What, me worry?
Parents and the blessedness of being blasé
When I lived in Lima, Peru in the mid-1990s, my route home from the airport would take me through an “ovalo” or traffic circle full of very interesting shops. It wasn’t far from my house, but I could never seem to find it. During the Canadian summer my family came to live with me in Lima to share the wonders of Peru. As we drove to my home from the airport at midnight, we passed through my mystery ovalo and my son spotted a surfing/skateboarding shop. The next day he walked unerringly to the shop.
I have noticed in my life that the team that was unfortunate enough to include me invariably lost whatever was being played. This realization came to me early in my life but it never bothered me. It just was. If I was on the team, that team would lose. I felt sorry for my teammates but didn’t suffer from any degree of guilt. I didn’t choose me, they did.
This rather Linus-like behaviour was manifest in other ways. If I was traveling with someone and we needed to make a turn at a particular spot – the red barn for example – I would be challenged by my travel companion.
“No, I am almost positive we turn to the right at the red barn.”
“Murray, you are always wrong. We turn left at the silver Quonset.”
The correct way was to turn left at the silver Quonset. One would think that this would be very troubling to me, but it never was (or is). If I was traveling on my own, I would plan for a few wrong turns. If I was traveling with someone else, I would never debate their assertions. Just last night I turned onto a highway and headed off in the wrong direction. Had I been with a friend he would have said,
“No Murray, the highway is divided, and you have to cross over to the lanes going the other direction.” Oh yeah…
Today I am mostly bemused by this strange quirk in my personality and try to always accept my wife’s gentle directions without comment.
In a cosmic twist of fate, today I read three articles (actually two were articles and the other was a podcast) that touched on this quirkiness. The writers of The Free Press put me on to the writings of Mr. Oliver Burkeman who writes the delightfully named blog called “Imperfectionism”. That seems to conform very comfortably with my life experience.
Burkeman argues that life is to be lived rather than obsessed over. Why feel burned out because you didn’t get enough accomplished today or you forgot to read the Bible for half an hour, or the workout was missed, or you fell asleep reading the latest New York Times bestseller. No one ever breathed his or her last expressing regret at having not read enough novels or spent enough time on the treadmill. He is on to something very important in my view.
A common critique of Latin America is their concept of “mañana”.
“No wonder Latin America is in a mess. No one wants to work, and they are terrible procrastinators!”
I think mañana is a significant strength in Latin American culture and it will come as no surprise that I fit in immediately. In fact, I reveled in that aspect of their worldview. More than once, I thought to myself,
“I can either stay here at the coffee shop and continue this fascinating conversation or I can go back to work and write a poorly constructed letter in Spanish to be sent to a potential client who will put it at the bottom of his stack of letters from supplier supplicants.”
I always stayed for the conversation and think my life was improved thereby.
An anecdote from my university days may be helpful in describing my attitude towards the balance between ambition and the examined life - which I flatter myself into thinking is the topic at hand. The first year of engineering included a course that was designed to peel off and fail twenty five percent of the first-year students. Everyone understood the game. I was in a small group of imperfectionists who skated dangerously close to the edge of engineering annihilation, and we compensated by stating loudly and boldly that it was stupid to achieve a score of more than fifty percent plus one. Why bother? was our challenge to the more gifted among us.
No one was fooled by our bravado. It was easily recognized that our challenge was the fifty more than the plus one. Although I never had the confidence to sew my graduation year numerals on my engineering jacket, I did, in fact, make it. But mine, as always, was the Alfred E. Neuman retort,
“What, me Worry?”
It amazes me today that the very real possibility of experiencing the ignominy of flunking out of engineering caused no obvious anxiety. Having said that, it is true that, like all engineers I know, I had recurring nightmares of having my diploma retracted because I failed grade 11 math. I guess there was some lingering anxiety regarding the whole engineering enterprise, but it was only ever subconsciously experienced.
All this is to say that, in certain aspects of my life, I have been a bit of a screw up. For most of my life people have told me that my sartorial choices are inappropriate at best and just awful at worst. I have always laughed in response. What surprises me is that my lack of concern has always kept pace with my awareness of the reasons for the concern.
Scott Adams offered a bit of an insight into my situation in an old podcast with Tim Ferriss. He described how he used “affirmation” to visualize carefully defined goals. He was able to visualize being a best-selling author and cartoonist, getting his voice back and getting a high enough GMAT score to get into a top tier business school and then he accomplished each of those goals.
