A game of ‘keep away’ developed organically. My nephew was in the middle, laughing as hard as the two adults were on opposite sides of him. He was laughing so hard, and apparently having so much fun, that another kid joined into help him defeat us. Another kid joined in a couple of throws later, then three, then four, then so much more. The game wasn’t young versus old, but it evolved into it. It started out friendly, but it evolved into a competitive definition of whatever remained of our athletic ability.

I started out tossing the ball from a stationary position. I was laughing and failing on purpose, giving the kids a chance, until one of them said a little something that I considered a provocative definition of my declining athletic ability. When it came time to catch the ball, I followed the same pattern. I went from light-hearted attempts to get open to employing quick, ankle spraining jukes. When I realized I couldn’t shake the nephew I once held as an infant, the quick movements evolved into some running. I ran every single day at one point in my life, so it was not a concern to me. I don’t know if I started losing, or if I sensed that the others were further questioning my ability, but I began sprinting to open spots to capitalize on the holes in their coverage. It dawned on me, while doing it that I haven’t done this in years. No one gave this a second thought for most of my life. Some people run, some people sprint. I didn’t see the spectators watching, but I could feel it. I even saw a couple stand with some concern. Did they see the game for what it was, or were they wondering if they should begin sprinting too? Did they stand to source the emergency that sparked my progression? I looked over to verify that they were watching me, but in that casual glance, I almost tumbled. I couldn’t look back at them. I had to be mindful of my feet. (Mental Note II, running now requires more focus.) Running was not my greatest concern. Stopping was. I had a myriad of little feet under mine, and I had to focus to avoid them.

I know I’m not as athletically inclined as I once was, but who is? I am smarter now. I know how to use my faculties much better than I did when I was younger. In the midst of these throws, my competitive juices got the best of me. I overdid it. I knew my best presentation could be found sitting on the lawn furniture with the other old people, talking about what old people talk about with lemonade in hand on a sunny day, but I didn’t decide to play this game. An impromptu game broke out and evolved into a character-defining match of my ability against theirs. I could not just quit. “Why did you quit?” I imagined one of them asking me. “Because I’m old and I can’t handle the physical requirements of such a game anymore.” Yeah, that’s not in my nature.

The nephew I once held as an infant was shutting me down in coverage at one point. I encouraged it verbally, but I also wanted to discourage it physically. I wanted to prove so dominant that he left our little game a little demoralized. To do so, I employed some of the know-how I picked up along the way, using the bag of tricks I developed in the decades I spent playing intramural football. Michael Jordan developed a fade away when his skills started to decline. I developed a few moves of my own over the years. “Youth is wasted on the young,” Winston Churchill said. What if I had this wide array of jukes when I was younger, I asked myself, would I have been better? I sprinted to the right, juked, and went further right. In doing so, my fellow old man led me well with a pass. My ability to stop on a dime and juke surprised my nephew. He went left to cover the traditional juke, and he did so right under me. To avoid taking him out, I had to adjust. (Mental note III, my ability to adjust on the fly has receded.) I tripped over his feet. (Mental Note IV: Studies show that the chances of tripping increase exponentially when we sprint.) Been there, done that. (Mental note V, watch out for ground, it hurts, but not near as much as a parked car.) I didn’t have much choice, in the stumbling and bumbling that followed. I decided to take on the car. (Mental note VI, the pain experienced from stationary objects increases when approached at top speed, and we should all try to avoid parked cars as often as possible. They can be unforgiving.) Hitting the car, and then the equally unforgiving concrete was humiliating, and I thought the people surrounding me with looks of concern was the peak of my humiliation, until my nephew called me up later that night to apologize for getting me so worked that I almost ended up impaled on a car.

Defeating the Aliens

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“The aliens are not evil, but they are here to eat us,” our main character replies to the first question the talk show host asks him. This contradiction draws some laughter from the studio audience, as they don’t understand the difference. “Do we consider the lion evil? Of course we don’t. When lions eat cute, baby antelopes, they don’t do it to satisfy some perverse love of violence. Anyone who thinks lions are evil is assigning their thought process to the primal actions of the lion, or they might watch too many cartoons. I agree with those who say that the aliens are not evil in the same vein, and I disagree with my colleagues on this note, but I can only guess that the lion’s prey don’t care what their intent is. We know the only reason lions kill is that they’re hungry. I think the aliens who landed on our shoes are desperately hungry, and they know we have meat on our bones. They just want to eat it. If you consider that evil, that’s up to you, but my bet is that the baby antelope doesn’t suffer their fate without, at some point, mischaracterizing the lion’s motive.”

