Birthday Thoughts from a 45 Degree Angle

 

One of my low-key birthday activities today

Today is my birthday, and as has become tradition on this blog, it's time for a birthday post.

At 45, it occurs to me that I'm halfway to 90, an age I am statistically speaking unlikely to see. But that's okay. It's not like I can stop time or alter the fabric of basic arithmetic. Besides, I discovered several years ago that I had already reached middle age based on statistical life expectancy. So it's downhill from here. But again, that's okay. Downhill is the easier part.

Life isn't easier in terms of medical issues (as I have already begun to experience), but perhaps easier in terms of wisdom, at least if you count as wisdom the Socratic quip that true wisdom consists in knowing what you don't know.

Maybe I have an unfair advantage in not knowing things, not just by my profession as a philosophy professor, but in my specialization in philosophical skepticism. Maybe. I don't know.

While in many ways the pandemic has ruined my mid-40's so far, in some ways I suppose it has trained me to appreciate the things that will be easier to do as I age. I've always loved reading, but spending the afternoon with a book, a beverage, and a snack on the porch is now one of my favorite things. I love seeing friends and family, but these days social media and Zoom can fill the gap between visits in person (I Zoomed with some friends today!).

Thinking a lot about death is also perhaps an occupational hazard for philosophers, but I tend to bring it on myself. I've spent a lot of time with Buddhist philosophy, and nobody thinks about suffering, sickness, old age, and death like Buddhists. 

I've also been covering a lot of existentialism in my horror and philosophy class this semester. I love the horror genre (as well as its musical counterpart, heavy metal) in large part because it faces in cold, gory reality that life is not all puppy dogs and rainbows. We're all going to die, although hopefully few of us from the axes and chainsaws and eldritch machinations of horror fiends and foes. For most of us, time and entropy will do the job.

But I also learned long ago that you can't let all this get you down. Life is horror. But it is also beauty. There is suffering, but also love. And you never really know when and where the love and beauty and suffering and horror will come. Or as Björk once said, "All is full of love. Maybe not from the directions you are staring at."

And maybe the fact that it all comes to an end is what makes life meaningful at all. At least to those of us privileged to become a small eddy of this wild, flowing universe contemplating itself for a tiny swirl of existence. Not that I know this for sure.

Or maybe as the Sage of our Age, Weird Al Yankovic, once proclaimed,

I guess you know the earth is gonna crash into the sun

But that's no reason why we shouldn't have a little fun

So if you think it's scary, if it's more than you can take

Just blow out the candles and have a piece of cake