Happy Birthday to Me

Not long ago, a guy I know, a good guy who to all outward appearances seems happy and successful, replied to a birthday e-mail I sent him at work -- "go home and blow out some candles" -- with this:

"I'm 40-f*ing-8, give me a break. They tell me that's close to 50, but I refuse to believe it." (Only he didn't leave any letters out of "f*ing.")

I wrote back: "you've got your hair, a flat stomach, and a wife. i'd say life is good."

To which he replied: "At 20 you won't settle for less than several million, two best-sellers and a house in Majorca. At 48, what you said sounds really good."

Expectations are strange things. When we're kids, and when we're parents of kids, we have no compunction about shooting for the stars. Every child is encouraged to believe that becoming a Michael Phelps or a Golda Meir, or however your tribe fills in the blank, is within the realm of possibility. Commencement addresses are universally about holding fast to your dreams.

But nevertheless, somewhere along the line we're supposed to learn that the secret to happiness is adjusting our expectations to reality. Maturity means accepting that failing to get the gold or the Golda isn't the same thing as failure. The good life is to be found in wanting what you have.

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To be sure, the self-help sections of bookstores are filled with inspirational messages and 10-point-plans to the contrary. If only we visualize what we want, if only we believe in ourselves, if only we buy this book, then love and riches, fame and health, six-packs and serenity will be ours, no matter how far along in the life cycle we are.

But by and large, despite those enticing pitches, adulthood turns out to mean acceptance -- of how you played the hand you were dealt, of mortality, of fate -- even if it sometimes includes flashes of 40-f*ing-8-like fury at the way the world turns out to work.

I wonder whether that rage would be mitigated if, instead of everyone being brought up to think we could be president, we were raised to believe, as Buddhists are, that desire is the source of suffering. I wonder if the gross domestic product would really shrivel, or the upward mobility of classes would stall, or the amount of art and justice in the world would decline, if we grew up already knowing how things more often than not turn out to be -- if we understood early on the unreliability of the meritocracy, and the odds against our dreams, and the huge role in life of dumb luck -- if the rough passage signaled in the cry of "40-f*ing-8" were not something kept hidden from kids, like the true identity of the tooth fairy, the mutability of beauty, or the lifelong wrestling with the meaning of existence that lies ahead of them.

In The Uses of Enchantment, child psychiatrist Bruno Bettelheim explains that the purpose of fairy tales is to give children an arena -- a proxy world -- in which to come to grips with evil, to come to terms with loss, to train their emotions for the inevitable struggles and disappointments of life. Anyone who has read the cruel original fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm will recognize the sense of this. But anyone who knows these stories only from their Disney versions will recognize how diligently we now go out of our way to insulate kids from the disturbing stuff that Bettelheim says is good for them.

Yes, I know that Bambi's mother is killed, and plenty of other modern classics include scary separations from parents. The murder of Harry Potter's parents by Lord Voldemort is of course the setup for the series. But (spoiler alert) no one in those seven volumes is forced to reconcile with the whole panoply of less lethal but no-less-soul-crushing disappointments -- being downsized, pink-slipped, passed over, left -- of which many, maybe most, lives are partly constructed. We are all broken vessels.

Recently I found myself reading the Wikipedia entry about me, an article that -- in the way of wikis -- I hadn't written, nor did I know from whose keyboard(s) it had sprung. Someone -- someone I went to Union High School with, in New Jersey, I'd guess -- had included this line: "In his high school yearbook, Marty said that his ambition was 'To win the Nobel Prize.'" Seeing that, I cringed, and -- in the way of wikis -- without a moment's hesitation, I cut the sentence out.

Thinking about that excision, from the vantage point of my own birthday today, I wonder what made me rush to scrub my old ambition from the record. Was it too embarrassing that, at 16, I had such an aggrandized vision of my future? (My reading of Irving Wallace's novel, "The Prize," in ninth grade doubtless had something to do with my equating a trip to Stockholm with the highest anyone can aim.) Or was it rather too humiliating that, today, I had fallen short of what I set out to do?

Like another friend, who told me on his 86th birthday that he had "a stomachfull of gratitude," I am deeply appreciative of what I have and achingly conscious of its fragility. But there is no house in Majorca, nor a Nobel on the mantle. I can't conceive of urging any children to settle for the moon, when they can have the stars. I just wish there were some way to immunize them against their future feelings about 40-f*ing-8, just in case the White House, or Bill Gates' billions, don't come along.

(A version of this ran in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, where I'm a columnist. If you want to see what else is going on over there, here's a link to their homepage.)

Comments

[Wigs]

Marty, I think the Buddhist belief that desire is/leads to suffering you mentioned has a strong connection to the exploding acceptance of new agey thinking among young people. I find that many of my most intelligent and reflective peers have checked out of the race and are pursuing dreams that are not necessarily dependent on a gatekeeper or the approval of society.

Great post....an excellent articulation of universal struggles.

