Late 30s

Being in your late 30s means having a lot of this conversation:

Other people to you: You're young!

You: No, I'm old!

Wanna feel old?

Nirvana's breakthrough album Nevermind is older today . . . than the Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" single was . . . on the day Nirvana released Nevermind.

ABC News flubs presidential candidates' ages

ABC News says this about Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, the latest Democrat to announce he’s running for president:

At 40, he's the second-youngest candidate, three years older than Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, whom Moulton has described as a friend and fellow veteran.

Wait, Tulsi Gabbard and Eric Swalwell are both 38-year-old members of Congress who've announced they're running for president. Have they dropped out? No, Moulton is at most the fourth-youngest candidate, not the "second-youngest"; ABC News just didn’t bother to fact-check. This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed the mainstream media getting a 2020 contender’s age wrong; as I posted before, a CNN article understated Joe Biden’s age. If the media isn’t going to be accurate about something as easy to check as the age of presidential candidates, you have to wonder how badly they’re getting the facts wrong in trickier areas.

(I posted a screen shot of ABC's mistake to Facebook for posterity, in case it's eventually corrected.)

By the way, Moulton seems to have an impressive military record as a Marine and an Iraq veteran — not that that’s been an effective way to win votes. The veterans who've run for president in recent memory (John Kerry, Wesley Clark, John McCain, Bob Dole) all failed; it's been a while since we've elected a president with a military background. So I don't expect this to be the factor that makes Moulton stand out from the crowd of at least 20 candidates.

Joe Biden and the one-term pledge idea

David Gergen, writing at CNN, has 3 suggestions for former Vice President Joe Biden if he decides to run for president. The first suggestion:

[I]f and when he declares, Biden might break precedent by promising up front that he will serve for only a single term. . . . Unlike other politicians who always seem grasping for power, Biden would have a credible argument that he is truly putting country first. . . .

[C]ommitting to one term would also diminish the importance of his age issue. With a single term, he would step down at 81. People might accept that. But trying to go on till 85? That seems beyond the pale.

I agree with Gergen: in a presidential race, age matters.

But then, why does this article understate Joe Biden's age?

Biden was born on November 20, 1942 (unless Wikipedia and the rest of the internet are mistaken).

2024 - 1942 = 82.

So if President Biden serves just one term, he'll turn 82 (not 81, as Gergen says) shortly after Election Day 2024, before he steps down in January 2025. If he serves a full two terms, he'll be 86 (not 85) by the end of his presidency.

If CNN wants to be in a good position to defend itself against the president's wrongful attacks on the network as "fake news," CNN should try to give us confidence that its articles are thoroughly fact-checked. When we see misstatements about basic info like a former vice president's age on CNN, we lose a bit of that confidence.

Anyway, I'm always skeptical of the idea that a presidential candidate might pledge to serve only 4 years if elected. That suggestion gets made whenever there's a septuagenarian candidate, but we never ended up hearing those pledges from Bob Dole, John McCain, Bernie Sanders, etc. (The candidate would ideally make the pledge before the primaries start being held, so voters can factor it into their decision.) It was also suggested about Hillary Clinton when she ran in her late 60s. And while there's been speculation about whether Donald Trump (the oldest president ever when first inaugurated) will run for reelection, he hasn't taken a one-term pledge.

This 2015 Washington Post article tells the history of one-term pledges. Three presidents have made them, but they were all in the 19th century. (Two kept the pledge; the other was William Henry Harrison, who died a month into his first term.) But the idea of a self-imposed term limit started feeling less relevant once the two-term limit was added to the Constitution in 1951.

There are two other problems with the pledge. One is it could backfire by drawing attention to the candidate's age and raising questions about the candidate's health. It would be seen as an admission: "I'm too old to serve for 8 years." That will get voters wondering if the candidate is too old to serve for even 4 years.

The other problem, as the WaPo article says:

If someone made the pledge and then got elected, would they hold to it? A number of congressional candidates during and since the 1994 wave election made term-limit pledges -- and a number of them have broken them. Once president, it seems hard to think a politician would simply walk away.

The article includes a tweet saying a one-term pledge "is like when that opera lover in your life insists you go but agrees you can leave at intermission."

(Photo of Biden in 2017 by Jay Godwin, via Wikimedia Commons.)

"Respect your elders"?

Amid all the talk about how the Covington story was falsely reported and how the mob against those kids summed up everything wrong with social media, one point seems to have gotten lost: no matter what version of the facts we believed, it was always absurd to say, in response to seeing a Native American in his 60s, that the teenagers needed to "respect their elders." That phrase can be used to mean many different things, but I'd suggest that it's so problematic it should be replaced by clearer statements that don't rely on cliches.

