The Grumpy Old Man Problem
And the proper Buddhism
Do you want to know a secret? I am actually neither GenX or Boomer. I’m on the cusp. The fairest thing to say is that I adhere to Boomer virtues but I play GenX instruments. I respect what WW2 did to America. It made us grow up. I respect what advanced distributed information systems did for America. It made us grow out. When I think about matters of power or systems I say this: Decentralize it until it breaks, then centralize it until it works. It’s not stable ground. I hate moving.
You can’t look at my record collection and guess that one of the things that fascinates me is an emergent ontology syntax called SHACL. You can’t look at my ringless left hand with its orange rubber strapped Apple Watch Ultra and guess that I’ve been married for 31 years. Maybe I don’t, but I think I defy expectations, just by being consistent and true to my life, my family, my nation. I try to express my conventions, but perhaps the fact of the matter is that I’m kind of a one man arcane book club. I don’t mind that. What I mind is that some days I feel like some incredibly clever and powerful force pulled an entire country from under my feet.
We’re always proving who we are.
You may not know it, but Irene Cara is dead. She was first for our generation. Diana Ross didn’t play piano. Aretha could but we never saw that. Irene. Before India Irie. Before John Legend. In the 80s, I thought about Irene Cara a lot. She was my generation. The song’s last lines are brilliant.
I may not win
But I won’t be thrown
Out here on my own.
The Grumpy Old Man Problem is, I think, well-understood. The solution is one of my cherished virtues, the virtue of humility. Sometimes the best expression of humility is silence. But that comes into conflict with the responsibility one has of expressing the kind of wisdom that can alleviate suffering and bring light to darkness. I’m having difficulty reconciling things when these two responsibilities come into conflict. But whom do I actually have responsibility for? For whom am I trying to demonstrate humility? That’s my problem.
The Proper Buddhism
I have read, somewhere, that the proper Buddhist understands two very important things. The first is the matter of abjuring certainty. If somehow science were to incontrovertibly prove something that contradicted Buddhism’s axioms about the world, the Buddhist would adjust. The second is that Buddhism may arise from order established by power but understands that all regimes fall. The truth of Creation is not created by great power struggles. At some point, sooner or later, I will attempt to understand these and other concepts.
In the meantime I am disappointed by my invisibility to the order an older power once created and sustained. And it makes me grumpy that I am not able to have a cadre of colleagues that are well-fed by the trade I have spent so many years perfecting. I don’t want to be grumpy.
Why Trump Doesn’t Worry Me
I never used concepts of ‘zero fucks’ until COVID. I was one of those by the fast and loose conjectures of demography that was significantly at risk. My mother might die, I reckoned. My father might die. My wife might die. I might die. Shit happens. So I did the smartest things I could do and recommended all of those things to my family. I didn’t listen to or make any political arguments. I didn’t vote or sign any petitions. I never made any decisions based on anti-government, or anti-pharma, or anti-vax propaganda. I simply did what made the most sense to me.
In the early days, I maintained a daily website and Notion repository now long abandoned and forgotten. I lost contact with dozens of friends. I didn’t die. Nobody in my entire family died from COVID except my already frail, bedridden grandmother-in-law in her 90s.
Off the top of my head, something around 600,000 was the projected death toll for the US, by a famous guy named Nick Somebody. We have all forgotten the COVID experts and now they’re all replaced by AI experts, but I remember when Italy was dying and nobody quite understood why. These days, they are hosting the Winter Olympics.
I remember all the times people were predicting nuclear war in the Middle East if we went after Bin Laden. It was the Baby Bin Laden Theory. Somebody even made a super-cute animation of nuclear explosions all over that part of the globe, starting with Jerusalem. Today Grok claims that I alone was the only one with this idea back in 2003-2004 criticizing this particular anti-war argument that escalation was inevitable. (interesting memory Grok, considering)
Trump doesn’t worry me for the same reasons Putin doesn’t worry me. For the same reason AI doesn’t worry me. For the same reason that all the evil in the world doesn’t worry me. People are petty and it’s very difficult to get petty people to do bloody things. To sustain a reign of blood takes world historical power under particular circumstances. All of those wonders and signs are not in alignment. There is too much good in the USA for all that blood to be shed. And just like the woke decided to believe (and consequently twist universities into knots) that unarmed black men were being murdered by the thousands by racist white cops, actually all of us were going to the malls and eating in the food courts.
I don’t know exactly how I will get to the proper Buddhism. It in fact may not be necessary. Occasionally, however, I have dreams in which I am living in a refugee camp in my 70s. I’m an old storyteller and I fix people tea and, for some reason, I’m the man who finds lost dogs. I am this person either in Morocco or in a shattered America. Don’t trust my dreams, but I’ve considered the possibility that my entire life may have served no good and that I’d suffer in penitence attending to the most minuscule and immediate concerns.
This week in Beauty:
- The Remains of the Day
- Battle of Britain
- Project Hail Mary (reread)
- Being There
- S1 E5: The Knight of Seven Kingdoms
I hope I have consumed enough literature in my life to have balanced out the pop culture I consume as an interface to the ordinary people I have social access to. Some days I think that people look at me and think I’m something like Morgan Freeman carrying around some huge black weight on my psyche screaming silently for some kind of understanding. I don’t ever feel that strongly, but I’m suggestible. More often I feel like (of the above five exemplars) Mr. Stephens living the empty honor in service to Lord Darlington as time makes fools of us all, and yet somehow we survive.
I expect to live down my pride. I hope it won’t be too painful.
Good read. Thanks.