Thirty
I’ve learned maybe one thing every ten years.
When I was ten I was… let’s see, in the fifth grade. And what I wanted out of life was… probably whatever was next. When you’re a kid, what you know is progression. When you’re in grade 5, all you care about is how great everything will be when you’re in grade 6, when you’re ten you just can’t wait to be eleven, then twelve, then sixteen, then a grown-up.
When I was twenty I couldn’t wait to acquire whatever it was that was supposed to fulfill me. I got out of university the year I turned twenty-three, and that same year I got a job and an apartment and a girlfriend, and the next year I got a car, and now, now it was all coming together, right?
The most vivid memory I have of my twenties is being alone in my apartment—the next apartment, after I’d broken up with the girlfriend and still had the job and car—in this run-down apartment by the highway where I was lonely all the time, talking on the phone with my mom. And I was lamenting the ennui of some menial task, like how, no matter how many times you wash your dishes or do the laundry or make yourself some food, you’ll just have to do that all over again soon. It just never stops being a struggle. And she said something like, “Well, yeah. That’s life.” And I was baffled by how profound that was. Or, if not profound, revelatory. Relevatory in the non-hyperbolic sense; she was stating an obvious truth but one I’d accepted, not really.
I suddenly saw where so much of my angst came from: the gap between my expectations and reality. At twenty-five, I should be “an adult”, or, more to the point, a “grown-up”, someone standing tall and strong at the helm of their life, chin held high while sails snapped in a sure wind.
But I was still a mess. Maybe a little less emotionally unstable than I’d been as a teenager, but really just beginning, maybe with that first revelation, to grasp the truth: that the utopian vision of adulthood I was somehow clinging to against all evidence to the contrary was fake, that you never actually reach a point where the choices you’ve made accumulate and you breeze through the rest of your life, happy and content.
I hadn’t learned that lesson at twenty-five. I’d have to do a lot of things and be disappointed by them, first. And meet my brilliant wife, and learn about the world by seeing it through her eyes.
I’ve always been heavily into the idea of the individual. I’ve always wanted to go my own way. And, whether makes me strong willed or just stubborn, I’ve thrashed in the yoke of any system placed around me, that told me how to be.
And, indeed, in my twenties I was very alone, in my head. The act of growing up means differentiating yourself, breaking away from the default set of values presented by your family. And, past that, when you’re on your own, you have a certain sort of freedom to continue believing whatever suits you best. But the problem with being just an individual is we’re trapped in our narrow perception of the universe. Since whatever upholstery has developed in our heads is what we’ve always been familiar with, we maybe don’t question what flows out of that perspective.
Say what you will about choosing to bind your life to that of another person, but it does provide an opportunity, rare for otherwise selfish creatures, to step outside your head and view yourself sideways.
I already knew I get really angry pretty often. What seeing myself from my wife’s perspective did, though, was prove that I was usually angry for no reason, or that the magnitude of my anger was out of proportion to its cause.
That’s worth knowing, but it led to something more important: after growing into someone who jealously guarded my ego, my sense of individuality, I realized that my brain hasn’t earned and doesn’t deserve my unthinking trust. That the first step in exerting any reasonable amount of control over yourself is to separate your behavior from your emotions, when you can. That just because you feel angry doesn’t mean that feeling is justified, and if it turns out you’re overreacting because you’re hungry (which happens to me constantly), you need to moderate your reaction compared to when you’ve actually been hurt.
And the other important thing to realize, for the staunch individualist, the iconoclast that hates traditional systems and their expectations, is that viewing your ego with a suspicious eye and moderating your reactions to your own emotions aren’t evidence that you’re selling out, bowing down to some external standard of behavior. Learning to behave this way makes you happier, because as righteously furious as you might feel in the grip of your emotions, being angry all the time is not—no, really—the path to contentment.
This way of thinking of things, diminishing the all-importance of the ego, coincided with discovering (some version of) Buddhist philosophy. That taught me our reactions to negative emotions and events are not only controllable, but are often more damaging than the emotions or events themselves. It also introduced me to the idea that dissatisfaction is inevitable: the myth that we belong on a path towards some idealized state of success and joy is out of touch with reality to a damaging extent. And embracing dissatisfaction helps you approach the things that happen in your life with more deliberation and understanding: you can look for happiness in what you have, or embrace change without fear of stumbling on your continuous ascent towards perfection… because you know that path isn’t real.
And having mentioned the word fear, we come to the final part of what I learned in my twenties: we have met the enemy, and he is us.
I’ve read what Merlin Mann has to say about fear, and what Seth Godin has to say about the Lizard Brain, and finally what Stephen Pressfield has to say about Resistance, and I cling to those ideas like driftwood, because if there’s one thing that’s keeping me from doing any number of things, trivial or momentous, that I want to do, it is fear. And I’ve hardly started living my life as an exemplar of fearlessness, but I feel like I’ve identified the problem, at least, and can try and try to bend my will towards improving.
And that brings us back to the revelation my Mom casually mentioned on the phone: nothing is harder than fighting fear, and nothing improves in your life unless you try it and fail and then try again, and that’s the most frightening course of action possible. So learning to accept that it will always be a struggle is necessary. You might not succeed, and you certainly won’t always be happy. But you ought to try anyway, and sooner than later. Because the only alternative is to huddle in fearful tepidity until pretty soon you die.
That’s what I’m looking forward to at thirty, then, I suppose: a struggle. Because I’ve learned and accepted that there is nothing else true. And I feel better about that than I ever did at twenty, when I still assumed, though I would have denied it at the time, that what came next was happily ever after.