Arthur, Aging, and Ambition
Dusting off an old essay I wrote to help myself process my thirtieth birthday
[NOTE: I wrote this essay below as a sort-of “sermon to myself” when I turned thirty years old. Since my birthday has come around again I felt the need to read it over. Since writing this, I have started a podcast, read some additional 100 books, fathered (another) child, and published some substack articles. I very sincerely thank God for being able to do all these things. Hopefully reading this will help re-inspire me to substantially cultivate all of those wonderful gifts if God gives me the strength to do so.]
But now at thirty years my hair is grey—
(I wonder what it will be like at forty ?
I thought of a peruke1 the other day—)
My heart is not much greener; and, in short, I
Have squandered my whole summer while ’twas May,
And feel no more the spirit to retort; I
Have spent my life, both interest and principal,
And deem not, what I deemed, my soul invincible.
Today, I turn thirty years old. Unlike Lord Byron, my hair is not exactly grey, but it is very much disappearing, and exposing increasingly more of the ghastly-white scalp underneath, making me wish it were turning grey instead. I do share Byron’s sense that “I have spent my life,” that it is over in some meaningful way, though not the way that Byron describes.
I first began to think of my own aging and mortality not when reading a Byron poem (which was introduced to me by Scott of Slate Star Codex, who is older than me by at least a decade), but by an episode of the kids’ show Arthur, wherein Arthur’s younger sister D.W. is about as whiney and angsty in anticipation of starting kindergarten as Lord Byron was upon reaching his thirtieth birthday.
D.W.: And now, here it is, my birthday. They're gonna give me normal cake, and then - whammo - I'm five.
Arthur: So?
D.W.: So I don't know if I'm ready. I'll never be four again, you know. Did I do everything I could? Did I waste my fours?
She grabs Arthur’s collar.
D.W.: Did I frivol away my childhood?!
This TV show I saw when I was probably about seven years old did not really resolve the existential question confronting the characters. Another episode addressed aging more metaphorically: before the opening credits, Arthur is shown writing a list of all the things that he wanted to do over summer vacation, but after the theme song plays, Arthur wakes up to discover that it is already time for “back to school” shopping. Watching this as a child was extremely jarring,2 but at least it offered some sort of hope that even if life seems to have sped by, looking back at your bucket list after the fact can help remind you of accomplishments made in the meanwhile, because when Arthur looks back at his list, he realizes that he in fact did do many of things written there (see the episode synopsis if you really want the details).
In 2007, a professor at Carnegie-Mellon University gave a similar message in a “last lecture” that he delivered after being diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. The video of Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture, or “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” went about as viral as things could go back in those days, with an accompanying book selling many millions of copies. The upshot of his lecture is that his super-cool-fun life as a computer science professor allowed him to achieve his childhood dreams (among them, “being Captain Kirk,” and playing football for the NFL).
When I was about fifteen years old and my dad told me about Randy Pausch and his silly dreams, I decided that I was much wiser than either the childhood Pausch or the fictional Arthur. At fifteen, I also made a metaphorical “summer stuff” list, but not a bucket list to check off anytime while still alive, just a list of things I wanted to make sure to accomplish by the time I turned twenty, and another list of the things I wanted to accomplish by the time I turned thirty. (Of course, I didn’t write down this list on any physical piece of paper; if it needed a reminder, then obviously it wasn’t important enough to be on the list in the first place).
My fifteen-year-old ambitions, however, did not extend past age thirty. This age was like an event horizon, beyond which I could not even imagine, or cared to. Après ce, le déluge.
Part of this was simply because an additional fifteen years, from that particular vantage point, seemed too distant to see past. But there was really a more important reason for setting the deadline for all my teenager-self’s life’s goals for age thirty. By the time I was fifteen, I had already experienced at least one crisis of faith, even if these internal crises were totally unrecognizable from the outside. I understood that my priorities were likely to change, and so the reason why I couldn’t or wouldn’t see past age thirty is because I recognized that my real thirty-year-old-self would likely have different goals than the ones that my fifteen-year-old self would have established for a hypothetical thirty-year-old self. Randy Pausch was being dumb — people do not (necessarily) abandon their childhood dreams because they get tired or lazy, but because when they grow in wisdom and maturity, they learn to pursue better dreams.
“If I'm not doing those things it'll be because I've found something better."
In reality, however, now that stand on the other side of my thirtieth birthday, I find that my life goals have actually not changed much; instead, I am merely depressed at having barely scratched the surface of my youthful ambitions. Where did it all go wrong? How could I have made it to this milestone with a personal score of around 15% success? Was I indeed too lazy? Distracted?
