Dear ___________ (insert name of niece, nephew, former student, neighbor’s kid who used to mow your lawn):
Thank you for your cheery Christmas GIF, and thank you for the DM asking me what I would do with my life if I had just graduated from college and had my whole life ahead of me. I suppressed the impulse to tell you my first act would be to thank God it was 1972 instead of 2022 because I knew that was not what you meant. You were talking about the present, I was thinking about the past. Old people tend to do that because the present is scary.
Even if you could get back to a time when the sexual revolution was in full swing, the draft had just ended, and the United States was embarking on fifty years of unprecedented prosperity, you would also be looking forward to the evacuation of Saigon, the murderous homilies of Ronald Reagan, 9/11, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the destruction of the middle class, the end of civility, and a mob psychosis sparked by a pandemic.
Put that way, you might be forgiven for preferring a future that appears to be a blank screen.
The future’s not a blank screen, unfortunately. It’s just blank to you and me, although resource depletion, overpopulation, and a well-armed citizenry suggest that once our modems are unplugged and plugged in again, the streamed images will be dark and violent.
In your place I’d probably hide out for the next fifty years. I know that’s not what you want to do with your life and there aren’t many places to hide anyway. So here’s some survival advice, tailored to a world that seems to contain more endings than beginnings.
Trust perceptions over expectations.
It won’t be easy. Philosophers long ago demolished any notion that humans could accurately perceive a material world, and a subset of those philosophers went on to prove—at least to themselves—that there isn’t a material world anyway. Everything is illusion, or reality is contained in language, or governments create their own reality, or two or more people get their heads together and create a seamless belief system in Progress, or History, or the Glory of God or Humankind. Organized religion, virtual-reality goggles, Matrix movies, Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, quantum physicists’ speculations that the universe is a computer simulation: these can all seduce you into believing that reality is a craft project.
The only weapons you have against this idea are your senses. If, as we know, your senses do a poor job of relaying reality to your brain, they still relay something to your brain. There’s a real world out there even if we can never directly know it. Our senses at least give us hints about what it’s like. Some people take those hints seriously, and they seem to be the ones who get to be my age rather than dying at your age.
Assume the real world exists. That will allow you to live in it, and chop wood, carry water, build fence, plant a garden, cook dinner, read books, drive safely, hike the mountains, ski, dance, hold down a job, make love, and, most importantly, assume that other people exist to the same extent you do.
Accept that the center of the universe is somewhere you aren’t.
The default position of adolescents is narcissism, which is why, once you’re an adult, it’s not much fun to hang out with them. They spend time and energy (your time and energy) making sure they’re the smartest people in the room. They will happily cast you in a supporting role in their movie, but you’ll look in vain for your name in the credits.
When I taught undergraduate fiction writing, I cautioned against using the first person autobiographical, because too often my students’ characters became versions of themselves. (I am writing this letter in the first person. You might consider the subtext of my advice in that light.)
“The I that you’re using to tell your stories is a construct,” I would tell my students. “But it’s only a black mark on a white page, just as fictional as any other character in your story. Don’t get it mixed up with the I that’s sitting at the keyboard, who is also a made-up person. If you’re comfortable knowing that neither I is real, go ahead and use the first person. Otherwise, get out of your own head. Write about people who are more interesting.”
Another way to put this is that life is not a fiction workshop, but if you make it all about yourself, it will become one. You’ll put out one story after another, and people will tell you what’s wrong with it. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to hear them.
You may not be able to avoid narcissism, but you can get over it by realizing that by the time you’re eighty-five or so, chances are zero that you’ll have completed the construction of a self. What you will have is a ramshackle structure, built without plans and by a succession of untrained temporary laborers, often in violation of zoning regulations, with maybe plywood in place of a broken window or two.
It may not keep the rain off. The plumbing might or might not work. If you plug in too many appliances, circuit-breakers will blow. Also, it’s no longer in style if it ever was. A lot of the landscaping is dead.
It’s in a nice location, however. Developers are sniffing around the property, pointing out where the sunroom will go, the dining hall, the pickleball court. You realize you’re a tear-down.
Out-of-control metaphor. The point is that a self—any self—is a flawed work-in-progress, and always will be. The time you spend perfecting it is better spent looking outward, to the world, which isn’t complete or incomplete, it just is. You’ll never live long enough to explore even a little of it, but it’s a better thing to do with your life than spending it making up a life story that couldn’t possibly be true. Hence:
Grow up and find some adults to hang out with.
Lots of people get old without growing up. To find an adult, look for other things besides sagging skin and a growing fear of the future.
