How terrified would your child self have been of your current adult life?

By David McElroy · October 27, 2017

Halloween has never been especially scary to me and horror films have held little interest. The real world has monsters far worse than whatever fiction or fantasy can imagine.

What scared you as a child? Was it the monsters under your bed? Noises in your closet? A tapping sound on your bedroom window at night when it stormed? Or maybe just the fear that someone would leave?

By our adult standards, those are (usually) childish fears which wouldn’t scare us much today. But what if your adult self could go back 20 or 30 or 40 years? What if you could go back into your own mind when you were about 12 or 15? Looking forward into the future as you now know it, what would be your biggest horror?

I’d like to suggest that the reality of our daily adult lives would be more terrifying than anything else that child self could possibly see.

I’ve been thinking about this since last week — ever since I saw the cartoon above. (Jim Benton’s cartoons are frequently funny and insightful, so I follow his work regularly.) I’m not sure whether to laugh or feel depressed, because as I think back to my honest expectations as a child, I realize that what I’ve allowed myself to become would have terrified me.

I’ve done nothing that mattered to that child self or teen self.

I expected love, success and fame. I imagined so much of that future in very clear terms. I saw myself changing the world. I saw myself influencing great numbers of people and leading them to improve and protect their society.

I saw myself financially successful, not because I loved or worshipped money, but because I saw myself being rewarded materially for providing great value to others.

Most of all, though, I imagined a woman and children. I had a very specific picture of my future wife and of what our home would look like with bright and motivated children. Even as a teen-ager, I knew I loved children and it mattered to me to have my own.

I saw myself as someone who knew what he wanted and then did what was necessary to get exactly those things — and I was confident enough (or egotistical enough) to believe others would be glad to follow me.

But life didn’t follow the path I imagined for myself.

It started with small compromises — and those small compromises led to bigger ones. In small ways and then in large ways, I accepted a life which looks nothing like what I imagined for myself. And I know that if I could show my current life to my 15-year-old self, I would have been disappointed and angry and full of despair.

When you were full of hope about your future, would you have accepted the things you’ve come to accept about your life? I wouldn’t have. I know that. So I wonder why I slowly accepted certain things.

When you were young, would you have accepted the impact you’re having on the world?

Would you have accepted the relationships you’ve allowed yourself to put up with? Or would you have known you deserved more?

Would you have accepted the person you’ve become? Would you have accepted the things that your habits and decisions have done to your health and your body?

There are some aspects of my current life that my young self would have been satisfied with. I’m sure the same is true for you. But if you’re anything like me, the overall picture of your current life wouldn’t have been acceptable to your young self.

How did we get here?

We made bad decisions — first smaller and then larger — and we refused to correct them.

We accepted the wrong people and pushed away the right people.

We lowered our standards because that was easier than changing things that needed to be changed.

We made compromises in ways that we should not have compromised.

We expected people to put up with things from us which we should have known would leave us alone and bitter in the long run.

We took our eyes off the great things we expected. We lowered our expectations. We settled.

If my 15-year-old self could see my current self, he would experience denial and anger. He would say, “I won’t accept this. What do I have to do to change this?”

Nothing is scarier to me today than someone holding a mirror in front of me. What have I become? And how can I reclaim what my young self expected?

I’ve been asking myself these questions a lot more lately and I’m determined to change things. I sometimes forget to listen to him, but that confident and idealistic 15-year-old is still alive in me. I still want much of what he wanted.

Becoming more honest with myself about the horrors of what I’ve become is the first step toward reclaiming the heart and soul of what I once was.

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I’m seeing a lot of simplistic and dishonest explanations right now for the current rioting in France. Those on the populist far right claim it’s all about Muslim immigrants to France disrupting the culture. Their message is that this sort of thing is going to happen in the U.S. unless “we defend the border.” On the far left, socialists and their fellow travelers claim the riots are all about wealthy people in France not paying enough taxes, resulting in cuts to government services. The truth is far more complicated, but it’s rooted in the decline of population growth in Europe. There simply aren’t enough young workers paying into the tax system anymore, so cuts in social services were inevitable. There is genuine cultural tension as more and more people immigrate from other countries, but government cuts to education and other services are even more important to what’s happening. The situation is complicated, so don’t let dishonest people with U.S. political agendas tell you that it happens to support whatever they were already promoting for partisan reasons.

Here’s another reason to appreciate the cats in your life: New research involving 93 countries found that places with more cats per person also tended to have happier people. The researchers say the finding fits with previous evidence that living with pets can reduce loneliness and stress while providing companionship, emotional attachment and social support. The study doesn’t prove that cats cause greater happiness, but it certainly adds to the evidence that sharing your home — and your life — with a cat might be good for you.

The company that owns Facebook and Instagram is heavily promoting its new AI-based software assistant called Muse, but people who are using it as it was designed are incredibly foolish. An early adopter of the software discovered that a few days ago when he advertised an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace — and he inadvertently gave Muse full authority to act on his behalf. The software agreed to a lowball offer made by another Facebook user and then gave that man the home address of the man for whom he was an agent. The software told the buyer that the seller was home and waiting for him. When the buyer showed up and waited angrily, the would-be buyer left an angry review for the man. And this angry man had the seller’s home address. It was only well after that that the software reported what it had done and admitted it had made a mistake. I won’t be putting that much power into the hands of any software. I think anyone who agrees to such terms is a fool. And the software’s user agreement says you’re responsible for purchases the software makes in your name. Nope.

Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

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