Are You Sure?

September 30, 2007

Filed in: The Middle Ages, The Way We Live Now

Over at the Practically Perfect blog, Jennifer is remarking upon the phenomenon of magazines, now even men’s magazines, spending all their editorial energy telling their readers how to improve the little, improvable parts of their lives while pretty much ignoring both the Big Questions and the Stuff You Can’t Change So Easily.

I would like to second that observation and take it up a notch. Here in Swellville, there is a certain kind of person—not everyone by any means, but a sizeable sub-chunk of the population—that seems to me well and truly obsessed with the little, improvable parts of their lives while not, at least on the surface anyhow, giving a whole heck of thought to the other side and especially not to the Big Questions.

Which is to say, they hold strong opinions on a wide range of tiny topics I personally could not care less about. Not only is there a right time to take out your trash, there is a right way to store your trash before garbage day, a right place in which it should be stored, and a right barrel to take it out in (and guess what? This right barrel is frequently improved upon, necessitating the disposal of the old one and the replacement with the newer model). 

There are right shrubs and ground cover, the right lawn (this is America, right? That should go without saying), the right colors for your house, the right way to load the dishwasher, the right number of guests to invite to a cocktail party, the right place to take your Volvo wagon for its 75,000 mile tune-up and a right way to spend the time while you wait for it to be done.

Me with my loosey-goosey, who-cares-about-the-f*cking-dishwasher attitude thinks it must be exhausting to have fiercely held opinions about so much minutiae. But I must admit, these super-sure friends and neighbors don’t seem exhausted at all. It’s the opposite, it’s as if their convictions energize them.

The way all this ties into the 50th State is this: from my vantage point here in my mid-40s, it seems to me that at midlife you’re either marching forward on a path you’ve chosen (or been given or worked for), living in a certain way, pretty sure of what the upcoming years are going to bring and working steadily toward the milestones (the raise and the second house and the retirement or whatever). Or you’re still questioning things, maybe even questioning things more than you ever have before, which seems in this light disorganized and pathetic, like, is that all you have to show for a near half century on the planet, a bunch of questions?

Quite honestly a big part of me would like to live a life of greater certitude. It seems like a clean and strict and satisfying way to live. But I worry about that mindset writ large—how can we ever change as a people if all the adults are already so certain of everything? Who’s going to figure out how to save nature and stop these religious wars and feed the hungry etc.?—but also, on a personal level, if you have preconceived notions about, well, everything, you’re going to miss out on stuff that might be really cool.

So with certitude, you get a lot, but you also give up a lot. Like, oh, vacationing in North Dakota instead of Turks & Caicos. Or finding that even better way to load the dishwasher.

If you’ve found one, let me know. I’m still open to suggestion.