When I was a kid, I was a hoarder. I kept every graded assignment from school. Every toy and every box it came in. Every toothbrush. Every sock with the heel worn through. My closet was full. My drawers were full. Under my bed was stuffed.
I’ve always been very sentimental. I care about things. Some things serve as portals to pleasant memories. Some things I anthropomorphize into loyal friends worthy of dignified retirement.
At some point I realized that it was getting stupid. There was so much junk and I would never look at it or think about it. It just sat there taking up space and I couldn’t organize the stuff that I did actually care about.
I want to say it was in my early teens, maybe 13 or 14, that I decided to clean my room. I took those mountains of 2nd grade spelling tests and 4th grade science dioramas and socks with holes in them and I put them in the trash. And it hurt. I missed the memories. I felt like I was betraying my loyal friends. Especially when trash day actually came and they were gone forever.
But doing that was one of the best things I’ve ever done. It was the first step to accepting a universal truth: nothing lasts forever.
I hoarded again after that. It was one powerful moment followed by lots of thinking about it and worrying about it and I wasn’t able to willpower my way through it again for awhile. But next time I did, it was easier. And it was easier the time after that. Until eventually, I started throwing some things away as soon as it was their time to go.
Today, I still have that connection to things. I love them while they’re here. But I accept when they’re gone. And the lesson has really helped with bigger and more inevitable losses.
I got a chocolate lab when I was 8. He was the best dog in the world, as I’m sure everyone will agree. I was debilitatingly shy through middle and high school and that dog was my closest friend.
I remember doing the math around 5th grade and realizing he would probably die while I was in college. And so I dreaded college. It kept getting closer, and whenever I thought about it, it made me sad.
When my dog eventually died, just after Thanksgiving 2016 (remember when that was the worst year ever?), I was okay. I cried when they gave him the injection. I cried the next day when I thought about him. But I knew life would go on. And it has.
One of the biggest dangers we individuals face is getting stuck in the past. We get blinded by the way life has always been and fail to see the beauty of where life is going.
Hedy Lamarr was a Hollywood beauty queen in the ’30s, ’40s, and ‘50s. (Also a certifiable genius inventor, but that’s not what I’m talking about today.) Like many beauty queens, Lamarr had a love/ hate relationship with attention. She lived passionately in her youth, stringing up numerous brief marriages and affairs, but once she was no longer youthful, she retreated in on herself, living the second half of her life in complete seclusion. Her relationships were maintained almost entirely over the phone. She didn’t speak to her eldest son for 50 years. And her only participation in public life were 2 high-profile court cases where she sued companies for using her name and image because, now that she wasn’t young and vivacious, she couldn’t stand the idea of people thinking about her anymore.
“Old age, believe me, is a good and pleasant thing. It is true you are gently shouldered off the stage, but then you are given such a comfortable front-row seat as a spectator.”
Confucius
You are the center of your own universe for the beginning of your life. You have youth and energy. But the end of those things isn’t the end of the world. If you have lived your life right, as you lose your own youth and energy, you are surrounded by the youth and energy of the next generation. You are granted the opportunity to be a mentor, an advisor, a guide. And as difficult as it is for a hedonist to understand, there is nothing more joyful and meaningful than that.
We also romanticize the past and catastrophize the future on a larger scale. It’s only natural; the world we used to live in definitively didn’t kill us, but the world of the future certainly will.
Thomas Malthus believed that the world’s population of 1 billion in 1800 was more than the planet could possibly sustain. The stratospheric growth of the number of people on Earth terrified him. Never in the history of the planet had the population increased so much so fast. It was unprecedented. And he was absolutely right. The world he lived in couldn’t sustain a billion people.
So why didn’t the world end?
Humans got better at producing food. Humans got better at building shelter. Humans got better at curing diseases. And 7 billion more people later, most people on Earth are better off than Malthus himself.
Ned Ludd (who may or may not have actually existed) believed that factories would leave craftsmen and artisans homeless and unable to provide for their families. He was a weaver, like his father before him and his father before him, and he had to watch factories emerge that could weave better and faster and more easily than he could. And he was absolutely right. If artisan weavers kept on hand weaving, they would not have been able to provide for themselves and their families.
So why didn’t the world end?
His children learned to work in the factories. They made more fabric and earned more for their work than their father did. And their children earned more than they did, all the way down to us who only work 40 hours a week and have cars and phones and the cure for tuberculosis.
The world today changes faster than it ever has before. And it forces us to change faster than humans were ever meant to. It’s difficult to let go of what we know and embrace the chaos of not knowing what’s going to save us. But as long as humans are out there looking at the problems, humans will keep finding the solutions.
Climate change is not going to be the end of the world. Overpopulation is not going to be the end of the world. Automation is not going to be the end of the world. Unless we continue to teach our children that the only thing to do is cry about our problems like Malthus and Ludd.
The world as we know it is coming to an end all the time in all sorts of different ways. The world with my dog ended in 2016. Before too long, my world as a vivacious youth will end. And each of us is only given two choices: we can allow ourselves to be dragged down with the world that’s ending or we can do what we can to make the world that replaces it even better.