[JailNeoconVicts]

To quote Woody Allen: Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.

[ptillen]

Hello Marty, and happy birthday. Just turned f**ing 50 two weeks ago myself. I keep waiting for the existential angst to set in, but it hasn't yet.
Instead, I'm aware of having not backed away, in fact, having stood firm in several conflicts with guns a-blazing, not in a combative George W Bush kind of way, but with the feeling of "y'know, don't f@$* with me. I've seen more, done more, and been around more blocks than you've had hot dinners, so just don't start with me."
It's good to be a hardened veteran. I like it.

[debb17055]

I was an avid reader of Newsweek magazine years ago (1990) and I was especially impressed with the "My Turn" column that ran that week. It was called "The Dirty Little Secret of Aging". I even cut the page out to save for future reference, as I was already seeing the signs. Well, between my divorce and several moves since then, I have not been able to locate it. I did try to go to the Newsweek archives to locate it, to no avail. It was an excellent story and so true to what I was starting to experience. I would love to know if the author is still kicking around. And I would love to have breakfast again. That's an inside joke that only the author and the readers of the story would get.
Can anyone be of assistance to satisfy my desire to retrieve this article?
Happy Birthday Marty!
I'll be 53 on September 17th, ye-haw.

[msfisk]

8/22/08
2:32pm
University of Oregon

Happy Birthday. And don't feel bad about not having the Nobel Prize. Yet. It could still happen.

I turned 58 last week and I don't think life is a "blast" like some people, but I think that I will never give up.

[Arithrianos]

The source of suffering is not desire according to Buddha, it is CONFLICTED desire, or desire that is in conflict with ultimate reality, which is egolessness and impermanance. Desire itself is fine.

[lewes17266]

Anyway, happy 40-f*ing-8th birthday!

[SamEllison]

I like getting older because if I'm not, I'm dead.
Happy Birthday Marty

[anfractuous]

The argument can just as easily be made that the person who, after years of disappointments, beams with thankfulness at their present state, is doing so precisely because they have become deformed beyond recogniton under mountains of dismay. They are now monsters of gratitude; it is the Stockholm Syndrome of life.

[NoMoFearNoMoHate]

Great post, Marty.

Happy Birthday!

[Checquoline]

A director of nurses in a hospital was whinning to me about being 50 that day. The housekeeper heard the conversation and said to her...."you look good, you have your health, you should thank God."

[itolduso]

At 9 I wanted to be a dancer, to light up the stage with my grace and beauty-to tell all of life's joys and sorrows through movement. I dreamt of bringing tears to the eyes of my adoring audience when they felt my passion. But the future can be tricky, no one knows for sure where it leads. For me, dance was merely a signpost-not 'the' destination. Other roads appeared that I was compelled to follow- the journey has been more than I could have hoped for, and it's not over. My 50 year old knees are no longer fit for the stage-accidents and arthritis have taken a toll. The other night I struggled from the chair to stand, my husband watched as I moved painfully across the room. Feeling his eyes on me, I lifted my arms, managed a brief twirl and took a bow. His eyes as he wrapped me in his arms are all the proof I need that the future can be so much better than we dreamed.

[AZBunny]

I guess I grew up watching too much Monty Python. My theme song is "Always look on the bright side of life......." I Love the line "life's a piece a sh*t when you think of it. Truer words were never spoken.

[Cynth]

"Thinking about that excision, from the vantage point of my own birthday today, I wonder what made me rush to scrub my old ambition from the record. Was it too embarrassing that, at 16, I had such an aggrandized vision of my future? (My reading of Irving Wallace's novel, "The Prize," in ninth grade doubtless had something to do with my equating a trip to Stockholm with the highest anyone can aim.) Or was it rather too humiliating that, today, I had fallen short of what I set out to do?"


Or perhaps that sentence just doesn't represent who you are anymore? There are many aspirations I had when I was younger that wouldn't make me happy today and are based on my then limited understanding of myself and the world. Seeing some of those aspirations publicly in print would make me laugh and cringe... :-)

Happy birthday, Marty! (And I highly regard your achievements and what you continue to do.)

[Sciguy]

I'm 53, and I wanted to grow up to be a scientist. So I did. I hated research, so I retired the day I got my PhD. Now I'm an Adult Education teacher, working part-time for lousy pay and no benefits - and I love it.

I take my happiness whenever and wherever it comes. If I wake up, and find my spouse and all my critters to be OK, and my chickens haven't been eaten, and I get around without an accident, and go to sleep that night, it's been a great day. Sure, I'd still love to have buckets of money, but it's not going to happen - and it doesn't matter.

You can't immunize your kids against life. As you noted, Disney tried, and the result was that we now have a lot of kids and adults who think they're entitled to everything they want, RIGHT NOW, without working for it - and without knowing how to handle not getting everything they want. If you can raise kids who have decency and enough basic education to survive, you've done well.

Happy b-day!