When you're young, you want there to be a lot of space between now and where you're picturing your death day. It's never distant enough — and, of course, it's always potentially today — and you cling to a vague fantasy of immortality. But when you are old, you continually notice benefits in the short time line: These problems are not mine to solve. I do not exist much further out on this trajectory.
If you are young, you should know that old people are mostly keeping this secret. We don't want to demoralize you as you shoulder the burdens of life, and we don't want to seem as though we don't care.
Look how J.K. Rowling got lambasted 2 weeks ago when she said "I do not walk around my house, thinking about my legacy. You know, what a pompous way to live your life walking around thinking, 'What will my legacy be?' Whatever, I’ll be dead. I care about now. I care about the living."
She was saying that she cared about the living and didn't worry about herself or the ghost of a self that would remain out there in the future. Yet that curt "Whatever, I’ll be dead" really hit younger people.
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49 comments:
Well, I certainly started being concerned with my 'legacy' in the last few years, which is actually embodied in the here and now. Your legacy is what you do every single day for others. Somewhat paradoxically, It's (Really) Not About You.
Its too bad our DC politicians and creeps Like George Soros, don't retire and enjoy the benefits of their retirement. They'll be dead in 10 years, but they hang to power, making decisions and they won't have to suffer the consequences.
Personally, I think this "hey, I don't care, I'll be dead", is exactly why you need age limits for judges and corporate execs.
Once you get past 55, your horizon shortens. your kids are probably grown. You've gone as far as you can in your career, and you probably don't want to embark on a new one. You realize that whether you liked your life or not, its too late now to change. Liberating - yet also depressing.
No time like the present, David!
My wife and I are content that we will not be around to see the destruction of the American experiment in self governance. "A republic if you can keep it." Benjamin Franklin was absolutely correct to add that proviso. The only concern is that we have children and grandchildren. My wife even has two great grandchildren. They will suffer under the deluded rule of evil people. They may even have to re-enact the battles of the Revolution or the Civil War. What I fear is the feckless destruction of our economy and our military which will leave them in an intolerable situation. The wild spending on things of no consequence to our population will destroy the country. The Chinese owned representative Swalwell said that the people will need f-15s to defeat the leftist government. Who will be flying those F 15s ?
Almost 60, and I frequently find myself thinking, I’m lying low, done here soon, actuarially 3/4 done, and y’all can deal with this mess.
I have five sons and now five granddaughters. I am not likely to do much from here (70) that changes what the perception of my career, my teaching, my parenting and friendship will be. You are correct that one starts doing the math and going "Yeah, I might still be here in 20 years, but given my risks, probably not, and things are going to have to stand and fall as they are. The rest is God's problem - as it always was anyway before I shoved my way in thinking I was important.
With my 77th birthday coming up, the realization that death is coming along someday is pretty inescapable. My pulmonary specialist tells me that there are issues with my lungs (though I was not a smoker and never lived with smokers) and my cardiologist says there are issues with my heart. My PCP tells me that I’m overweight and out of shape, though why Medicare pays him to tell me what I can deduce from my scale and bathroom mirror is beyond me.
But I have reason to know that there are people alive today who would be dead except for software projects that I led or to which was a key contributor. That is comforting. I will leave behind sons who are moral and intelligent and and who hold down good jobs while married to good women and raising wonderful kids. There are worse fates in life.
hmm.. IF you're REALLY concerned about your "legacy".. Maybe (just MAYBE) you should've had kids
I was going to comment on this, but then I realized, if I believe what I was writing (and I do), then why do I even care to share it? Figure it out on your own. You'll be better for it anyway.
I might give anything to be younger. Would give much to keep getting older and older.
"But when you are old, you continually notice benefits in the short time line: These problems are not mine to solve."
But I wish they were, and I care about the problems left to my offspring.
I do not exist much further out on this trajectory.
"Whatever, I’ll be dead. I care about now. I care about the living."
Totally fine. Legacy means little. But caring about the living logically means caring about the life they have yet to live, not just "now." Not a criticism of JKR, but: nowness is next to selfishness. See, for example, senior defenses of current "entitlements." Or, for another example, the extreme pro-senior bias in Covid policy.
I’m getting closer to that mindset and definitely hear it from my mother and in-laws. I find it harder to accept though because I feel despondent for my children and future grandchildren. The only way I avoid feeling anxious and miserable about the society they’re inheriting is by remembering that it’s in God’s hands. Things might change for the better in ways that I can’t imagine, or else the trials they face might be necessary and if so I pray that he’ll equip them to handle the hardship.
