Life: We Spend It Every Second

“This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.” – Fight Club

In life, don’t burn your bridges.  They’re all made of steel and concrete now.

I was talking with an acquaintance the other day, and asked him what exactly it was that he wanted out of life.  I know that sounds weird.  But I like to understand people, so I ask them weird questions.  The really odd part of that is if you ask someone a question (especially an odd one), most of the time they won’t lie.

I have no idea why.  It’s the same reason that when you ask Joe Biden a question he says, “Umm, er, ahhh, blonde leg hairs, wanna touch ‘em?”  See, not all politicians lie.  Just the ones who don’t have dementia.

Back to my acquaintance.  “What do you want out of life?”  He paused.  It was a longer pause, so I was expecting something profound.

“You know, I think I’m looking forward to being old enough to retire.”

This particular gentleman is in his thirties, and plans to retire at 65.

Rowan Atkinson is now a has-Bean.

First, retirement at 65 might be a dream for most people in their thirties today.  I have no idea what the future economy will look like.  It may involve Bitcoin® and jetpacks, or it might involve cannibalism and burning old VHS tapes of Who’s The Boss? so Tony Danza can keep us all warm with family-friendly humor and the thermal energy from burning plastic.  In 2021 I’m betting on Tony Danza.

Second, I can recall being in my thirties pretty well.  The one thing I certainly wasn’t thinking about was retirement.  I was thinking of ways to have fun, and ways to contribute to humanity.  Heck, back then I thought I might even start writing at some point in my life to both contribute and have fun.

At some point.

Here, among people I know, is an example of a person who is actively sleepwalking his way to being 65.  My acquaintance is wishing his life away.  Now, I have a lot of faults and have done things that would have made the Portrait of Dorian Gray melt like the reactor at Chernobyl, but wishing my life away isn’t one of those sins.  (I do apologize for green chili flavored-PEZ™, which was sort-of my fault.)

Yes, there have been times that I couldn’t wait for something to finish, especially when it was the end of a seemingly endless stream of 84 hour work weeks.  Yeah, I was glad when that was over.  But I’m also glad I did it.  Nothing tells you what you can do until you’ve done more that you thought you ever could.

What’s Joe Biden’s favorite gum flavor?  Retire-mint.

Ben Franklin said it best, in a quote that I’ve used multiple times:  “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.”  He was right.  And Franklin was not known for wasting time, especially when it came to the ladies.  The man was a beast on Tinderâ„¢.  Here is his message to Mistress Fancy Pantaloons 1769:

“If thou desire many things, many things will seem but a few.  A few compared to my most magnificent biceps and firmly corrugated abdominal musculature.”

I have become convinced that a significant number of people in society have not only started squandering time, but are intentionally doing so.  They are stuck shuffling their feet, mark time, until some future event when “things will be better.”  What future event?

There are many:

I was ready to go home after a few days on a sleepover, and called my Mom.  “Mom, I’m ready to go home.”  Her response?

Ma Wilder just said, “John, you’re married.”  Yeah, my first marriage was pretty bad.

So, I object to wishing your life away.  I mean, unless I’m at the dentist.  I just want that stuff over with.  But each and every moment of my life has one thing in common – it is a minute of my life that is forever lost.

Died in 1973:  Still releasing books on a more regular pace than George R.R. Martin.

Certainly, there are minutes that I cherish more than others.  But as I get older, I find that I have fewer minutes that I want to spend on bad movies.  If I’m going to spend some time in someone else’s dream, it had better be a damn good dream, and not the ones I have when I’m sleeping about forgetting to wear my pants to the White House and finding that Joe liked that idea.

(shudder)

As I get older, I find that I certainly think differently than I did when I was just a kid.  Fluid intelligence, that innovative creative rush that allows physicists to intuitively feel their way to ever more accurate and complex models of reality at both the subatomic and galactic levels seems to peak at around thirty.  I still wonder why my “the Universe is actually a melty plate of cheesy spaghetti with meat sauce” theory never got the attention it deserved.  I guess that the other physicists thought I was an impasta.

Thankfully, for older folks, there’s more than one dimension of intelligence.  Crystallized intelligence, which consists of the increasing ability to connect ideas and increasing ability to communicate them seems to be dominant later in life.  This may explain while an older professor might not be doing world-shaking innovation, but might still have much to add to science, and would almost always be a better teacher.

Regardless, whatever I end up doing, I know that for me to make the most of life I actually have to live it in the here and now.  Sure, I have to reminisce about the past – that’s how I learn.  And I have to plan for the future – that’s how I avoid criminal charges for tax evasion and fines for my grass being too long.

Communism is like tax fraud.  Both seem great at first, but both end with government agents knocking at your door.

Dwelling in the past is a recipe to live with regret.  Dwelling in the future is a way to live in the false opiate of the dream.  To make the past worth the scars you earned and the future possible, you have to live and take action in the present.

Action.

Action is what men do.

If the action is worth taking?  It requires courage.  Courage, because failure is always a possibility.  Courage, because a future worth taking action for isn’t an easy decision.  And courage is required to stand up to the school bully, even though it’s been quite a few decades since I’ve beaten up a seventh-grader.

I’m not saying it didn’t feel good, but when I had my lawyer sue her?  That was the best.

The good thing about the past is, at least, that it’s over.  The bad thing is that if the scar tissue is too deep, it can cause me to hesitate.  There are tons of different ways that things can go bad, and in my life, I’ve explored more than one of them.  Heck, when I told The Mrs. she should embrace her mistakes, she hugged me.

There is hope, however.  A friend of mine once told me when I was down:  “John, if you had a line of troubles in front of you, half that you’d lived through, and have that you hadn’t you’d always pick the ones that you have already conquered.”

Most problems (not all) that make me the most apprehensive are the problems I haven’t faced.  Is that a lack of faith in me, or a fear of the unknown?

I’m not sure.  And I’m not sure that it matters.

Why did PETA send cats to Mars?  They heard about the Curiosity rover.

But I do know this:  each and every day I have a choice whether to phone it in, or to give it everything I have.  I won’t lie, there are days I phone it in.  And there are days when I get in the car to come home and say, “Yeah, that was utterly worth it.  Nobody could have done that better.”

Those days normally run like a breeze – I walk in the door and can’t believe it’s time to walk out.

Sadly, by doing more and being more, subjectively, I’ll burn through my time much faster than my acquaintance.  That’s okay.  I’m living for something, not just passing the time.

And when I type these words, I’m doing everything.  I’m living in the moment.  I’m using my past.  And I’m doing whatever little bit I can to help the future.

Don’t just exist.  Mean something.  Be significant.