Loving Projects

Old age is life's parody.

— Simone de Beauvoir  

Bruce Willis' family's announcement that the wisecracking actor has succumbed to aphasia is yet another reminder of old age's cruel sense of humor.

Old age "crushes" people, said existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, turning them into parodies of their younger selves.

"There is only one solution," she wrote in The Coming of Age, the philosopher's sweeping essay on elderhood. "That is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence meaning. 

"In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in upon ourselves."

The specific passions de Beauvoir had in mind were ones that today's emotion scientists would classify as cathected (other-directed); namely, love, friendship, and compassion.

The old can stave off mental, emotional and spiritual decline through "devotion to individuals, to groups or causes, or to creative work," de Beauvoir wrote.

But interests and intentions alone aren't enough. 

The old must have projects: purposeful ventures that "people their world with goals, values and reasons for existence."

Projects, after all, are the things that consume our youth, when we're little more than walking, talking, wage-earning commodities—"human resources." 

Objectified cogs in the global economy.

As soon as we reach adolescence, we're forced to devote all our waking hours to learning, earning, networking and caring—if we're lucky—for a family and a home.

There's barely a second to stop and smell the coffee.

Those projects by default are loving—purposeful and other-directed—even if mandatory.

Purposeful projects in our dotage, on the other hand, are voluntary. They have to be discovered, crafted and tended; otherwise, we acquiesce to sloth and idleness, sleeping the first half the of day, sleepwalking the rest.

De Beauvoir didn't pull any punches when it came to old age.

She described it as surreal, a "double alienation."

We're stigmatized, twice: cut off from youth and from any role in the economy.

Young folks question our worth—and so do we.

A retired newspaper editor told me yesterday that a twenty-something corporate IT trainer once said to him, "You old people are a waste of time." He didn't disagree.

That sums up old age's predicament succinctly: it's decrepit and nonproductive.

"America is the country of young men," Emerson said.

That's truer than true.

The only way out, as de Beauvoir saw things, is to be-for-others, just as we were before we grew old. 

To tackle a passel of loving projects.

If we don't dive into a lot of loving projects, she wrote, we face the very cruelest of fates: "abandonment, segregation, decay, dementia, death.”

We need loving projects—several—just to stay in the game.

Freud, whose influence on de Beauvoir was profound, said it best.

"Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness."

NOTE: Read more about the renewed interest in Simone de Beauvoir's 1970 book The Coming of Age and watch A Walk through the Land of Old Age, a 1974 film featuring the French philosopher.

Above: Priscilla, My Mother by Anne Gifford. Watercolor on paper. Spring Corn by Rose Frantzen. Oil on canvas.

Enthused

I thank God every day for keeping me enthused.

— Bobby Rush

Enthusiasm was borrowed by the English language in the 17th century from the Greek word enthousiasmos, which meant "divine possession."

The Ancient Greeks believed that music took possession of you and produced enthusiasm—especially the "manic" tunes attributed to the god of music, Dionysus. 

But age often dampens enthusiasm, as it dampens drive. People reach 60 or 70 and seem suddenly adrift and disengaged from the greater world. They spend their waking hours reminiscing about the past, grousing about the present, puttering about the house, and seeking leisurely distractions to fill the empty time.

So it's inspiring to learn there are enthusiastic folks like Bobby Rush around.

A "legendary" blues musician who won his first Grammy at 83 and today, at 88, still tours the world, Rush performs in front of large audiences at solo shows and festivals continuously.

Last year, Rush took home yet a second Grammy and even published a memoir, I Ain’t Studdin' Ya.

"I have 397 records," Rush told the Houston Press last year. "There's not another blues singer ever lived that has that many records. I'm the oldest blues singer that’s living in the world."

Rush, a Louisiana native who worked all through childhood as a sharecropper, is the product of 1950s-era juke joints in Little Rock, Arkansas. Success on the stage quickly took him to Chicago, where he played guitar and harmonica alongside musical giants like Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Etta James, John Lee Hooker and Buddy Guy. He founded his own band in the 1960s, and scored his first hit, the funky single "Chicken Heads," in 1971.

Fifty-one years later, Rush's enthusiasm for the blues is as strong as ever. He spends over 200 days a year on the road. Like Bob Dylan's, his tour is "never ending," and Rolling Stone has respectfully nicknamed Rush "King of the Chitlin' Circuit." He has appeared recently on a slew of TV shows and in feature films and documentaries, and is a prominent voice in favor of voting rights.

In 2017, in tribute to his career, Rush received the B.B. King Entertainer of the Year Award, the most prestigious blues-music honor any performer can receive.

"I’m sitting on top of the blues," Rush told Glide Magazine two years ago.

"I’m a bluesman who’s sitting on the top of my game, proud of what I do and proud of who I am. I’m happy about what I’m doing and still enthused about what I’m doing."

How about you?

How's your tour going?

And—most importantly—are you enthused?

Whoops a Daisy

A cleric I know lost his "dream job" when he wrote an email to a confidant complaining about a whiney congregant and by accident sent it to the whole congregation.

Mistakenly sent emails cost many people their jobs last year, according to a new study by cybersecurity firm Tessian.

In fact, one in four people.

According to the study, an employee sends four emails to the wrong person every month, on average; and one in four loses his job as a result.

Nearly one-third of employees say their businesses lost a customer last year because of a mistakenly sent email, the study also says.

Half of all employees blamed the mistakes on bosses pressuring them to work quickly.

The others blamed the mistakes on distractions and the fatigue brought on by working from home and meeting for hours on Zoom.

Whoops a daisy!

HAT TIP: Thanks go to Forbes columnist Edward Segal for alerting me to Tessian's study.

