I think I may have figured out how life goes.
Once you become a preteen up until you’re age 15 or 20 or 25 or 30 or even 35, you spend a decent chunk of your life developing principles and thinking that there is a particular way that you like to live your life and molding your personality into the kind of person that you want to be.
At various ages, you decide whether religion matters to you; whether staying in shape via exercise or diet matters to you; whether you’re going to try recreational drugs or not (and whether you are going to continue to “try” them each and every morning after you wake up); whether you want to go to college and ultimately do with your life from a career standpoint; the types of things you save up for and spend your money on; what your political beliefs are; what clothes you wear and how that expresses who you are; what sports you’ll play; what clubs to join or hobbies to have; whether you’ll play video games or not; how to wear your hair; what car to drive; what music to listen to; what books to read; what TV to watch; what bars or clubs to hang out in.
But you don’t just choose religions and philosophies and art and material goods. You choose the people that you will live your life with. You choose your friends. You choose a boyfriend or girlfriend.
Lots of these decisions are big and lots are small, but in the 21st Century, your identity is no longer determined by who your family is, or what “class” you’re from. Who you are is based, in large part, by the choices that you make. Lots of people take this seriously, spending thousands of hours deciding who they are; making choices that they can respect the rest of their lives.
What no one tells you when you’re 20 is that you shouldn’t spend so much time figuring this out, because you ultimately just give it all away.
For men, I think it starts with the girlfriend. Specifically, I think it starts with the first chick flick that a guy goes to see with his girlfriend. It continues when she buys him his first shirt with a designer label (yuck!) and gets him to stay home instead of going out with the boys. When I got married I was a little horrified to find my wife going to Jazzercise classes.
But the spouse or girlfriend is nothing compared to the children.
Earlier this week, I was flipping ahead on Turner Movie Classics and AMC, to see if there were any movies I wanted to TIVO this week. And I saw “Look Who’s Talking” come up and I thought “oh, the kids might like that” and I hit the Record button.
And it didn’t even hit me (that's probably the worst part). I didn’t even notice that I had, completely without irony, chosen to record “Look Who’s Talking.” I couldn’t help but flashback to the teenaged version of myself, when I believed Look Who’s Talking to be so odious and held it with such disdain as to not be worth mocking (since everything is worth mocking to a teenager, this means I held it in such low regard as hair metal bands, the song “I Just Can’t Get Enough” by Depeche Mode, my sister's Jelly shoes and people who didn’t like Catcher in the Rye). The teenaged me wouldn’t recognize the man who just chose to record Look Who’s Freakin Talking without irony.
I think most people in their early twenties realize that on some level they’ll get more tolerant when they get older, or they start to realize this as they actually start to get more tolerant.
What I’ve just come to realize is that it’s your own damn kids that largely do this to you. You may have always thought playing with dolls and barrettes are silly, but you don’t think your daughter is silly, so if she cares about that stuff, ultimately you do too on some level. So I’m a 35 year old man that has opinions about the merits of different kinds of barrettes now. You might have thought, pre-children, that “People that have kids are just making excuses about not working out and I am going to work out six days a week after having kids” and then, when you have kids, that goes out the window (at least when they’re real young, it has to).
You start watching absolutely ridiculous TV hows, like that new show Wipeout or American Idol or (the worst) America’s Funniest Videos with the kids, simply because the kids love it. And after watching them crack up at 10 ridiculous videos of people falling off three-wheelers, it will be tough to maintain your dislike for that damn Tom Bergeron (or Bob Saget, if watching reruns). I mean, I’ve used flash cards with my kids. I’ve said “because I said so.” I’ve worked at a job I’m pretty damn ambivalent about for 9 years.
Hell, half the crap I write about in this blog is exactly this: me surrendering principles at the altar of my children.
You might hate McDonalds and fast food. But your kids won’t and they’ll mellow you out about it. You may have chosen certain sports to play in high school or at least favored those sports (I played tennis and would’ve loved to play football had I weighed over 140 lbs). And you probably thought some sports were silly (for me volleyball and, later, lacrosse). But when your kid is out there playing, your prior opinions will go out the window. So if my kids like it, it’s LAX for me baby!
The increasing-tolerance principles-out-the-window affect even applies to serious stuff. While there are certainly horror stories from the gay community about parents rejecting gay children, the more common outcome these days is for the gay child to convince the parents that there isn’t really anything wrong with being gay. And you hear a lot about parents and children fighting over politics only to come to terms with the other’s political beliefs a few years later.
It is a cliché how parents complain about how their grandparents coddle their grandchildren and how “things weren’t like that when they were raising me.” It is similarly cliché how “the first child has it the worst” when it comes to discipline. And while simple fatigue is part of the reason for this, half of this is simply because, at age 60, you don’t have the principles that you had at age 30. Maybe at age 60 you don’t think hitting someone because they took your toy isn’t really so bad; you don’t think kids making a little too much noise in a restaurant is such a big deal; and you realize that giving a kid extra candy now isn’t going to spoil them and ruin their life 20 years hence, making them so lazy as to be unemployable or something.
So that’s it. You gather up principles for the first quarter or third of your life and you spend the rest giving them away.
Finally, you whittle it down to just one principle.
And that last principle you give up is the principle that you like life more than death.