"Yet that curt "Whatever, I’ll be dead" really hit younger people."
How? One person's side comment about how they think about their own day or coming days. How does that have anything at all to do with younger people in general? They don't care what any of us have to say- unless we use the wrong pronoun.
Honestly, Sedaris hit the right note for me. I can't say I'm 'excited to be dead in 20 years'. That's a bit too dramatic for me (Sedaris is dramatic). But I get what he's saying. I'm figuring on 20 more years- give or take a handful. And knowing that, you look at the short term and what you can do in it. You also think more about just being present and enjoying that, which is something we didn't do much in our youth.
"Once you get past 55, your horizon shortens. your kids are probably grown. You've gone as far as you can in your career, and you probably don't want to embark on a new one...."
When I was 53, I started this blog, and it vastly changed my life, opening a lot of very different aspects of experience.
"I’m getting closer to that mindset and definitely hear it from my mother and in-laws. I find it harder to accept though because I feel despondent for my children and future grandchildren. The only way I avoid feeling anxious and miserable about the society they’re inheriting is by remembering that it’s in God’s hands."
It's just a realistic acknowledgement that these are not your problems to solve and that whatever happens, you won't be living in it. That doesn't mean you don't care about the people who will be living in it. What can you contribute by feeling despondent? Be a good grandparent and do what you can to help these new people figure out how to deal with the future. You can't be there with them helping them forever, only now and for a little while longer.
When I was younger I wanted to live a really long time just because I looked at the world and wanted to know how it all turns out. Having become cynical and pessimistic about the course of human events, I want to hang around till my meager funds start running out and then I'll be happy to head for the exits. My kids and grandkids can decide what if anything counts as my legacy.
No cafe picture??
Ann Althouse said: "It's just a realistic acknowledgement that these are not your problems to solve and that whatever happens, you won't be living in it. That doesn't mean you don't care about the people who will be living in it. What can you contribute by feeling despondent? Be a good grandparent and do what you can to help these new people figure out how to deal with the future. You can't be there with them helping them forever, only now and for a little while longer."
I like that, it seems like a healthy attitude. I shall adopt it. Cynicism and pessimism be gone! Although I'm still not particularly interested in seeing how it all plays out.
The opening line in the NYer article is bass ackwards.
It should read: Could the Next Great Robot Be an Author?
THAT is possible in my world.
And, to join the thread: I'll stand behind that until the day I die.
It's just a realistic acknowledgement that these are not your problems to solve and that whatever happens, you won't be living in it. That doesn't mean you don't care about the people who will be living in it. What can you contribute by feeling despondent? Be a good grandparent and do what you can to help these new people figure out how to deal with the future. You can't be there with them helping them forever, only now and for a little while longer.
Intellectually I agree, getting the emotions to align is difficult.
I’m also only 58 so I’m not quite at the point where these are not my problems- so I still feel compelled to participate a well as helping kids prepare for what will come later.
I know the feeling, but funny thing is now I'm crying. We moved house yesterday and one of the young movers was from Madison, a hard worker. I worry for his back!
And he was telling us how hard it was to rent an apartment, everything run by property management, no more mom and pop. He and his partner both working with excellent credit..I'd read as much already in r/Missoula.
For me it was so different. Come to town, all rentals were mom and pop. $90 or $125 a month. Landlord kindly and practically in loco parentis.
Things were just so easy then. Now we got ours, no worries. But it's not good for any of us when it's so hard for the young.
LOL.
I never really ever thought about dying until I was well past 45 years old. I think about it now, but I don't dwell on it, and if it is tomorrow that I die, so be it. I am not afraid of it, at least not yet.
>Michael K said...
The only concern is that we have children and grandchildren...They will suffer under the deluded rule of evil people. They may even have to re-enact the battles of the Revolution or the Civil War.<
I used to hold the same fears - but I don't anymore. I realized that the following generations will be like the slowly boiling frog - each successive generation won't know that it should be any different from what they are experiencing. What they are experiencing will be what is normal, what things "are supposed to be." They don't know that our generation lived in the best place in the world at the best time in the world's history, and they don't care about all that old guy blather.
Already kids are not taught what the real America is (was). They don't know what it is supposed to be. They don't know that it is briskly deteriorating into, ultimately, a dystopian fascistic, socialist shithole. Only what it currently is in their experience.
Now, like the denizens of similar shitholes extant, they will know as they go along that it could be better for them and they will bitch about this and that. But they will accept it as their reality, even as it gets generationally progressively shittier. So it really won't be so terrible for our grandkids, IMO, and we don't particularly care about those distant generations, do we.