The reactions the various players have to the main character’s appearance on the talk show ends up saying more about them than it does the main character, or the aliens. When the scientists and reporters attempt to interact with the aliens, soon after the shock and awe of their arrival subsides, they do so to understand why they’re here. They want to befriend them, and we follow their lead on the matter, because we want learn everything we can about them, so we can learn from them.

The aliens know their arrival is the greatest thing that has ever happened to us, and they know how much it excites us. They operate in good faith, in the beginning, and they focus on public relations to build trust with us to hide their real motives. When one of the reporters, assigned to cover the aliens, disappears, the aliens’ approval ratings suffers a dive. The public begins to suspect that the main character might be right when he suggested that the aliens captured her, filleted her and refrigerated her to take her meat back to their home planet.

“They had their eyes on that reporter,” the main character suggests, “because she had right combination of muscle and fat. My friends and I have studied all of the people who have gone missing since their arrival, and we’ve found no discernible patterns, other than they’re not too fat or too muscular. We think the aliens are eating those of us of a certain body mass index that contains a quality mix of fat and muscle. We think there are so many humans on earth that they’ve developed a finicky preference. They prefer those of us with a little fat to add flavor to our meat, in the manner a little fat flavors a ribeye steak. 

“Their initial landing was awe-inspiring,” our main character says on another talk show, “and I was as affected as anyone else by their initial messages, and their attempts to help us advance our science, but the number of missing people that followed alarmed me so much that I began studying them. It’s them, I’m telling you, they’re the reason we now have so many missing people. They’re filleting them, and refrigerating them to feed the starving population on their home planet. I don’t know why it’s so hard for us to accept this idea. Our water supplies have not diminished, nor any of our other natural resources, and I don’t think they’re here to build friendly relations between the planets, as they suggest. There’s no evidence to suggest that they’re here to breed with us, or any of the other things we’ve guessed aliens might want over the decades. So, what’s their motive? I don’t care what their public relations team says, we should still ask why they came here in the first place? We’ve heard them say they had the technology to come here decades ago, so why now? Why are they here? I think they regard us as food, and I’ve been trying to get that message out before it’s too late. As we sort through all these complex arguments regarding their intentions and motives, we forget Occam’s Razor, “All other things being equal, we may assume the superiority of the demonstration that derives from fewer hypotheses.” Simply put, the best answer is often the simplest.”

Most moviemakers line “alien attack” movies with hints of the adversary’s high-minded intelligence. The aliens, in these productions, are required to be of an intelligence we cannot comprehend, and they are of unfathomable strength and power. Our production would state that evidence suggests that power and strength usually counter balance one another in most beings. Is the lion smarter than the human is? No, but that wouldn’t matter in a one on one conflict. Is the body builder smarter than the average person is? Most are not, because we all focus on one pursuit to the usual detriment of the other characteristic. Thus, the alien cannot be of superior, unfathomable intellect and superior strength and power. Not only is it a violation of what I consider the natural order of things, it’s not very interesting.

Yet, even productions that try to have it both ways, be they sci-fi novels, movies, or otherwise eventually begin to train their focus on one of these attributes. If they depict the aliens as the literary equivalent to the bloodthirsty lion is this nothing more than a slasher flick? If they focus on the superior intellect, do they do so to achieve a level of complication that might lead to more favorable critical reviews? Whatever the case is, we now require our moviemakers to provide subtle hints of alien intelligence. The more subtle the better, as that makes it creepier. The moviemaker, as with any storyteller, might be feeding us the entertainment we want, but I don’t think so.

I think the quality moviemaker modifies his material in such a way that it provides subtle hints of the surprising and unusual intelligence of the aliens. They spool out hints of the aliens’ intelligence in drips to further horrify and mystify us. They do this to mess with our mind in a way that a slasher flick doesn’t bother doing. They want to creep us out and scare us somewhere deep in our psychology.

In our production, the aliens have developed powers that we cannot comprehend, but as with any decades-long reliance on a power, it comes at a cost. To explain this theory, the main character says, “Imagine if we could emit super gamma rays from our eyes, in the manner these aliens do. It would be a superpower to be sure, but it might lead us to neglect the intelligence we might otherwise employ in tactical and militaristic conflict. We might rely on those powers so much that it could result in a deficit of our intellect. I submit that even though these aliens employ some war-like tactics, they’re as intelligent as a lion and not as smart as we are. I think we can defeat them with our intelligence.”  

