I don't want to Adult today.
- Popular FaceBook meme/theme
Today I attended my third funeral in the past month. Gone too soon were my 20-year old cousin, my 61-year old electrician and my 84-year old 'Other Mother' (of whose loving presence one can never have too much in life). Adulthood is hard. Adulthood is difficult. Much harder and much more difficult than it appeared to be when I was a child hell-bent on getting to it as soon as possible.
As the FaceBook meme suggests, I can't adult today....
I would like to think that this is really a reflection of the much harder circumstances that I face relative to my parents ... but I know that this isn't true: I've enjoyed opportunities about which they could only dream, one of them having grown up in the de jure segregated South and the other having come of age in the de facto segregated North. And, in terms of opportunity, with respect to my children - their grandchildren - this truth is even more so.
Part of the challenge for me is that both of my parents are gone now, so they're not here to coach me through the vagaries of fate at mid-life. I can't help but think that were they here, I'd have made fewer mistakes and would've also leveraged opportunities better. Or so I'd prefer to think (even though I've lived in a world virtually exclusively beyond their experience). Whatever the case, I miss them and wish that they had lived to see their sacrifices come to fruition in the life that my family - their grandchildren and I and their daughter-in-law and step-grands - enjoys.
Yet I'm ever aware that, as I used to tell my cousin (who's like a brother to me) more than a decade ago, we are now the age at which we met (read = can remember) our parents in their prime ... and we've seen the rest of the movie of their lives, which turned out to be a short feature for some (like my parents) and a full-length drama for others. In a word, this time in my life and my contemporary loved ones' lives counts. A reality driven home all the more by this maddening and saddening rash of funerals....
A few years ago, my (cousin-)brother and I were having a conversation that has never left me: we were both remarking on the arc of our careers, which, it turns out, was not as grand as we had expected. And the more we talked, the more we were drawn to the conclusion that our personal lives were more challenging than we expected, too. Multiple kids in expensive private schools during stock market crashes and career transitions and minor mid-life medical challenges and ... had all added up to a far more challenging existence than we anticipated as we crossed the Rubicon of the Big 5-0. Salad days were not our reality; we were rising before dawn to work harder and longer than ever for less money while coming home in the dark to crazy, loving households full of kids who were just a little more spoiled and less appreciative than we expected. Life was supposed to have been easier now - given our sacrifices over the preceding two-plus decades - but our reality was something quite different. Still blessed, but not nearly as easily so (as we expected, of course).
Hmmm. There's that word again: expectation. While we were cognizant and appreciative of our myriad blessings, we felt a real lack of comfort and ease, one of the expected payoffs that hasn't materialized in as great abundance as we'd anticipated. Though we're still better off than 99% of the rest of God's Children on this planet, life for us hasn't nearly been no crystal stair as had been suggested to us in our youth, or so we believed....
I suspect that this aspect of our experience is three-fold:
First, we were naive when we were young and emboldened by our full access to the mainstream of America. We were the first generation of young People of Color for whom the limits of our success corresponded to our abilities, or so we were told. Second, I suspect that our role models had it a good bit harder than we realized when we were young and, like loving parents do, they shielded us from this bracing reality, which has turned out to be a double-edged gift. Third, I do believe that, to a lesser extent than we might suspect, 21st century life is a bit more complicated and challenging than that our parents faced.
They were children of the Depression, our parents, so as long as things weren't horrible, to them, they were good. We are the children of those Children of the Depression who strove so valiantly so that we wouldn't experience lack. We may not have had it easy, but, thankfully, virtually everyone in my extended family had everything that they needed growing up and even a few of the things that they wanted. I know that this was certainly the case for me.
In reality, in my family, we've all lived a good life, especially relative to so many others in our society and our world, and yet we're not fully satisfied (even though we are, I believe, virtually fully appreciative). This dis-ease is only minorly material; it's far more about a perceived lack of comfort and ease - and a greater volatility that accompanies it now - than about the bigger houses and nicer cars to which our children have become accustomed.
So what is the nature of this middle-aged miasma? What's missing? Why aren't we as happy and satisfied as we expected to be?
Here, too, I think that the answer has three primary parts:
First, we were naive in our youth and it turns out that adulthood has always been harder than it appears ... so the answer to this part of the challenge is simply to acknowledge this reality, suck it up and move on, as hard as this may be for some to do. As M. Scott Peck so memorably noted in that famous opening sentence to his classic The Road Less Traveled, "Life is difficult." Get a grip, accept this and keep putting one foot in front of the other (in large part because we still can...).
Next, let's acknowledge that progress, too, comes at a cost. The world is certainly more complex than the one in which we came of age, so we need to adjust to this. Yes, we have the Internet and smartphones that bring the world into the palm of our hand, but we also have greater inequality and an Education Gap and a Digital Divide and a phalanx of other new phenomena with which to deal.