He doesn’t suggest that paranormal energy was necessary to achieve his goals. Rather, he suggested a couple of explanations that involve the way our brains work. Perhaps our brains narrow their range of interest to save energy, and his affirmation technique simply caused the brain to open its peripheral vision to include more inputs, some of which illumine paths toward success that may not have been previously apparent.
So, if Mr. Adam’s affirmation led to remarkable success, then perhaps, I suffered from a negative affirmation that led to a remarkable record of “getting by” and “not winning”. Perhaps my negative energy was being channelled to ensure mediocrity – imperfectionism. I don’t offer this as any great insight, but I do find it interesting. Again, what is more interesting to me is my completely blasé response to this. I truly channel Alfred E. Neuman and, like Rhett Butler, frankly I don’t give a damn.
This is not to make a virtue out of screwing up and having a mindset that is negatively biased, but at this stage of my life, I am bemused more by my mistakes than my successes. Given the predominance of the one over the other that is a good thing because it gives me much to laugh about. Why do I have this response?
Previously I have pointed out that the world has always been a dangerous place and the current hyperventilating about the inappropriateness of bringing children into this danger is silly. I point out that my generation lived through the entire period of the Cold War and the immanence of thermonuclear annihilation. Yet I never once felt any anxiety about that possibility except when the air raid sirens were tested. My conclusion to why I and my friends felt no anxiety was because we trusted our parents to handle this little wrinkle in our lives. I am increasingly of that view.
Where I have gone wrong is my dismissal of younger people who fear the danger of today’s world. I used to believe that the “safe spaces” world of Generation Z was a function of the toxic effects of social media and the overuse of smart phones. That may be true but perhaps only to a limited extent.
The other article I read today was a blog by Freya India who dealt with the fears of the Gen Z generation head on. She argues that parental divorce can result in feelings of abandonment that are very damaging to the self-esteem and confidence of children. According to Ms. India, the Gen Z unwillingness to create stable relationships stems from this fear of abandonment. I would nuance her argument by saying that children of a “friendly” divorce do not necessarily fear abandonment. Likewise, parents who remain aloof or are antagonistic to their kids, like those of my friend Sandy, can also create fears of abandonment. Divorce is not necessarily causal, but no doubt it is the highest correlating variable.
“We fear life because we feel alone.”
argues Ms. India. What an indictment of a generation of parents. Her essay was a wakeup call to reframe my understanding of the idiosyncrasies of people younger than myself. If she is right, then “entitled” is not the correct diagnosis of the apparent silliness of Gen Z individuals.
And I suppose what I wonder is, what did we expect? These things have consequences. Throughout history our ancestors built customs and institutions to bind us together and then, one by one, we kicked them down. We killed God, we mocked marriage, we attacked the family, we uprooted neighbourhoods, we debunked every last myth and story. And we kept going and going, until we got here, with our sad little divorce parties. Until we got here, with a generation huddled, heartbroken, fearful of love, fearful of life, kicking away at anything that reaches out to help. We lifted the burden from adults, told parents to do what makes them happy, forgetting that those structures weren’t just limits on adult freedom; they were foundations for children to stand on, to step off from, on which they depended. We shattered them and now we wonder why a generation is falling apart. Welcome to the age of abandonment.
I think Ms. India answers my questions. My sang-froid regarding my screw ups and my bemused imperfectionism is powered by the security created by parents who established appropriate boundaries and gave up many of their own dreams and aspirations to live vicariously through mine. I can’t imagine living a life in fear of the slights and disappointments of normal social commerce. I didn’t care about the views of other people because I didn’t fear abandonment. Instead of creating such fears, my parents had fortified my life during the time that I was susceptible to the toxicity of feelings of abandonment.
As a result, I have profound respect, admiration and thanksgiving for my parents. In a more recent context, I wonder what damage was done by abandoning a generation of kids to Zoom calls and social media and using Costco as a community center.
But mostly I have a newfound respect for those of the Gen Z (and other) generations who have fought through their feelings of abandonment to create secure lives for their children.
Ms. India leaves her readers with a challenge,
All this to say, being abandoned is not trivial. Not only having divorced parents, but being cut off from community, from culture, from all sources of support. Maybe it means more to you than you are letting on. Feel it, grieve it. Then turn that disappointment into determination. Nothing’s guaranteed, but we can take the pain and put every inch of it into our own family. Comes to down to us now; our opportunity to seize. We don’t have to pretend there’s no fear. But we can use it to forge ahead. And build something we can finally belong to.
Well said Ms. India! I hope that many take up your challenge.