We should not respect anyone based on what demographic group they belong to, whether it's age, ethnicity, or anything else. Each individual either does or doesn't deserve respect based on what they've specifically said or done. Just think how many of the people who said "respect your elders" after watching that video have the utmost disrespect for Donald Trump, who, as the 72-year-old leader of our country, is as much an "elder" as anyone. Of course, "respecting your elders" is an effective approach in many social situations. But the word "respect" can refer to either outward behavior or internal thoughts/feelings. If it means the latter, then no one believes you must genuinely respect all of your "elders" (whoever they are). Some of your "elders" are fundamentally at odds with each other, so to respect one of them would be to disrespect another. It's even been argued that teaching kids to "respect their elders" could lead them to accept being abused by adults.

There are valid arguments in favor of "respect your elders": that we should honor those who've come before us, who've struggled in ways we haven't, who've worked hard to make the world better, and who've gained wisdom over the years. As a general attitude toward older generations, that's fine — but that's not what people meant when they said "respect your elders" about the Native American man at that event. They seemed to mean that he as an individual must be respected at all times, but we can't know that from clicking on a short video someone recorded with their phone.

Ironically, it isn't respectful to leap to a positive judgment about someone based on their ethnicity. Is seeing a Native American of a certain age and immediately saying, "Respect your elders!" really that different from meeting someone who's Asian and quickly praising them for "speaking good English," or routinely mentioning that "some of my best friends are black" during any conversation about race? Those kinds of statements might sound positive on the surface, but it's well-known that they're insidiously patronizing. They treat people as ethnic placeholders instead of as fully formed individuals with unique strengths and weaknesses.

Garry Shandling (1949 - 2016)

Garry Shandling, the comedian, died yesterday at age 66.

The New York Times says:

Mr. Shandling’s Larry Sanders was the host of a fictional show within the show, interviewing real celebrities playing themselves in segments that were virtually indistinguishable from real talk shows like “The Tonight Show.” (Mr. Shandling had frequently substituted for Johnny Carson as the “Tonight Show” host.)

But the show was mostly concerned with what happened when the cameras were off, especially the interplay among Larry, his bumbling announcer and sidekick (Jeffrey Tambor) and his mercurial producer (Rip Torn).

“The Larry Sanders Show,” often cited as a groundbreaking precursor of shows like “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “30 Rock,” was the second show by Mr. Shandling to take an unorthodox approach. The first, “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show,” seen on Showtime from 1986 to 1990, freely admitted that it was a show, with Mr. Shandling often breaking the fourth wall by speaking directly to the audience. . . .

Playing a talk-show host who was, as Jacques Steinberg wrote in The New York Times, “a too-close-for-comfort amalgam of Johnny Carson, David Letterman, Jay Leno and Jack Paar,” Mr. Shandling offered a jaundiced insider view of the television business. . . .

Mr. Shandling’s profile was never again as high as it was during the “Larry Sanders” years, but the show’s influence has been lasting. “30 Rock” borrowed its unblinking warts-and-all look at how television is made; “Curb Your Enthusiasm” embraced its use of real celebrities to play versions of themselves that were perhaps only slight exaggerations.

Its influence was also felt in less obvious ways. David Chase, the creator of “The Sopranos,” once said that “The Larry Sanders Show” “inspired me to want to do something really good for television.” . . .

Just a few months ago Mr. Shandling was a guest on Jerry Seinfeld’s popular web series “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” in an episode eerily titled “It’s Great That Garry Shandling Is Still Alive.” Eighteen years earlier, Mr. Seinfeld had praised Mr. Shandling’s comedic instincts.

“Comedians all wait around to hear things that they can use,” Mr. Seinfeld said in 1998. “With Garry, it’s like being in a boat with a guy who’s constantly reeling in fish.”

In 2007, nine years after “The Larry Sanders Show” went off the air, Mr. Shandling spoke to The Times about his post-“Sanders” life.

“It’s very similar to — what is it? — the seven stages of grieving,” he said. “First there’s the shock. Now I’m going to head for something funny here. Then there’s denial, acceptance and” — he paused — “masturbation.”

Here's Shandling and Seinfeld talking on that recent episode of Seinfeld's show:

Shandling: I was sitting there watching CNN anyway, and they broke in and said Robin Williams had killed himself. And I sat there and I was frozen. . . . Then Wolf Blitzer says: "63 is so young!" And then I looked up with a little hope, because I'm about the same age as Robin. And then I realized: "63 is so young" is a phrase you never hear relative to anything but death. "63 is so young to be playing in the NFL"? There's nothing!

Seinfeld: You have to die in your 60s for them to say: "Boy, he was young!"

"God bless you, piano, I love you, you're my best friend."

"Uh, I got a little emotional there, I'm sorry. But anyway, that's the way I feel."

