© Charles D. Hayes
If you are getting on in years and facing
the reality that time is running out, you may experience an existential alarm
that rings erratically and gets increasingly louder. You breeze by the aging markers
of 40, 50, 60, and then, all of a sudden, it seems you are elderly. More and
more, I find instances of people being described as elderly who are years younger
than I am.
For some people like me, being
elderly comes with an urgent call for perspective, a pressing need to be
realistic about time. When we’re finally able to put aside all illusions about our
mortality and fully realize that we are experiencing the final chapters of
life, everything begins to look different. Many of the myths we have grown up believing
are shattered by the clarity of oblivion.
A large body of evidence in existential
psychology shows clearly that the prospect of death affects us deeply at both a
conscious and unconscious level. Although the most common strategy in the past seems
to have been to deny one’s approaching demise, recent research suggests that a straight-up
acknowledgement and overt conscious awareness of one’s forthcoming death can
add greatly to the quality of day-to-day experience by forcing us to see more
clearly and allowing the things we really value to stand out.
The realization that time is short can
seem like a meaningful civil comeuppance in that it tends to cut through all of
the platitudes and clichés we’ve heard about the ideological nature of freedom
that comes with being an American citizen and with having grown up in a country
where people are accustomed to thinking of themselves as being free in the
greatest nation on the earth.
The prospect of an abbreviated future
exposes the idea that genuine freedom is different from popular opinion. To be
truly free one has to have the ability to see through illusions, to defy the
herd’s desperate need to conform, and to enjoy the privilege of using one’s
time as one chooses. It means being able to pursue one’s interests and treat
the important things in our lives as if they really matter, regardless of what
others think, say, or do.
Once you begin to think like this, you
may find it hard to believe that you ever bought into the notion that time is
money, because you can’t buy more time. If you have enough money, you can spend
what time you have as you please, but such thinking reveals our culture to be a
social arrangement that indentures millions of its citizens to a life of poverty.
This situation has grown out of an arbitrary use and abuse of power based on
counterfeit assumptions, lip service about values, and an imagined sense of tribalistic
superiority that thrives on advantage and strives to maintain advantage with arrogance,
contempt, and a willingness to go to any extreme necessary to prevail.
As Americans we grow up being
taught a history so whitewashed, so egregiously out of sync with the realities
of the past, that it’s little wonder the stories we wind up believing about our
past are mythic fantasies. History shows that we are easily distracted, routinely
duped, and so effectively manipulated politically that we spend little time paying
attention to the things we should. Politicians in both parties routinely
practice bait and switch.
Our future depends on high-order
technology, while the real political power lies in the psychological manipulation
of poorly educated citizens by shifting the blame for inequality to the least
powerful among us, those who are without echelons of paid lobbyists to rig an
advantage—those who are unable to effectively represent their own interests.
Scapegoats offer antagonists a reliable distraction that works nearly every
time.
By any objective criteria, moneyed
interests have hijacked the original aspirations of America as a democracy
driven by the attributes of meritocracy and the idea that citizens require some
measure of leisure in order to become active participants in their own governance.
That America has become a plutocracy is undeniable, and claims to the contrary
are disingenuous by any standard. It’s surprising how clear this reality
becomes when one’s future is small.
The angst that comes with age is
both a curse and an opportunity, a dreaded feeling and also a clue that there
is something to get beyond, something that can be improved. As we age,
nostalgia—if it doesn’t itself become a habit of excessive distraction—often
presents itself as a method of fixing something wrong in the present by
comparison with something worthy in the past, although care has to be taken not
to judge the past with selective memory.
For millions of our citizens, real
freedom is little more than a cliché. There are myriad ideological excuses for
America’s growing inequality, some of which are very sophisticated and sound
convincing, but none of them are good enough to justify it. None, zip, zero.
That a significant number of our population
can spend a lifetime of hard work at wages that guarantee poverty while a few
individuals loot America’s corporations under the phony guise of excellence is
ludicrous. What’s even more preposterous is that so many people can be persuaded
to accept such contrived inequality as adequate living conditions and be so
confused about the real essence of freedom.
The tactic of using the virtue of hard
work as a divisive cultural weapon is rendered sterile and infantile by the
reality that much of what is done that we called work has an enormous negative economic
effect on our citizens and the planet. To claim that a significant percentage
of our population is devoid of the virtue necessary to earn above-poverty wages
is patently absurd, and to indenture generations to financial institutions to
pay for college to qualify for jobs that won’t pay enough to retire the debt is
a national disgrace.
When the decades have stacked up
behind us like cordwood, it doesn’t take a lot of reflection to acknowledge
that many of the things we were taught to accept as truths were really
distractions manufactured to keep order by those with enough power to make people
believe that freedom is the ability to switch from one low-paying job to
another instead of having enough economic equity to have the time and leisure
to learn to become fully vested citizens.
But then, how else could you create
a society in which executives could run companies into bankruptcy and yet walk
away with enough largesse to live freely and never work again without citizens
taking to the streets in protest? Speaking for myself, a lifetime of study
reveals that history is one longsuffering attempt to justify the power of those
with the authority to write it.
Unfortunately, the majority of
magazines and websites for seniors these days are so superficial and so shallow
in their content that, if anything, they add to the angst of aging. So the
bottom line here is that the last chapters of life are where the whole book of
one’s life needs to end with a perspective which allows for the possibility that
one’s existence will have made enough sense that something of value might be
shared with those who will survive us.
Imagining what life could be like
if we tamped down the contempt that results from tribalistic pretention is much
easier to do when we remove ourselves from the equation and consider the
possibility of achieving the kind of civilization where it would be commonly
accepted that everyone’s life really matters, not just those who have mastered
the ethos of greed.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, argues that many of the economic
problems we face occur because the people making the decisions have no skin in
the game, so to speak. In other words, they have nothing to lose. Then contrast
John Rawls’ Theory of Justice advocating
creation of a society in which the people cutting the economic pie do so under
conditions that bar them from knowing which piece they themselves will get.
Now keep both of these notions in
mind as you consider how objective we might be in offering feasible advice for
a society that we won’t be alive to see. In other words, imagine you have no
life in the game except through your kin and progeny who will live on after you.
If this kind of objectivity can’t be trusted, what can?
My Books and Essays on Amazon
New Fiction: The Call of Mortality
My Other Blog
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