Every alien/monster movie eventually also eventually turns into an allegory about our inability to accept outsiders. In our production, the aliens would use our compassionate approach to outsiders against us. They are intelligent enough to put together a seductive war-like plan, and in doing so, they purport to support a cause that most humans adore. They don’t have a cause, but they know that we’ll follow them to our own demise if they cater to our heart correctly.

The reporters and scientists in every alien/monster movie are always correct in the designs they create for how we should approach and handle our relations with aliens. What would happen if they operated from a faulty premise? Everyone who employs the scientific method to resolve a crisis, approaches the situation with a question, does background research and eventually reaches a hypothesis. At what point in the attempts to prove or disprove that hypothesis, do we troubleshoot and find out if we approached the issue from a subjective or biased view? At what point, do we arrow back to the beginning on our algorithm and correct the question that led us to an incorrect conclusion? 

In our production, the reporters and scientists are operating from a flawed premise they develop as a result of their own biases and subjective viewpoints. The aliens enjoy that premise and begin building upon that narrative to sell it to all earthlings. These useful idiots inadvertently aid the aliens’ public relations campaign to soften us up. They discover, too late, that the less worldly main character’s simple truth that while the aliens are not as evil as their detractors suggest, they’re also not hyper-intelligent as the reporters and scientists theorized. The idea that they just want to eat us bears out, and we realize that if we all agreed to these facts earlier, we could’ve saved a lot more people. We all had a difficult time agreeing to the idea that we were of superior intellect, but once we did, we used it to defeat them. We used our intellect to nullify their superior force. We were elated with the victory, of course, but once life returned to normal, there was that sinking feeling that if we just ignored the reporters, the scientists, and all of the people who believed we should be more accepting of the aliens sooner, we probably wouldn’t have been victims of the worldwide slaughter that ensued. If we listened to the main character, and all of the people who supported his view, and we followed his simple strategy for attack, we could’ve saved a lot more lives.

Yesterday I Learned … V

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Yesterday, I learned that every job has its drawbacks. I learned this when I informed a group how much I now love green bean casserole, and one of my friends said, “I can never eat it again. The sight of it makes me want to hurl.” She explained to us that when she was a member of an Emergency Medical team, they received a call for an overdose. When on this call, she performed mouth to mouth on the victim, and the victim vomited into her mouth. He vomited the last thing he ate, of course, and that happened to be green bean casserole. Today I learned that while every job has its drawbacks, I don’t think I’d be able to become an EMT after hearing this. I come from a long line of strong stomachs. My dad spent a majority of his life eating Swanson’s Mexican TV dinners, and he lived a relatively long life. Yet, I have to imagine that if I was an EMT trainee, and one of the on staff veterans said, “This job has it’s drawbacks,” and they explained the possibility that while trying to resuscitate a victim I might get vomited into my mouth, “I’m out,” would probably my response. “It happens,” is something they might add, “and you have to prepare for that possibility.” If they, then, provided a visual anywhere close to the stomach-turning display in the season 2 finale of Amazon Prime’s Catastrophe, I think half the training class might politely stand and proceed to the nearest exit in an orderly fashion.

Yesterday, I thought about how many exciting opportunities I missed in life. I thought about how cautious I was, and I was cautious, too cautious at times. I probably didn’t have as many opportunities as I think I did, but some were undeniable. I didn’t cash in on them, I tried to avoid talking about them, and yesterday I tried to figure out why. Today, I realized that I based some of these decisions on the unique brand of crazy I knew they had deep inside their Cracker Jack box.

Some of us loved the unique taste of the molasses, caramel confection of popcorn and peanuts the Cracker Jacks company offered, but most of us did not. The flavor isn’t awful by any means, but if someone told the individual, who decided to package and ship the Cracker Jack product, that it would prove a sales juggernaut for over a hundred years, they would probably be surprised. When they heat the confection at a fair, or some outdoor venue that offers it fresh, the adoration for the confection is more understandable, but there was always a certain, stale taste to it in the Cracker Jack Box. Yet, as kids, we always asked for Cracker Jacks as a treat, because the prospect of a prize in each box was tantalizing. The prize often turned out to be as disappointing as the flavor of the super-sweet molasses-flavored caramel coated popcorn and peanuts, but the next time our parents offered us an open invitation to the store shelves, we chose Cracker Jacks again. “Candy-coated popcorn, peanuts and a prize” proved a provocative marketing slogan to those of us of a certain age who couldn’t wait for our surprise. Several other enterprises have taken the prospect of a “prize in each container” to greater lengths, but I don’t know if a company did more with less than the Cracker Jack Company and later Borden.