(Between you and me: It's like our age-contemporary medical colleagues who say, "I would never want my kid to go into Medicine," knowing how FUBAR the practice of American Medicine has become and knowing that it will only get worse - and that it will never again be wonderful, as it was in our early careers. But the kids go to med school anyway and think it is all terrific, concerning themselves with diversity, equity and inclusion above all else and contending with suffocating government meddling in medical practice. They don't know that it should be any different and they are content and probably even happy. That is simply microcosm of the circumstance for the current new and the future generations of all kids.)
Rowling is still on the ramparts and has no time to reflect on the ultimate significance, if any, of the battle. I would guess that her enduring legacy will remain with the Harry Potter books and not with her arguments with the transgendered. Lewis Carroll's legacy is with Alice in Wonderland and not with whatever pervy instincts inspired him to write it.....As a general rule, posterity is just as much subject to popular whims and elite prejudices as the NYT and National Inquirer front pages. Here's an example: Admiral Lord Nelson never owned a slave. He did, however, write a letter to someone saying that if he were placed in the House of Lords, he would do whatever he could to defend the interests of slaveholders. For this offense, they want to remove his statue from Trafalgar Square. Napoleon, by way of contrast, sent an army of 50,000 men to re-institute slavery in Haiti and French possessions in the West Indies. There's never been any talk of taking down the Arc de Triomphe or replacing his Mausoleum with a Memorial to the Enslaved....Napoleon was at heart a Jacobin and a creature of the left. He still has protective coloration. Nelson and the British Navy were tools of imperialis so off with his statues.
I'm in my eighties. I will be extremely reluctant to leave this world. It's definitely a better place than the world in which I was born and, politics aside, it gets better. At at the present time, I live better than the richest man on earth in the year in which I was born.....I just had a root canal done. It took a half hour and involved minimal discomfort and no pain at least during the procedure. I still have keen memories of the root canal I had done fifty years ago. Life is better now. I've read bios of FDR and Stalin. They had a lot of trouble with their teeth. No high speed drills and CT scans in their days. And they couldn't eat blueberries in February.....So far as legacies go, I'm hoping that the cumulative total of my small kindnesses add up to something. I've never done anything big, and I would not like to be remembered solely for that unfortunate accident with fragmentation grenade at the day care center.
I remember after Brexit, liberal globalists fretting that so many old people voted Leave. What do old people care? They'll be dead soon!
Old people care plenty. They have children and they love them and want them to lead good lives. They have grandchildren and they love them. They want to pass on a peaceful prosperous world to their descendents.
This bit about "I don't care, I'll be dead" is nonsense. At least for anyone who isn't childless.
David Sedaris is childless. He has no incentive not to be selfish. RK Rowling was talking about the grief she's taking for standing up for women. She doesn't care about the grief she's taking; she cares very much about standing up for women.
What younger people should be concerned about is the future we (the older) are stealing from them.
Those trillion-dollar budget deficits? They're supporting an enormously advantageous lifestyle for older people who benefit from them disproportionately. And I'm not talking about Social Security or Medicaid. Those are mere crumbs. Those vastly exaggerated college loan debts we're handing you? 8% annual inflation. We're stealing your future so fast we can't hardly count the ways.
The older generation today is stealing money so far into the future we're stealing money from people who haven't even been born yet - they don't vote and they cannot extract vengence. It's great! And the only solution for these young people will be to steal the money of those who come behind them; just as theirs was stolen by the people who came before them.
If you can't figure out how we're doing it - well, let's just say if you can't figure out who the chump is at a poker table, then it's YOU.
It's just a realistic acknowledgement that these are not your problems to solve
Yes they are. You and your sister feminists helped create this mess; now get off your butt and get to work. You can start by telling co-eds that regrets over a hook up isn’t rape.
and that whatever happens, you won't be living in it.
Doesn’t matter. Nothing wrong with dying at your work desk.
Blogger Ice Nine said...
>Michael K said...
The only concern is that we have children and grandchildren...They will suffer under the deluded rule of evil people. They may even have to re-enact the battles of the Revolution or the Civil War.<
I used to hold the same fears - but I don't anymore. I realized that the following generations will be like the slowly boiling frog - each successive generation won't know that it should be any different from what they are experiencing. What they are experiencing will be what is normal, what things "are supposed to be."
You have an excellent point. The problem is that I have a major interest in History and even wrote a book about the history of medicine. I can see how everything has gotten better for humans since about 1880. The first big advance was sanitation. The World Wars were a setback but we recovered. The last 50 years have been a miracle of progress. Now, it is all to be thrown away by fools who have grown tired of the good life and want to follow fantasies when reality is there for all to see.