Let me give myself some grace for not meeting my deadlines. First of all, there was recently this Covid-19 thing that totally ate away at my life, and I feel like those years don’t count. All the schools in the U.S. seemed to take this as a good enough excuse to stop learning/teaching for a year or two, so maybe I can file for an extension for… let’s say, five years? Age 35 is, after all, the biblically appropriate time for a mid-life crisis, should I choose to have one (see Psalms 90:10).
More seriously, though, in some ways I did have a change of heart regarding the relative importance of the items on my theoretical list versus how my actual life turned out. The details of my life goals at age fifteen is best left vague; I’m not about to go spilling all of my personal ambitions on the internet. But it did not include any of the following: having friends who I could call for anything, a loving spouse, a child, and a reasonably steady/livable income. Thinking back, it is hard to say for sure why none of these super important things made it onto my list, but I believe it was because I wasn’t actually sure any of these would even be possible, and if they were, they wouldn’t count as “achievements” because they are mostly out of my control.
I still think this way, which is that my feelings about my friends and family is overwhelmingly one of gratitude, not accomplishment. But in a way, that is even more important - God entrusted me with these gifts, and I have a huge obligation not to lose them. And of course, the value of a person’s life is not in how many books they might have read or trophies they may have won in banana-eating-contests. Merely living is enough of a reason to praise and thank God. For me, who has been bestowed with so many more blessings, I am obligated to say a thousand fold:
ברוך ה’ מלך העולם שהחיינו וקיימנו והגיענו לזמן הזה
Blessed is God, King of the World, Who has given us life, sustained us, and brought us to this time.
Rabbinic tradition (Mishnah Avot Ch. 5) gives the following descriptions for ages twenty and thirty:3
בן עשרים לרדוף בן שלשים לכח
Age twenty for pursuing, age thirty for strength
Many of the classic commentaries see this as referring to physical characteristics, but I like to imagine that the interpretation is as follows: during a person’s twenties, he or she is pursuing goals, collecting ambitions but also relinquishing some other goals, deciding on how to spend one’s life; it is a time of seeking and preparing. Identity and role confusion, Erik Erikson called it. Once a person reaches thirty years, then it becomes time to stop running around and to actually invest energies into those narrower goals or life paths that have been already chosen.
This seems to me to be a correct interpretation of the rabbinic dictum especially when considering the question, “Where did the rabbis get this idea from?” The scriptural source for this Mishnaic advice is likely from the verses describing the age requirements of the Levites in the Tabernacle: according to the traditional rabbinic interpretation of the beginning of Bamidbar/Numbers, the Levites would only begin their service at the age of thirty, after having trained for their roles while in their twenties (see here for sources). In fact, the laws regarding the Levites' service in the sanctuary also provide us with an example of professional specialization:
Levites are forewarned that one should not engage in the labor of his fellow, that the singer should not assist the gatekeeper, nor the gatekeeper the singer, as it is written: “Each person to his work and his labor” (Bamidbar 4:49). If a Levi performs the labor of a Kohen, or if one Levi assists another with regard to work which is not his, they are then liable to death at the hands of the Divine Court. (Rambam, Hilkhot Kelei Ha-Mikdash 3:10-11)
In other words, the Levites model what it looks like to spend one’s twenties in study or training, and then at the age of thirty begin the real work that one has trained for. If we were rewriting the Mishnah in English based on this idea, we might say “age twenty to explore, age thirty to exploit.”
With this perspective, I may still be a little behind in my professional goals, but when it comes to most of my other ambitions, I have already chased, I have chosen, and now it is time to get down to work. The “work” is holding tight to those gifts God granted me, cultivating them, and maybe, if I have some extra time, get back to that other list.
A “very stylish” wig
Actually, the show would frequently have a short segment before the opening theme song and title page that was disjointed from the narrative of the main body of the episode that as I found really disorienting as a seven-year-old. This is not necessarily bad; I think I have very strong memories from my childhood precisely because I would spend a long time ruminating on things that confused me (which were many) to try to figure them out.
In reality, lifespans until very recently were much shorter, and so it is a bit of a puzzle as to why this Mishnah describes a person as living until 90-100 years old (or even why the bible mentions “seventy to eighty years” as a normal lifespan). But these fit contemporary actuarial tables much better; a man who turns 30 today has a life expectancy of 45 more years.