Once you become a preteen up until you’re age 15 or 20 or 25 or 30 or even 35, you spend a decent chunk of your life developing principles and thinking that there is a particular way that you like to live your life and molding your personality into the kind of person that you want to be.
At various ages, you decide whether religion matters to you; whether staying in shape via exercise or diet matters to you; whether you’re going to try recreational drugs or not (and whether you are going to continue to “try” them each and every morning after you wake up); whether you want to go to college and ultimately do with your life from a career standpoint; the types of things you save up for and spend your money on; what your political beliefs are; what clothes you wear and how that expresses who you are; what sports you’ll play; what clubs to join or hobbies to have; whether you’ll play video games or not; how to wear your hair; what car to drive; what music to listen to; what books to read; what TV to watch; what bars or clubs to hang out in.
But you don’t just choose religions and philosophies and art and material goods. You choose the people that you will live your life with. You choose your friends. You choose a boyfriend or girlfriend.
Lots of these decisions are big and lots are small, but in the 21st Century, your identity is no longer determined by who your family is, or what “class” you’re from. Who you are is based, in large part, by the choices that you make. Lots of people take this seriously, spending thousands of hours deciding who they are; making choices that they can respect the rest of their lives.
What no one tells you when you’re 20 is that you shouldn’t spend so much time figuring this out, because you ultimately just give it all away.
For men, I think it starts with the girlfriend. Specifically, I think it starts with the first chick flick that a guy goes to see with his girlfriend. It continues when she buys him his first shirt with a designer label (yuck!) and gets him to stay home instead of going out with the boys. When I got married I was a little horrified to find my wife going to Jazzercise classes.
But the spouse or girlfriend is nothing compared to the children.
Earlier this week, I was flipping ahead on Turner Movie Classics and AMC, to see if there were any movies I wanted to TIVO this week. And I saw “Look Who’s Talking” come up and I thought “oh, the kids might like that” and I hit the Record button.
And it didn’t even hit me (that's probably the worst part). I didn’t even notice that I had, completely without irony, chosen to record “Look Who’s Talking.” I couldn’t help but flashback to the teenaged version of myself, when I believed Look Who’s Talking to be so odious and held it with such disdain as to not be worth mocking (since everything is worth mocking to a teenager, this means I held it in such low regard as hair metal bands, the song “I Just Can’t Get Enough” by Depeche Mode, my sister's Jelly shoes and people who didn’t like Catcher in the Rye). The teenaged me wouldn’t recognize the man who just chose to record Look Who’s Freakin Talking without irony.
I think most people in their early twenties realize that on some level they’ll get more tolerant when they get older, or they start to realize this as they actually start to get more tolerant.
What I’ve just come to realize is that it’s your own damn kids that largely do this to you. You may have always thought playing with dolls and barrettes are silly, but you don’t think your daughter is silly, so if she cares about that stuff, ultimately you do too on some level. So I’m a 35 year old man that has opinions about the merits of different kinds of barrettes now. You might have thought, pre-children, that “People that have kids are just making excuses about not working out and I am going to work out six days a week after having kids” and then, when you have kids, that goes out the window (at least when they’re real young, it has to).
You start watching absolutely ridiculous TV hows, like that new show Wipeout or American Idol or (the worst) America’s Funniest Videos with the kids, simply because the kids love it. And after watching them crack up at 10 ridiculous videos of people falling off three-wheelers, it will be tough to maintain your dislike for that damn Tom Bergeron (or Bob Saget, if watching reruns). I mean, I’ve used flash cards with my kids. I’ve said “because I said so.” I’ve worked at a job I’m pretty damn ambivalent about for 9 years.
Hell, half the crap I write about in this blog is exactly this: me surrendering principles at the altar of my children.
You might hate McDonalds and fast food. But your kids won’t and they’ll mellow you out about it. You may have chosen certain sports to play in high school or at least favored those sports (I played tennis and would’ve loved to play football had I weighed over 140 lbs). And you probably thought some sports were silly (for me volleyball and, later, lacrosse). But when your kid is out there playing, your prior opinions will go out the window. So if my kids like it, it’s LAX for me baby!
The increasing-tolerance principles-out-the-window affect even applies to serious stuff. While there are certainly horror stories from the gay community about parents rejecting gay children, the more common outcome these days is for the gay child to convince the parents that there isn’t really anything wrong with being gay. And you hear a lot about parents and children fighting over politics only to come to terms with the other’s political beliefs a few years later.
It is a cliché how parents complain about how their grandparents coddle their grandchildren and how “things weren’t like that when they were raising me.” It is similarly cliché how “the first child has it the worst” when it comes to discipline. And while simple fatigue is part of the reason for this, half of this is simply because, at age 60, you don’t have the principles that you had at age 30. Maybe at age 60 you don’t think hitting someone because they took your toy isn’t really so bad; you don’t think kids making a little too much noise in a restaurant is such a big deal; and you realize that giving a kid extra candy now isn’t going to spoil them and ruin their life 20 years hence, making them so lazy as to be unemployable or something.
So that’s it. You gather up principles for the first quarter or third of your life and you spend the rest giving them away.
Finally, you whittle it down to just one principle.
And that last principle you give up is the principle that you like life more than death.
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