Third and most importantly, the reality is that adult life isn't linear as we thought that it would be, so we need to be far more resilient, sometimes in dramatic measure and for extended periods, than we expected to have to be. Resilience, though potentially transformative, is also supremely enervating, especially when summoned on command but of necessity for a long period of time. The challenge is that the cyclicality of life - that roller coaster phenomenon where it feels like every peak is followed inevitably by a dark valley and a frightening descent into it - is tiring and wears us down after a while. In sum, we are not resilient enough to anticipate this troubling pattern and approach it dispassionately while working through it. Damn us that we expected to become masters of our fate and to be able to handle life with aplomb by now....
In his new book, Thank You For Being Late, the ever perceptive Tom Friedman writes about how our world is changing so much and so fast that we're feeling disoriented and that the pace of the change is now greater than our ability to process it (though we're getting somewhat better at doing so). For me, this is an update and extension to the myriad learnings that I had from studying the work of Darryl Conner, whose Managing at the Speed of Change transformed both my personal and professional lives two decades ago. In it were so many astute distillations of concepts about the nature of change and how it affects us as well as tools to address them that I felt empowered to confront the impending new millennium. Or so I thought....
By way of example, one concept that Conner brought to the fore indelibly involves the following:
Consider that you are sitting peacefully by the side of a pond that contains a single lily pad. The next day you come back to your perch and find that the number of lily pads has doubled to two. Ths doubling continues every day thereafter, you observe. If it takes 30 days for the pond to become completely covered in lily pads, on what day would it be half full? Naturally your mind cuts the 30 days in half and shouts "Day 15!" before you can think critically about this conundrum and come to realize that it's on Day 29 that the pond was half full and that as much change as had taken 29 days to foment was duplicated in a single day on Day 30 such that the pond became completely covered. That's what it often feels like now: that we're living in Day 29 times where change is happening so fast that we can't keep up and seems at risk of doubling again before we've even mastered its latest iteration.
Friedman touches on this reality in several ways and almost as indelibly, including in his consideration of Moore's Law, that bold prediction a half-century ago by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the computational capacity of microchips (and thus computing power) would double every year for a decade (which he revised to every two years a decade later) but that has proven true ever since. Think about it: a chip the size of your fingernail could have over a billion - that's right "one billion with a 'B'" - transistors on it. And a computer that can perform 1.8 teraflops - 1.8 Trillion with a T calculations per second (and, no, you can't even mentally conceptualize such a number/speed!?!) - went from being the size of a tennis court, using as much electricity as 800 houses and costing more than $55 million in the mid-1990s to being available for retail purchase - because it's smaller than a DVR, runs off of a single electrical socket and costs only a couple of hundred dollars - a decade later (i.e., you know it as the PS3 Sony Playstation that you bought your kids in 2006). Let those numbers - and the scale of change acceleration that they represent - sink in for a moment....
Now, is it any wonder that we're having trouble dealing with all of this change?!?
Of course not. And therein lies the problem, because even though we know that we shouldn't be bothered too much by the feeling that we're always drinking from a fire hose and that life seems to keep aiming more of such hoses at us than we want, we're still troubled. And we're troubled because this isn't what we expected.
The reality of the modern world is that even in the lives of supposedly comfortable middle class families, the alpha of change is higher, both objectively and than expected. Connor's prescience is relevant here, too: it feels like the volume, magnitude and complexity of the change we're experiencing are increasing simultaneously ... because they are.
This is the New Reality: that change means that we're all at risk more than we used to be ... and thus we must raise our children and their children to accept this phenomenon dispassionately while we lead them to build their resilience continuously. Here, too, Conner can be our guide, as we need to teach ourselves and our children to do two things: first, to increase our overall capacity to adapt to change over time; and, second, to have each experience of change cost us less emotionally, spiritually, physically, etc.
The Tyranny of Daily Life is quite simple: the world is gonna do what the world is gonna do, so the only question is what are we gonna do in response. I/we don't like this new, change-dominated world as much, but that doesn't really matter, does it? It's in our acceptance of this New Reality that we find our deliverance: cultivating resilience - or what Darwin would describe as adaptability - is both our charge and our salvation. By choosing to become fluent in proactive evolution - which means, in essence, to learn continuously whatever it takes to stay current and make progress - we can adapt successfully to this new world in which we find ourselves.
Or we can delay the inevitable, as so many who've chosen to succumb to the siren song of leaders who promise to return them to some long ago but (necessarily) undefined better days seem to be doing. This mass engagement in fantasy is both mystifying and dismaying given that no one can document an epoch when time/life/reality didn't march inexorably forward - admittedly at different speeds and with different scope in different eras - as we see it doing ever more profoundly at the present time. The urge to want to stop this inexorable march is understandable; the belief that it can be done is not....
I, for one, am choosing to move forward, to embrace the reality that change is dominating my individual life and our collective lives ever more profoundly and, even at this 'advanced' life stage, to commit myself to learning new skills and increasing my resilience so that I can not only survive in this Age of Acceleration (as Friedman describes it) but thrive. In part this will be accomplished not by lowering my expectations, but by reality-testing them. It's OK to wish that things were easier and better. I suspect that this is an innate psychic and intellectual pattern. But it's not OK to project it out into the world, as many of us have been doing for some time now.