It's a shame as we want our kids and grandkids to have the life we lived.
"Once you get past 55, your horizon shortens. your kids are probably grown. You've gone as far as you can in your career, and you probably don't want to embark on a new one. You realize that whether you liked your life or not, its too late now to change. Liberating - yet also depressing."
Geez, rcocean! Thanks for the depressing reflections! Of course, I get where you're coming from. I'm 52 myself, and now that my youngest has graduated from high school, it's definitely a new season.
And thank you, Ann, for the pushback. New beginnings happen in a person's 50s. My favorite example is Richard Adams, who wrote down the rabbit stories he would tell his children, which became Watership Down. His second career as an author began at 52.
This may seem like a non-sequitur. But the topic here made me think of the movie Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. I can't recommend it highly enough. A cartoon sequel that reflects on mortality, death's inevitability, and the significance of making one's life count.
William notes, "Napoleon was at heart a Jacobin and . . . still has protective coloration."
Now do G. Washington and T. Jefferson.
The examples given have as much to do, IMO, with national characteristics and cultures as with the particular individuals memorialized.
In 2017, I stood under the statue of my great ancestor Charlemagne on the grounds of Notre Dame in Paris. He converted the heathen Saxons by the sword, and his tribe was recognized by the Pope as the New Chosen. (Come to think of it, in '78 my wife and I visited his tomb in Aachen.) We also did the standard royal and imperial sites in and around Paris in'17. A wonderful experience, that I hope is only a model for future self-indulgent travel.
"Is that all there is, is that all there is?
If that's all there is my friends, then let's keep dancing
Let's break out the booze and have a ball
If that's all there is."
Life in virtually all material respects is far better than it was 50 years ago, and is going to continue to improve in spite of the coordinated idiocy of the people in power. And yet the young are (mostly) miserable and convinced that the world is bad and getting worse.
We oldsters need to set an example. Be happy. Tell them that they are wrong, but say it with a smile. Life gets better--if you do things right. Don't listen to the doomsayers! Give them something to believe in.
There are a few moments in life where one can remember them in great detail.
When JFK was assassinated. The Challenger disaster. Most, if not all, of us alive at them time can recall those moments with crystal clarity.
Others are personal.
In my mid-30's, I was flying the F-111 in England. One night, after a low level in the Scottish Highlands, and air-air refueling over the North Sea, came forty minutes at 25,000 feet with the cockpit lights turned down as much as possible. Dozens of satellites, the Milky Way splashed across the sky.
Then, without warning or precedent, it occurred to me that one of these nights, I wouldn't be around to see it. The feeling was like someone had just poured a pitcher of ice water down my spine. Those synapses aren't ever going to change.
That started probably ten years of thinking frequently about death. Why it hadn't started well before then, by which time I already had 12 guys I knew on a first name basis killed in crashes, who knows.
After that, perhaps due to acclimating to the concept, thinking about death stopped.
Now that I'm nearly 68, I think about it more. My mother passed last August, and my two year younger brother the October previous.
But more doesn't greatly exceed not at all.
Based on genetics, I have 20 good years left. Not that genetics helped my brother (pancreatic cancer). So who knows. But then no one ever knows.
I have a life I can mostly be proudish of, save for, in my twenties, pretty much treating women as self-propelled sex toys. I blame feminism for that, and myself for willing acquiescence to what I knew, even at the time, to be destructive nonsense.
I hope I face death as stoically as my mother did. As for my brother? Dunno. He had TDS so bad he cut me off because I declined thinking Trump was the center of all evil in the universe.
Andrew, rcocean,
My wife reinvented her career starting at 50, and a dozen years later has now done probably 80% of her goals. 50 is still young if you didn't screw up your health.
As you age, if you are smart ( or lucky ) you learn detachment. If not, you will probably lead a miserable life. Detachment is not indifference. You still care; you still have preferences; you just don’t shrink into a ball of angst when outcomes are not of your choosing.
All I have are my actions. The results are up to God. So I concentrate on my inputs, let the universe pick the outcomes, horrible as they may be.
If you can learn to practice detachment you will soon discover that there is no better time than now to be alive as a human being. If you can’t detach, all of the terrible results ( of which you have no control over anyway ) will depress, pain and maybe kill you.
So we old people who want the young to fix this world are not being indifferent. We are just placing the onus on those who will inherit and live in that world; which is how it should be.
The world we inherited had problems. The world we leave will have problems. The world our grandchildren leave their children will have problems. Thus has it ever been.
It seems to me the idea that it is me that should fix the world is a work of self-aggrandizement.