As we made our way out into the world, and we met a number of exotic and beautiful people, some part of our subconscious kept this disappointing allure of a surprise near the bottom of the package in some deep recess of our subconscious. We knew who these people were, and we found their special brand of crazy such a unique characteristic that we considered it engaging and endearing. Imagine, we thought, waking up to meet a new person, in the same person, every day. Chaos and unpredictability can be exciting in the short-term, and when we wrap it up in beautiful packaging, it can be difficult to remain rational. This idea that the surprises inside the box might be disappointing has always stayed with us. We don’t draw any correlations between this innate sense and the disappointment we experienced when we opened the Cracker Jack surprise, but Cracker Jack taught us this emotion well during the formative years of our life. If we ever have a chance to meet those exciting prospects, years later, it dawns on us why we decided to go with what we knew, as opposed to ceding to our impulsive desire to chase the prospects of exciting things. We learned that what makes us healthy, wealthy and wise in the long term is often more important than the prospect of surprising and exciting opportunities.

My kid said something political yesterday. He didn’t know what he was saying. He was repeating what he heard. Some might consider it cute when such a complicated thought comes out of a kid’s mouth. Some might not view statements with which they agree as political. I did, and I found it a little disturbing. Today I realized that I don’t want my kid to be political in any way. I’ve heard kids who have words put into their kid’s mouths by their parents, and it doesn’t sit well with me. Kids aren’t democrats or republicans, they’re kids, and I don’t think we should let our agenda get in the way of their childhood. We should consider it our job to make their childhood last as long as possible.

Yesterday I realized that some of us have problems answering direct questions with direct answers. “I’m going to place my question in the form of a question. Your job, if you choose to accept it, is to say yes or no. I don’t want to hear equivocations that contain sections and subsections of the “yes and no” answer. I don’t care if you’re right or wrong, or if I’m right or wrong. I don’t even care if your answer hurts my feelings. Just spit it out for the love of all that’s holy and unholy.” Today, I realized that when I answer direct questions in a direct way the recipient often misinterprets my answer. Their feelings get in the way, they dream up sections and subsections of my answer, and they think I’m wrong about everything all the time. After experiencing this a number of times, it dawned on me that most people answer our questions the way they want us to answer theirs.

Yesterday, I realized that other people don’t always have it better than me. My dad was one of those guys who thought everyone had it better than him. He could walk out of the most flea-ridden, dilapidated home with a week-long smile. “That’s the way to live,” he would say. Influenced by my dad’s thoughts, I revered his people. Even though most of them weren’t living the ideal life, I thought they had something going on that I wasn’t able to process yet. Today, I realized that most of those people were younger than I am now, and age tends to emulsify delusions. My dad believed in them though, so I believed in them.

Yesterday I realized my friend’s parents were younger than I am now when I first met them. I remember thinking that they had it all together, and they knew more about life than anyone I ever met. I believed my friend’s propaganda about his parent’s level of intelligence and success. Today, I realized I bought into all that because he did.

Yesterday I learned that when we have nothing to complain about we will find something. Today, I learned that one of the reasons we complain is that we’re not happy, and the idea that something new can make us happy often results in disappointment and more unhappiness. I also learned that buying things makes us happy, and when that happens begins to abate, we repeat the formula, until we realize we can’t buy happiness.

Yesterday, I learned that there is a blueprint to success, and it should be our goal in life to learn it and follow it. Some try to deconstruct and reconstruct that path in a contrived manner. They are rarely successful. Today, I learned that those who won’t follow it are afraid of the risks involved. “What if we fail?” they ask. I’m a firm believer in the fact that the greater the risk, the greater the success if one succeeds.

Yesterday, I learned that politicians are here to help us. Some of them devote their lives to serving in government. Today, I wondered how often we should be grateful for their lifelong devotion to public service, as it pertains to a representative sitting in one of our seats of government for 20+ years. Some might herald such a lifelong commitment, but I think we can all admit that serving in the federal government provides a representative an undue level of influence almost unparalleled in America today. I think we can also suggest that some 20+ year representatives fall prey to satisfying their own narcissistic will to power.

