How Big Can an Apple Be?
And how can you live a life that is better without needing it to be bigger?
Hey Friends,
I'm taking a bite of the Big Apple this week.
No matter how many times I come here, it never gets old. The city is intoxicating. There's energy, lights, culture, and a pee smell that swells with the heat. There's no city like it. Even with its flaws, I can't get enough. Last night, after dinner, I walked around in the lights of the night to take in the energy, alone, in a crowd of thousands. It was not new to me like the first time I set foot on Broadway, 26 years ago, but it hadn't lost that new city smell.
But as I walk these streets, wondering if I'll run into the Property Brothers or the guy with the weird hat and glasses from 30 Rock, all I see is people walking with headphones on while reading their phones, gambling that they won't collide with another New Yorker. It's a place where too many have decided the pursuit of happiness is to live on a hamster wheel, where you'll never really get the cheese. The young people are in a rush to get ahead, and the old people are in a rush to stay there. There are many proud New Yorkers, soaking up life, but so many are letting it soak them up first.
It makes me think of aging, including what happens before you know it's coming, and after it overtakes you, so I'm going to pull out an old issue about the subject. It's about how, as you age, changing your mind gets harder, but if you can learn how to do it as soon as possible, it might be the secret to staying young. I'll open it up here and link you to the original post.
Plastic Brains
We are the smartest we'll ever be when we are twenty, but after forty, the envy of wisdom. Here's why it's hard to change our minds and how doing so can help us live longer.
If you've ever sat around a kitchen table, you might have noticed that change is hard. The old folks are stuck in their ways, and the young people know better than anyone, even if they know very little.
When hot-button issues ruin a hot meal, sometimes sitting around a dinner table is barely more appealing than sitting around a garbage can. Navigating disagreements on important political topics is not for the faint of heart. If there's one thing a hearty debate can accomplish, it's that it can work up an appetite if you don't lose one instead. But rarely does anyone change their mind. Most would sooner lose it.
Change gets harder and harder as we age, especially in the gray matter. But if we change our minds intentionally, it just may help us live longer.
In this article, we'll explore the reasons why we don't change our minds and perhaps why we should, even if it is hard. I'll highlight five factors that keep us from altering our most deeply held views, factors that, if we are not aware of them, will be the shovels that put us in the ground, none the wiser.
Vicenials and Elders
The beauty of our early twenties is that we're smarter than everyone around us. This is the point in time when we realize that parents and deans of students just don't get it and probably never will because they are old and out of touch. Children at two decades old are perhaps the hidden gem of our time, or theirs anyway, admired most by themselves for the wisdom beyond their own years. The only thing they don't know is that they, too, will be the future deans and parents themselves, and that the ones they cock their heads to also were once vicennial intellectuals as well.
Knowledge is an incredibly addictive drug, and aging is its antidote.
The older I get, the more I wish I had never been young to begin with. Youth is wasted on them. Whether getting out of bed is painless or getting into it is accompanied by sighs and groans, the young will never know how good they have it, and yet, I never want to be one ever again. That said, at this stage of life, every time I get into bed, my greatest accomplishment the next day is to get back out.
I may be old to some, but I'm not that old. If the average lifespan is any measure, I am on the crest. I still have a lot of writing left in me. In the meat space, I'm pretty spry and by any measure of average lifespan many years of yard work ahead of me. If I'm lucky, I'll be out of touch for a really long time, outsmarted first by my children, then my potential grandchildren, and bratty neighbor kids who walk on my lawn, until eventually, the only yard work I am doing is becoming one.
For most of us, we decide who we want to be in life, and what ideals we want to live by, and we dig deeper into those ideals, every layer an added commitment to them. Many of our ideals, formed in our twenties, deserve revisiting, but we seem to keep digging anyway. Eventually, it gets harder to dig ourselves out before the day we become a resident of the very dirt we spent our lives unearthing.
For some of us, it will be our ideals that bury us.
Why is it so hard to change our minds? How do we change our minds when our minds have been made up? If anything is true, it's worth being tested, and testing any notion requires a willingness to falsify it. After all, do we want to believe the truth or believe we're right?
But just like George Bush in 2002 insisted that Iraq was developing 'weapons of mass destruction' and, after finding nothing, sought UN approval for the use of force, and after failing to garner support, invaded anyway. You've probably done the same, minus the full-scale military invasion part. For a more contemporary example, I expect Joe Biden to continue to insist he's the best man for the Presidency, even if he has to run the country from his grave.
Politicians have figured out how to exploit the public. By reducing everything to matters of identity. Race, gender, fiscal responsibility, reproductive health – everything is presented as a matter of our identities rather than a complex problem, as many policy issues are in reality. The hardest ideas to let go of are those that we use to define who we are. Half of the voting public votes to defend their rights, while everyone else is voting against them.
How to win hearts and minds is clear, but changing minds is much more difficult. And this is why we remain polarized.
Here are five factors that keep us from changing our minds, and how inviting change may offer us a fuller life.
Continue...
Daniel Herndon
That's it for this week.
Remember: The Lorem Ipsum is the newsletter that never sleeps. Wake up your friends with a copy.
Have a great weekend!