Life being easier and better because we want or expect it too isn't a thing. But choosing to keep growing, stretching and striving continuously is, thankfully, and this is how I'm going to fight the Tyranny of Real Life going forward. Will you join me?
In his new book, Thank You For Being Late, the ever perceptive Tom Friedman writes about how our world is changing so much and so fast that we're feeling disoriented and that the pace of the change is now greater than our ability to process it (though we're getting somewhat better at doing so). For me, this is an update and extension to the myriad learnings that I had from studying the work of Darryl Conner, whose Managing at the Speed of Change transformed both my personal and professional lives two decades ago. In it were so many astute distillations of concepts about the nature of change and how it affects us as well as tools to address them that I felt empowered to confront the impending new millennium. Or so I thought....
By way of example, one concept that Conner brought to the fore indelibly involves the following:
Consider that you are sitting peacefully by the side of a pond that contains a single lily pad. The next day you come back to your perch and find that the number of lily pads has doubled to two. Ths doubling continues every day thereafter, you observe. If it takes 30 days for the pond to become completely covered in lily pads, on what day would it be half full? Naturally your mind cuts the 30 days in half and shouts "Day 15!" before you can think critically about this conundrum and come to realize that it's on Day 29 that the pond was half full and that as much change as had taken 29 days to foment was duplicated in a single day on Day 30 such that the pond became completely covered. That's what it often feels like now: that we're living in Day 29 times where change is happening so fast that we can't keep up and seems at risk of doubling again before we've even mastered its latest iteration.
Friedman touches on this reality in several ways and almost as indelibly, including in his consideration of Moore's Law, that bold prediction a half-century ago by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the computational capacity of microchips (and thus computing power) would double every year for a decade (which he revised to every two years a decade later) but that has proven true ever since. Think about it: a chip the size of your fingernail could have over a billion - that's right "one billion with a 'B'" - transistors on it. And a computer that can perform 1.8 teraflops - 1.8 Trillion with a T calculations per second (and, no, you can't even mentally conceptualize such a number/speed!?!) - went from being the size of a tennis court, using as much electricity as 800 houses and costing more than $55 million in the mid-1990s to being available for retail purchase - because it's smaller than a DVR, runs off of a single electrical socket and costs only a couple of hundred dollars - a decade later (i.e., you know it as the PS3 Sony Playstation that you bought your kids in 2006). Let those numbers - and the scale of change acceleration that they represent - sink in for a moment....
Now, is it any wonder that we're having trouble dealing with all of this change?!?
Of course not. And therein lies the problem, because even though we know that we shouldn't be bothered too much by the feeling that we're always drinking from a fire hose and that life seems to keep aiming more of such hoses at us than we want, we're still troubled. And we're troubled because this isn't what we expected.
The reality of the modern world is that even in the lives of supposedly comfortable middle class families, the alpha of change is higher, both objectively and than expected. Connor's prescience is relevant here, too: it feels like the volume, magnitude and complexity of the change we're experiencing are increasing simultaneously ... because they are.
This is the New Reality: that change means that we're all at risk more than we used to be ... and thus we must raise our children and their children to accept this phenomenon dispassionately while we lead them to build their resilience continuously. Here, too, Conner can be our guide, as we need to teach ourselves and our children to do two things: first, to increase our overall capacity to adapt to change over time; and, second, to have each experience of change cost us less emotionally, spiritually, physically, etc.
The Tyranny of Daily Life is quite simple: the world is gonna do what the world is gonna do, so the only question is what are we gonna do in response. I/we don't like this new, change-dominated world as much, but that doesn't really matter, does it? It's in our acceptance of this New Reality that we find our deliverance: cultivating resilience - or what Darwin would describe as adaptability - is both our charge and our salvation. By choosing to become fluent in proactive evolution - which means, in essence, to learn continuously whatever it takes to stay current and make progress - we can adapt successfully to this new world in which we find ourselves.
Or we can delay the inevitable, as so many who've chosen to succumb to the siren song of leaders who promise to return them to some long ago but (necessarily) undefined better days seem to be doing. This mass engagement in fantasy is both mystifying and dismaying given that no one can document an epoch when time/life/reality didn't march inexorably forward - admittedly at different speeds and with different scope in different eras - as we see it doing ever more profoundly at the present time. The urge to want to stop this inexorable march is understandable; the belief that it can be done is not....
I, for one, am choosing to move forward, to embrace the reality that change is dominating my individual life and our collective lives ever more profoundly and, even at this 'advanced' life stage, to commit myself to learning new skills and increasing my resilience so that I can not only survive in this Age of Acceleration (as Friedman describes it) but thrive. In part this will be accomplished not by lowering my expectations, but by reality-testing them. It's OK to wish that things were easier and better. I suspect that this is an innate psychic and intellectual pattern. But it's not OK to project it out into the world, as many of us have been doing for some time now.
Life being easier and better because we want or expect it too isn't a thing. But choosing to keep growing, stretching and striving continuously is, thankfully, and this is how I'm going to fight the Tyranny of Real Life going forward. Will you join me?
It is not the strongest of the species that survives,
nor the most intelligent that survives.
It is the one that is most adaptable to change.
- (Attributed to) Charles Darwin
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