When I turned 28 one of my sisters-in-law asked me “Josh, what’s it like to get old?”

I’ve never stopped, and never will stop, mocking her for this. But gently, because I really appreciate that she asked me what could have been an embarassing question, and I’m grateful that she thought that I might be able to provide some insight.

If I recall, I did not provide any insight. I probably said “I’ll let you know when I get old” which is, coincidentally, what I would say today.

Still, let’s fix that and try and provide some kind of answer! I’ve hit another milestone birthday…

(you’ll have to guess which one, but given that the last birthday I considered a milestone was 33, well, I have werid milestones)

… and another, different relative asked me how I was feeling, and if I had any regrets from the first portion of my life. I genuinely don’t have any regrets, and I’m very grateful for that, and I want to talk about why for a second to hopefully give both relatives a little understanding of why I’m such a weirdo.

The wisdom of Aesop Rock

Sometime in my twenties I was introduced to Aesop Rock, and the first song I heard was No Regrets. I highly recommend listening to the whole song (that’s a link to a lyric video). It’s a narrative song that tells the story of an artist named Lucy who persists in her art even though the people around her don’t quite understand (they say write about what you know, and Aes delivers).

In the third verse we get to the message and Aesop Rock, who loves metaphor, symbolism and wordplay more than any other human being alive, just straight up says it with no complications. On her deathbed Lucy says:

… Look, I’ve never had a dream in my life
Because a dream is what you wanna do, but still haven’t pursued
I knew what I wanted and did it till it was done
So I’ve been the dream that I wanted to be since day one!

I don’t know where Aesop Rock puts this in his pantheon of great works, but it was 100% a case of right place, right time for me. I’ve always had crazy ideas and dreams and here comes Aesop Rock saying … then just pursue it. Make it happen.

BUT! Most importantly he doesn’t say this in a sacharine, Nike commercial kind of way. Lucy is in a nursing home when she dies. She never made many friends. She never had a family. What she loved more than anything was to draw, and she did it throughout her life until she couldn’t anymore (arthritis, it had to happen). After she spells out the moral of the story she “blew a kiss to each one of her pictures and she died.”

In creative endeavors there is so much luck. An insane amount of luck. To stick with rap, for every Dr. Dre there are a thousand Aesop Rocks (I’m speaking only of financial success here, not trying to compare talent). And for every Aesop Rock there are a thousand rappers you’ve never heard of. So if you’re going to do something creative you can’t count on … well, what typically counts as success. Money, fame, big contracts, etc. If you want to enjoy your life, do the thing you love because you love it. But DO it.

In college I really wanted to be a musician. I scraped together my cash and bought a guitar, and a POD, and keyboard, and a computer, and a microphone and recorded an album in my Grandma’s basement.

Was it good? I mean, I can say quite honestly it wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t great. But I did it.

After I finished my album (though not my love of music), I moved on to my next dream — writing a novel. I did that over the course of a few years and submitted it and … achieved the same amount of success as my album.

After that, I turned to screenplays. I think I’ve written a half dozen or so. Haven’t sold any, haven’t even really gotten close, but I’ve done it. And I actually really like the process of writing them. I did one over a little vacation once and it was a ton of fun.

A lot of people regret not chasing their dreams. I “knew what I wanted and did it till it was done so I’ve been the dream that I wanted to be since day one!”

Well, since about age twenty, but pretty close.

The wisdom of Dashiell Hammet

In the Maltese Falcon, Hammet tells a story about a man called “Flitcraft:”

“Here’s what happened to him. Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put up – just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn’t touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. It only took a piece of skin off, but he still had the scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his finger – well, affectionately – when he told me about it. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.”

Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.

That was a longer quote — I tried to shorten it, but the writing is so good! I couldn’t bring myself to excise any of it. He ends the story by talking about how Flitcraft was jolted out of his life by the beam (he leaves his wife and kids in the story) but then got married and fell back into the exact same kind of life without realizing it. “I don’t think he even knew he had settled back naturally in the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”

Hammet is fantastic.

I studied Sociology at school and learned about how we are socialized to treat things certain ways. From a very young age boys are treated differently by their parents than girls, and thus learn the ways that boys are “different” from girls (societally speaking). There are thousands of ways we are guided down a specific path and millions of unspoken encouragements and approvals (and punishments and disprovals) that keep us moving along a pretty “normal” path.

Like Flitcraft I felt like “somebody had taken the lid off life and let [me] look at the works.” So as I did things like go through school, I questioned what I was doing with my life. As I got married I talked to my wife to make sure we weren’t just falling into a pattern — or that, if we were, we were at least aware of it and were making the decision deliberately, not by default.

This has complicated my life somewhat as I’ve agonized over seemingly trivial choices, and I have wound up, by happenstance or by the gravity of expectation, with a pretty … conventional life.

BUT, I do feel like I chose it. If I beam fell on me I wouldn’t feel the need to make a bunch of different choices just to prove that I can, because I have made the choices I’ve made until now, doing the best that I could in every situation. It kind of makes sense that many of those choices would be pretty conventional — I was socialized into certain attitudes since before I could talk. But being aware of that, and making a few different choices where it matters, has helped me feel like it’s my life.

It’s helped me avoid feeling regret. I think a lot of people feel regret when they wake up and go “How did I get here? Why did I do this? Why did I make these choices??” Although I question my past choices, I never wake up like that because I do know that I was aware of the choices that I was making.

Hopefully that makes sense.

Grattitude

A hundred and fifty years ago, statistically speaking, I would be dead already.

Isn’t that insane?

In ancient egypt life expectancy was just the early 20s, largely due to a high infant mortality rate. If you lived passed that you could look forward to a life expectancy … in the thirties. Not a huge improvement.

Some pharoes and other aristrocats potentially lived into their fifties, maybe even sixties, but for most people getting into the thirties was the most you could hope for.

For several thousand years the “midlife crisis” would’ve come at 17, and the grim reaper birthday cards would’ve started around 30 (if you had the good fortune to make it that far … and if hallmark existed thousands of years ago).

This only started changing in the mid 1930! It wasn’t until the 50s that average life expectancy topped 60 years. So from ancient egypt to just last century the amount of time a person might live changed very little.

Modern medicine is amazing.

Remember my 33rd birthday I mentioned? By the standards of the vast majority of recorded history I would’ve lived a full life by that birthday.

And, honestly, I have lived a full and incredibly fortunate life. I’ve had a few instances where I’ve contemplated (or been forced to contemplate) my own mortality and in every one of those instances my thoughts have been the same.

I have been overwhelmed by grattitude. I’ve lived a life longer than the vast majority of humanity already, and I’ve seen and felt and experienced things that royalty of the past could only dream of. And I’ve known and appreciated amazing, wonderful people in my family, among my friends, in the places I’ve lived and visited and through the internet.

And, statistically, I still have most of my life ahead of me! I get to live, by the standards of the past, more than an entire second life.

That’s wild. How could I regret what got me here? I am more fortunate that almost everyone in the history of the world.