What BS. I made my pile, I am going to spend it. I am not too stupid to figure out how to have fun even at 100. Perhaps if I am in fiery pain it would be different, but plan for the best and deal with the worst. All of you checking out early will support my consumption.
"It seems to me the idea that it is me that should fix the world is a work of self-aggrandizement."
Fixing the world? God save us from those who want to "make a difference". That's for 20-year-olds who've lived their whole life being supported by someone who is not them. Once they've had a chance to actually make the attempt to manage their own life (if that ever happens, for some it never appears to), reasonable people realize what they're up against and dial back their expectations a bit. You want to make a difference? Live a moral life and treat others the way you'd like to be treated. That'll get you started and should keep you busy.
I don't mind being old (I'll be 68 next month); I don't care for the aches and pains but I remind myself daily how good I have it versus some of my classmates that have already died. A younger sister of the girl I took to homecoming is in Hospice with pancreatic cancer. I am blessed to be able to work vigorously, have a love life, writing and editing every day.
I don't fear death at all. I do hope it isn't drawn out and painful but hey, I'll deal with it if it happens. The only thing I still have to do is get all my crap in order for my daughter to toss it out when I go.
MarcusB. THEOLDMAN
"Yet that curt "Whatever, I’ll be dead" really hit younger people."
Mentally unstable younger people.
Why do people get bent out of shape by what celebrities say? I can't think of anything less consequential.
The Makropulos case
“...play by Karel Čapek which was made into an opera by Janacek and which tells of a woman called Elina Makropulos, alias Emilia Marty, alias Ellian Macgregor, alias a number of other things with the initials ‘EM’, on whom her father, the Court physician to a sixteenth-century Emperor, tried out an elixir of life. At the time of the action she is aged 342. Her unending life has come to a state of boredom, indifference and coldness. Everything is joyless: ‘in the end it is the same’, she says, ‘singing and silence’. She refuses to take the elixir again; she dies; and the formula is deliberately destroyed by a young woman among the protests of some older men.
EM’s state suggests at least this, that death is not necessarily an evil, and not just in the sense in which almost everybody would agree to that, where death provides an end to great suffering, but in the more intimate sense that it can be a good thing not to live too long...”
Obtained my motorcycle license at the age of 64, less than one year ago, and bought a sport bike. Still work full time, majority of co-workers are under 40 years old, they are a joy to be around. Movement is life. Really enjoy this blog and especially the comments. Jim
"Fixing the world"?
Make your bed and clean your room first!
MarcusB. THEOLDMAN
Commenter Candide said, "The Makropulos case...etc."
Hmmm! I've got nine books by Capek on my bookshelf: short stories and novels, and a book of four plays. I've read almost all the books, but I haven't yet read the book of plays (plus one other collection of "Nine Fairy Tales"). I did read one of the four plays, "R.U.R." in high school. The volume I have includes "The Makropulos Case," along with "R.U.R.," "The White Plague," and "The Insect Play."
Thanks for your comment...now I'm inspired to read the book of plays!
Robert Cook,
For me, Capek is always good reading. He also had some incisive things to say about ‘little man’ subject of another recent post by Ann, in his novel “an Ordinary Life”.
"For me, Capek is always good reading. He also had some incisive things to say about ‘little man’ subject of another recent post by Ann, in his novel 'an Ordinary Life.'"
One of the volumes I have by Capek is THREE NOVELS, ("Hordubal," "Meteor," and "An Ordinary Life"). I read them all and remember being completely absorbed by each. However, it's been some years ago, so I will have to refresh myself and read them all again.
The only book by Capek that disappointed me--not least because I was most intrigued by its premise, (a man develops a weapon of incredible potency--essentially a nuclear weapon--many years before such a thing existed in reality)--was KRAKATIT. It's out of print and I had to buy it from a specialist book seller. I found it rambling and lacking in real focus. But, I'm still happy to have it.
I read ‘War with the Newts’ first time in mid 1980s and thought it was the freshest and most poignant thing ever. Tried to read it again about 20 yers later, struggled for awhile and dropped it. Well, time goes on and things change...
WAR WITH THE NEWTS was my first Capek and I thought it was terrific! I read it sometime in the 80s as you did. I should revisit it given your disappointing second experience with it.
(I read NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND by Dostoevsky three times, once in high school for a Humanities class, a second time not long after college on my own initiative, and a third time in my 40s. My experience of the book was entirely different with each reading. The only time I disliked it was when I read it in high school. I was too unread and mentally and emotionally immature to understand it or the literature of despair of which it is a signal part.)
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