Look for a sense of humor, preferably one that’s self-deprecating. Look for a willingness to admit mistakes rather than make excuses or blame others. A compulsive honesty is nice, even if the truth is hard to hear. A willingness to accept responsibilities is even nicer. Also: a respect for other people’s lives and priorities. A default position of kindness and good will. A willingness to work hard, even when bored or exhausted. A strong commitment to self-preservation. A sense of honor that has nothing to do with receiving honors, and a sense of right and wrong that has nothing to do with expediency.
None of these are compatible with an attitude of “You only go around once in life, so be as crazy as you can.”
If you find someone with all these characteristics, stick with them. If you have most of these characteristics yourself, they’ll stick with you.
Also, it’s important not to become addicted to anything, and to stop if you already are. (It will only feel like you’ll never have fun again.) Addictions put a hold on becoming an adult. They destroy trust and respect and love. They are incompatible with self-respect. They’re incompatible with having choices in your life.
The archetype of addiction is the zombie.
Beyond the addictions that come to mind—heroin, cocaine, meth, alcohol, gambling, sex, exercise, money—are others just as destructive. People can get addicted to being victims, addicted to anger, addicted to falling in love, addicted to social networks, addicted to hurting people, addicted to being in pain. Anything that gives your limbic circuits a little hit of dopamine will do it, which, as Dr. Pavlov demonstrated, can be anything.
Since all the action for an addict is internal, addiction is a shortcut to being a narcissistic asshole. You won’t have any adult friends. You’ll have a lot of narcissistic friends, especially if they see you as a means of satisfying their own addictions. Being friends with them is a lonely business. Being friends with you will be a lonely business.
Don’t fight in the Civil War.
The good half of America is getting ready to kill the evil half, ignoring Solzhenitsyn’s dictum that the line between good and evil runs straight through the middle of the human heart.
There are lots of ways to divide human beings into deadly factions. Urban and rural. Tourist and local. Authoritarian and freedom fighter. Vaccinated or pureblood. Rich or poor. Educated or ignorant. Red pill or blue.
It really doesn’t matter what the difference is, as long as people can find out who is on the other side and kill them. It’s all a matter of dopamine hits, after the first few murders.
You will be asked, by both sides, to fight for justice, truth, and beauty, but those noble qualities won’t last beyond the first few skirmishes. War means war crimes, by both sides, and the historians are left to clean up the blood and tears and grief. They’re forever inadequate to the task.
In the Spanish Civil war, some rural mountain villages were visited in daylight by the Fascists, who would round up sullen-looking men of fighting age and shoot them. At night the Republicans would visit the same villages, round up the remaining men of fighting age and shoot them. Fighting age kept getting younger and older, and the definition of enemy combatant came to include women and toddlers. These villages, once populated by people who only wanted to be left alone, became ghost towns.
If civil war breaks out in this country, get out. You’re the wrong age to survive it. It’s better to live as a refugee, begging entrance to Canada or Mexico or whatever country your sailboat will reach.
In the absence of an all-bets-off civil war, I have all sorts of pragmatic advice, but it may not fit you as well as it would fit me if I were in your shoes. I don’t even know if your shoes would fit.
Practical considerations: Don’t get married unless you’re planning on having kids. Don’t have kids. Get a puppy. Pay off credit-card debt every month. Do make sure you have health insurance. Examine your unexamined expectations. If your car is paid off, reasonably reliable, and gets good gas mileage, don’t trade it in on a pickup with loan payments. Don’t ever think you’re good at multitasking. If a friend asks you for financial help, a gift is less dangerous to the friendship than a loan. Do get a financial advisor. Choose one as carefully as you would a therapist. Do choose a therapist to help you arrange your life’s priorities, preferably a therapist smarter than you are, one who might see that what you want and what you think you want are two different things. If your place of work has a matching retirement plan, specify that the maximum amount be taken from your paycheck. Don’t build or buy a house with anyone else unless you’re married to them.
It won’t hurt to print out this list for future reference. Even in 1972, it would have been decent advice for not drowning financially or emotionally. If you do insist on getting married, forty-five is a good age for it. By then you’ll at least be open to the idea that the reason you stay married is seldom the reason you got married.
I hope this helps. Follow this advice, and you’ll behave a lot smarter than I did, although I must admit I’ve made it through the minefield of life this far without blowing myself up. A certain amount of luck has been involved, and my best advice is to avoid bad luck. If you’re lucky, sometimes you can see the signs and put your foot down somewhere else.
Stay safe.
Your (uncle, old teacher, former employer, not-so-innocent bystander),
John