Life Is So Terrible and Beautiful at the Same Time
johnpweiss.com
johnpweiss.com
> He’s bent over and moves slowly. His hair is uncombed and a dull vacancy lurks in his eyes. He’s always there so he must need the money.
> His sadness is contagious.
This drives me crazy. You don't know anything about this guy. One time I took an airport shuttle and the driver was ancient, the bus was empty and we started chatting. He loves driving the bus, he does this to stay busy, he's retired but enjoys having a purpose and talking to people (such as myself). He told me all about his kids and their careers.
My point is you have absolutely no idea why anyone does anything, unless you ask them. Projecting sadness onto strangers says more about yourself than the subject.
My dad, who did programming his whole life, didn't care. He was retired, he enjoyed the interactions with humans and the problems he was solving. He probably was providing $60+/hr of value since he would automate it.
If you saw a grey'd dude that is absurdly skinny drag himself into an office(He hated the commute, he always hates driving), you'd think he was miserable. No, he was happy to be there, he just doesnt like driving.
Having left Whitehorse in a canoe on our way to the Bering strait we met another 72 years old man, this one named Tom. Tom was also paddling the Yukon, or maybe I should say he was enjoying the current taking him downstream. His plan was to paddle the whole river like we were doing but he was doing it in stages where he would take to the river for a few days, then find his way back to his truck somehow to get his canoe. Tom was a pensioned school teacher, he lived on his own in a cabin and quite liked being pensioned but not hanging around in his cabin all the time so he sometimes took to the river.
When I reach that age I suspect I'll do something similar seeing how as I think I'd be bored by the "normal" life of a pensioner.
I bet that was the old guy disguising the annoyance of having a patronizing customer.
It’s a touching essay detailing one man’s thoughts and experiences as he moves through life, presented with the intention of eliciting certain feelings and thoughts in the reader. And that’s all it needs to be.
Here’s an alternative perspective about getting old. Maybe you’ll enjoy it more:
It’s like the student who hates the exercise of inferring authorial intent and ascribing situations and plots as metaphors in high school English. The point isn’t to KNOW the authors intent. The point is to understand what it means to YOU!
You’re both right. This piece was about a sad old man. This piece makes us ponder our unknowable connections and the loss of dignity in suffering and old age.
This piece can mean many things to many people. That’s what makes it good.
At least in the American context, people are remarkably rude and demanding to those who they deem beneath them, which is most often determined by the jobs they perform, how much money they have, etc. Assuming someone is miserable in these jobs may not always be correct, but it’s also not in anyway improbable. I and all my coworkers certainly were.
Which is obviously bullshit, he seems happy from your description, and if I were in his place doing the travelling would I be asking myself "What's the point?"?Probably yes.
Doesn't have to. With some empathy you can often tell. Also don't need to know anything to know that 70+ year olds don't work at some menial service industry job in countries where they can afford to retire.
>He loves driving the bus, he does this to stay busy, he's retired but enjoys having a purpose and talking to people (such as myself). My point is you have absolutely no idea why anyone does anything, unless you ask them.
That would tell you even less in many cases. I wouldn't necessarily believe the story a stranger would present for their circumstances either. Part of it will probably be saving safe, or making himself look better than "70-something that can't afford to retire and is forced to drive around".
The fact is, loving it or not, he probably works because he 100% needs the money. So a health incident, or some emergency (like his house needing repairs, or a rent hike) could wipe him out.
This doesn't sound like empathy - it sounds like stereotyping. Instead of getting to know someone and finding out about them, or accepting that you just don't know details about their life, you develop a story of their life in head based on nothing but your gut feeling.
> Also don't need to know anything to know that 70+ year olds don't work at some menial service industry job in countries where they can afford to retire.
Is Sweden one of those countries where people can afford to retire? Because they have about the same rate of 75+ year olds working as the US.
https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/02/22/the-rise-of-elderly...
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/slideshows/states-wi...
From the very link you provided, regarding Sweden: "a succession of policy choices have pushed older people into work".
And from the report they link to:
"The latest pension reform (a defined contribution scheme) has increased the economic incentives to work longer. Parallel, it has become more difficult to get a disability pension even for only medical reasons. (...) Several political decisions were also taken from the early 1990s on to counteract early retirement and increase the actual retirement age. (...) There is a clear socio-economic gradient in the age of retirement. Low-skilled jobs have lower wages and worse working conditions, work environment and occupational protection. The difference in “lost years”, i.e. the number of years that people exit from the labour market before reaching age 65, between early and late exit jobs amounts to 4.82 years for men (“Other sales and services elementary occupations” compared to “College, university and higher education teaching professionals”). For women, the difference is 5.55 years."
Rather than some socialist paradise, as is the stereotype of Sweden in the US (well, though compared to which, it might very well be), the political establishment there has been increasingly pushing neoliberal reforms for decades now.