Yesterday, I learned how important it is to have a philosophy for just about everything we do. Today, I learned that we all have some advice to pass on. As someone who didn’t date as often as I could have, I’m probably the wrong person to turn to for dating advice. I didn’t enjoy dating, because I hated all the messy emotional entanglements. I didn’t want to get into a relationship, find out I didn’t like it, and end up hurting a girl’s feelings. On top of that, I avoided women I thought might end up hurting my feelings. My friends and family told me that I overthought the matter. I probably did. On the few dates I went on, I probably wasn’t very good at it. I enjoyed women learning more about me than I did about them. I have talked to enough people who loved to date and did it as often as they could, however, and the following is a list of advice I heard from them: 

1) Most of us are very insecure individuals and dating people reveals our flaws. The people we date will break our hearts and leave us as if we’re starting over, but it’s important to date as often as we can when we’re young.

2) Don’t marry the first person with whom you share a spark. The reason we love the stories of the high school sweethearts who stay married for thirty years is that they’re rare. I’ve heard some theorize that we’re so different every ten years that we’re almost completely different people. I’m not sure how true that is, but there’s enough truth to it that if we marry a person who isn’t willing to change with us, it can get messy and result in a messy separation.  

3) A friend of mine came from a culture of arranged marriages. She said she believed arranged marriages were the ideal way for young people to marry. We didn’t agree with her, but she had an interesting point, “We don’t make quality decisions when we’re young. Our parents not only view matters from a perspective outside romance, but they’re wiser and they have more experience.” Most of us stated we wouldn’t want to see what our parents pick for us, and we thought we were wiser and more experienced than our parents were. This conflict introduced the strange mixture of confidence and insecurity we had when we were young. We’re confident that we know more than our parents do, and we have a general sense of arrogance in this regard, but we’re so insecure about our choices that we tend to stick with the one who brought us.

4) We shouldn’t stay in a relationship for the sole reason that we’ve invested so much time, effort, and emotion into it that we don’t want to start over again. We’ve all been burned, and we remember that when things start to go awry with our current significant other. We don’t break up with them, because we don’t want to go through that turmoil again.

5) “I didn’t enjoy dating either,” one person said, “but don’t make the mistake I made of thinking that you might be letting the right one slip away.” Such an admission is always uncomfortable to hear, and we’ve all heard some people openly admit it, but we rarely hear it when the significant other is listening in on the conversation.

6) Date the good the bad, and the ugly. That trail will help us make an informed decision when we think we’ve met “the one”. When we date, we see qualities in another that we enjoy in some and those we don’t in others, and we learn a lot about ourselves along the way.

7) Date with the mindset that you know nothing about the other party. Those who experience success in any field learn to focus on what they don’t know as opposed to what they do. We should use this mindset when it comes to dating. We should enter into every relationship with the mindset that don’t know anything about the other party of a relationship, except the qualities that they enjoy sharing with us. Most of the people we date aren’t dishonest in the sense that they’re lying or being phony, they’re just their best self when you’re around.

8) Meet their friends and family and watch how they interact with them. How different are they around their people? Are we seeing the person they are around their friends, or are we gaining quality insight into who they are? What are the differences between the person we know and the person their friends and family know?

9) Introduce your significant other to your friends and family. When we’re young, we walk around with an “I don’t care what anyone thinks” mentality. Dump that in these encounters. If they find faults with our significant other, our initial instinct is to suggest they don’t know them as well as we do. That’s going to be true, but is there anyone who cares more about the decisions we make than our family? As someone who has lost a number of intimate family members who cared about me, I now know what a precious commodity they are in life. It doesn’t mean they’re right of course, but their perspective is one we should value. Also, know that most of our people are not jealous, and they aren’t overreacting. They know that we’re proud of this individual we selected, but they care about us, and they don’t want to see us make what they regard as a mistake. Is it a mistake? They don’t know, and we don’t know, but our best bet is to make an informed decision.  

10) If the relationship moves into a more serious phase, take a vacation with them to take them out of their element. Watch how they act around flight attendants, waiters, and hotel staff. How do they react to unnecessary delays, cancelled hotel reservations, hotel amenities, and all of the other mishaps that happen on vacations? 

11) The final, and perhaps most crucial question, who are we around them? Are we putting our best foot forward? We all develop a façade of sorts around the people with which we spend significant amounts of time. We are different around them than we are our mother, for example, or our best friend. Do we like the people we are around them, and if so why? If not, can we change that persona, and if we do, will they still like us?