Fear Itself

Let the past abolish the past when—and if—it can substitute something better.

— William Faulkner

I've never encountered the conservative's rock-bottom belief better expressed than it was by William Faulkner in his 1962 speech before the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

"Let the past abolish the past when—and if—it can substitute something better," Faulkner said.

It's not our choice "to abolish the past simply because it was."

Conservatives always want to turn back the clock, without regard to whether the past was kind to everyone.

They can't help themselves.

Their brains are to blame.

Conservatives' have overactive right amygdalas, the side of the brain that processes fear.

In a word, they're chickenshits.

Holding reactionary opinions helps them manage fear.

The world is a dark, scary place, after all.

Scarcity is scary.

Disruption is scary.

Ambiguity is scary.

Hell, the future is scary.

At this moment, conservatives are even siding with Putin to quash their fear.

Any friend of Donald is a friend of theirs.

Liberals—those brave folks with the overactive left amygdalas—wonder why conservatives always choose the wrong side of history. But it's no mystery.

They can't handle fear.

As FDR said in his first inaugural address, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror."

But I say, the only thing we have to fear is conservatives—reckless, feckless, unreasoning cowards.

Find some cajones, amigos.

Please.

10 Books That Have Mattered to Me

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. 

They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

– Anna Quindlen

For better or worse—mostly better—every book you read becomes part of you.

Whether treasure or trash, books can furnish pivotal life lessons.

I've learned profound lessons from trivial books; enduring lessons from ephemeral books; glorious lessons from terrible books.

And, as every reader knows, some books matter more than others: the ones that change your life. 

They startle you, consume you, haunt you, and shape your world.

Here are the 10 books that did that to me:

The Nick Adams Stories. Ernest Hemingway's coming-of-age stories deeply influenced my own coming of age, although I could not be more different from his protagonist Nick Adams. Hemingway's stories showed my teenage self the dark sides of the world that were—and are—kept secret from kids. Suffering. Sacrifice. Cowardice. Ambivalence. Depression. Addiction. Suicide. Rage. Rape. And romantic betrayal.   

Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Walter Kaufman's critical biography of the German thinker drew me into the world of philosophy and "philosophical anthropology." Even though my college professors later told me Nietzsche was "adolescent," I've always liked his naive truth-seeker's attitude. "There is no better soporific and sedative than skepticism," he said.

Catch-22. A high school English teacher assigned our class Joseph Heller's absurdist novel the same year we had to register for the draft. If I needed convincing I was allergic to the military, I didn't need it after reading Catch-22. Only a decade later, when I was working in an ad agency, did I learn that Heller was in fact proud of his service in World War II, and was actually writing about the bizarre goings-on in New York ad agencies.       

The Sound and the Fury. Another high school reading assignment, William Faulkner's surreal novel showed me that the past is never dead; that psychic legacies—your "roots"—shape you indelibly; that racism is unquestionably America's Original Sin; and that all well-off families must eventually rot and decay. For its literary merits and insights into people, I consider this the greatest novel yet written by an American.

Sanity, Madness and the Family. More than Sigmund Freud's, psychiatrist R.D. Laing's books captivated me during my years in college. In Sanity, Madness and the Family, Laing presented eleven case studies of patients with schizophrenia (considered incurable at the time). He concluded from his studies that the patients weren't crazy, their families were. The hospitalized patients were just trying to deal with family pressures. In other words, even insanity is intelligible, if you listen carefully enough.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I took a semester-long course on Ludwig Wittgenstein's 150-page book, the only one published during his lifetime. Beneath its gnomic sentences lies an extraordinary—and quite mystical—worldview. According to that view, it is our language (i.e., our grammar) that lures us to many nonsensical beliefs about the world. But when we confront the world directly, our language stops operating, and those beliefs lose all credibility. In other words, speaking and thinking aren't doing. Doing is clear; it's speaking and thinking about doing that are muddy. "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent," Wittgenstein concludes. 

Being and Time. Martin Heidegger's exhaustive tome furthered my grip on reality. His basic premise simple: being is time. To be human is to exist "temporally," to live out our short stretch between cradle and grave. Being is time and time is finite: it comes to an end with our deaths. If we hope ever to be authentic human beings, we must act not as lifeless robots but as "beings-towards-death" and carve some meaning out of our finitude.

The Centaur. John Updike's charming novel warmed my heart to others like no book I've read. The story concerns a sad-sack science teacher and his disappointed 15-year-old son. The shambling father lives two parallel lives, one as a small-town high-school teacher (a self-described "walking junk heap”) and the other as a centaur. While the teacher is hapless and unremarkable, the centaur is a mighty Olympian god (he's even in love with a goddess, who's also the girls’ gym teacher). Through overhearing townspeople praise his father, the son comes at last to accept his long-suffering father for who he is—without ever learning about his fantasy life as a god.

Meditations. Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius' Meditations provided the sort of "self-help" I needed when, at age 40, I finally read the 2,000-year-old book. A Stoic, Aurelius says that serenity only comes by withholding your judgements of people, places and things. Most troubles exist only in the mind, and are worsened by self-importance, overindulgence, and thoughtless drive.

American Pastoral. Philip Roth's fictional account of the precipitous decline of Newark, New Jersey hit closer to home than anything I've read (I grew up next door to the once-bucolic city). Successful Jewish glove-manufacturer "Swede" Levov's world is shattered when his daughter protests the Vietnam War by blowing up a local post office. The fall of Newark from great American city to cesspool vividly parallels Lev's fate as he searches the city for his fugitive daughter.

What books have mattered to you?

HAT TIP: Thanks go to Dan Pink for inspiring this post. I wonder whether he remembers providing a guest post for Goodly nearly 10 years ago?