I have two kids around that age. Have had some bad scares and it’s been devastating emotionally for me
Hope you get lots of support
Feel free to reach out (checkout my profile), if you ever want to talk, about anything really, doesn’t have to be the kids
Life was far more assuring, rewarding, bountiful, and meaningful if you were living in a small Native American community in the year 1400 and millions of bison roamed the plains, and the soil was the most fertile in the world, and you had a direct, non-abstracted, immediate relationship with every person in the community around you. All of your inputs lead to physically direct outputs.
And all of your biological wetware and quirks were designed and evolved to operate in this context. Hunting, foraging, moving your own body around, sleeping and waking with the sun, having non-digital relationships, eating whole foods from the earth.
And it's not to say life never had its struggles. But it was certainly more biologically consistent and natural than what we've turned it into.
If you're going to focus on things like the soil being fertile and being directly involved with your neighbors, you kinda also have to consider the complete inability to cope with storms and disease and all the social ills that were reinforced because of that tight knit community.
We like to think of past life as having been the benefits of all our modern moral leanings and all our "invisible" technologies combined with idealized visions of farming fertile lands and hunting among herds of animals, but any history book makes it obvious why our ancestors struggled so hard for us to live differently.
Ignoring that many of the anecdotes presented in the linked article are mostly the author projecting despair onto others, those fundamental issues of disease, old age and death, were even worse when we lived "naturally" and had stronger ties to the people we lived around.
We can't just assume "the past is better." That's wrong in many ways. However, when we look at our lives today, we can see things that are not good, and we can find ways that those things could be good. Many solutions can come from the past. Connection to our communities and investment in our environment seem to have real benefits for us an individuals, besides the systemic benefits.
No, I'm not. But it's a good idea.
> extremely difficult to convince people to participate
Yes - easier to just stop tricking people into known-unhealthy behaviors first.
> Hardly simple.
The answer is simple. The implementation may or may not be [more simple than trying to replicate the lives of people in the past].
Some people can't accept the fact that human life has always been terrible, and it's better today than it ever has been.
Is it even possible to make progress if we're not defining what progress looks like? Is progress such a ludicrous goal for the human race? If progress is a reasonable goal and you can't make progress without defining what progress looks like then it's necessary for progress to have metrics that can be used to rank eras.
I much prefer having modern medicine, grocery stores, modern entertainment etc.
Just yesterday I picked up a bunch of tacos and sat down to watch the movie Renfield with the family and I had a brief moment of awe about all the resources that are at our fingertips. I am not rich by any means but can watch one of the greatest actors in history performing on a 72inch 4k screen in my living room whenever I want. It is amazing.
If you were a Native American in the 1400s you were pretty much guaranteed to die young and in a painful fashion after a very hard life.
But I think it's funny that you use Nick Cage as an example. Not to be mean - I like him too. But it's still funny.
Surely you don't mean Nicholas Cage! That title clearly belongs to John Cena.
It's funny how people are so confidently incorrect and so happy to be slave to their work, almost bragging about it. I can't even wrap my head around that, some form of Stockholm syndrome perhaps
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
https://medium.com/world-issues-politics-economics-and-more/...
https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/for-95-percent-of-human...
Also, bad weather and praying to gods wasnt exactly input/output.
Did I miss the point?
Stoicism also comes loaded with shoulds and shouldn’ts as they pertain to living a “virtuous life”, and for many people, this is too close to religious dogma for comfort. Put another way, there are many people who might benefit from the ideas but would bristle at the thought of turning to something that resembles religion.
But the underlying philosophical insights that can be found in stoicism can be also found across many other contemplative traditions.
When reading a piece like this, I don’t find it particularly interesting to try to reduce the author’s personal discoveries to “oh that’s just <philosophy>”. Many people find the stories of others helpful because they’re less abstract and heady than a series of intellectually sound ideas that might not feel very helpful when someone is going through the shit.
I’d argue that you missed the point of the piece. Knowing that stoicism (or Buddhism, etc…) exist doesn’t seem to have any bearing on the recollection of one’s personal journey. Some people are looking for a philosophy of life. Some people are just looking for comfort in knowing that others have experienced something that validates their own pain. And some people share their own journeys to make/find meaning in the pain, and it is this sharing that is more interesting than its resemblance to famous ideas.
I think he should have at least asked if she needed a hug.
Feels like that would have been a nice way to honor his instinct and her boundaries at the same time.
She may have at least appreciated the sentiment. Or she would have take him up on that offer and embraced his embrace. Either way, it seems like a positive.
Here is some material that guided me through this process:
"A Buddhist grief observed" by Guy Newland. Pretty much describes the confusion I describe above.
"Being with dying" from Joan Halifax. Here, it is a buddhist hospice worker who explains how Buddhist teachings help her in her relation with the dying.
Finally, the teachings of Rob Burbea. He was a buddhiat teacher whom we lost in 2019 to cancer, and whose philosophy shifted over the years from a very interesting take on insight meditation towards a spirituality of reenchantment and meaning searching/making. Hearing his latest talks, which he was recording for hours from his bedroom between chemotherapy sessions, where he describes how he relates to his own dying is incredibly inspiring (and I am pretty much in love with the whole of his teachings).
“It was glorious to see—if your heart were iron, And you could keep from grieving at all the pain.“