The "old" drive out the young at TNR

"I can no longer in good conscience even imagine my work appearing in the magazine. Your assault on the magazine has nothing whatsoever to do with print versus digital or with age versus youth. Chronologically, you are young — and some of us who are now leaving the magazine are older. But to me you seem old — old in the conventionality of your fast-forward thinking that goes nowhere. What you have done to The New Republic has broken the hearts of many people in their twenties and thirties — people who would like to take part in the great intellectual conversation that The New Republic has been for a hundred years and is no more."

— Jed Perl, resigning as TNR's art critic

"Should All Young Americans Be Fiscal Conservatives?"

Good question:

If young Americans knew what was good for them, would they all support aggressive deficit-cutting plans that slash government spending across the board? . . .

The federal government spends more than seven times as much on someone 65 or older as it does on a child. Even after you include state and local spending on public schools, total spending per person on children is less than half that for the elderly. Over the past decade, the number of children in poverty has soared, and over the rest of this decade, spending on children will shrink by a fifth (as a percentage of total federal spending), while spending on the elderly will swell even more. On the current path, in 25 years Social Security, health-care and interest on accumulated debt would consume all Federal government revenue, according to the latest Congressional Budget Office projections. . . .

Current policies will continue to shift resources from the young to the old. Moreover, these policies are ultimately unsustainable, so that when today’s young people retire, they will not be able to count on full benefits. Without a change in policy, in 40 years Social Security will only be able to pay three-quarters of the payouts that have been promised. The gap cannot be closed by tax increases alone without sizable spending cuts.

IN THE COMMENTS: Jason (the commenter) suggests an explanation:

Money the government is spending on old people means young people are free not to take care of them.

Cafe conversation

From the table next to me at The Grey Dog in Manhattan:

— Is she young-ish?

— No, she's not that young. She's 24.

— But she's young-ish.

The European and North American bubble

Mark Steyn writes:

[T]he unsustainable "bubble" is not student debt or subprime mortgages or anything else. The bubble is us, and the assumptions of entitlement. Too many citizens of advanced Western democracies live a life they have not earned, and are not willing to earn. Indeed, much of our present fiscal woe derives from two phases of human existence that are entirely the invention of the modern world. Once upon a time, you were a kid till you were 13 or so; then you worked; then you died. That bit between childhood and death has been chewed away at both ends. We invented something called "adolescence" that now extends not merely through the teenage years but through a desultory half-decade of Whatever Studies at Complacency U up till you're 26 and no longer eligible for coverage on your parents' health insurance policy. At the other end of the spectrum, we introduced something called "retirement" that, in the space of two generations, has led to the presumption that able-bodied citizens are entitled to spend the last couple of decades, or one third of their adult lives, as a long holiday weekend.

Any functioning society is like an orchestra. When the parts don't fit together, it's always the other fellow who's out of tune. So the Greeks will blame the Germans, and vice-versa. But the developed world is all playing the same recessional. In the world after Western prosperity, we will work till we're older, and we will start younger – and we will despise those who thought they could defy not just the rules of economic gravity but the basic human life cycle.

Happy 107th birthday to Alice Herz-Sommer, who survived the Holocaust with music

Here's her Wikipedia entry, which links to this article:

I played Chopin as they sent my family to their deaths

That article explains:

In 1943, with her husband and their six-year-old son, she was deported from Prague to the Nazis' "model" concentration camp at Terezin ....

Her mother had already been deported and killed by Nazis a year earlier. The article goes on:

In Terezin, despite appalling conditions, she was determined to live for her son and for her music. In the camp, music became part of daily life. She gave more than 100 concerts there. Many of her fellow inmates were artists, musicians and writers, but there was nothing remotely philanthropic about the Nazis' encouragement of the arts in Terezin. "It was propaganda," she says contemptuously. "This was something they could show the world, while in reality they were killing us."

Her husband was taken away to Auschwitz and later Dachau, where he died of typhus six weeks before the end of the war. His parting words to her were: "Do nothing voluntarily." She believes this saved her life and their son Raphael; other women, offered the chance to follow their husbands, were sent to their deaths.

In this documentary, you can see her talking and playing piano recently, at age 106:



"My world is music. I am not interested in anything else. ... Beethoven, he is a miracle. His music is not only melody, but what is inside. ... Music is the only thing that helps me to have hope. It's a sort of religion, actually. Music is God. In difficult times you feel it especially — when you are suffering."

"A lot of German journalists come and want to ... speak with me and so on. Before they enter my room, they ask, 'Are we allowed to enter your room? Do you not hate us?' So my answer is, 'I never hated. I would never hate. Hatred brings only hatred.'"

How to use "What would I regret the most?" to make life decisions

"Regrets of the Dying" is a bittersweetly inspiring piece by Bronnie Ware on her blog, Inspiration and Chai (via <— via).

Ware used to work in palliative care for "patients . . . who had gone home to die . . . for the last three to twelve weeks of their lives." She had the chance to hear them answer the question what they regretted most, and her blog post lists "the most common five" (she doesn't say if these are in order of how common they are, or just ordered for the sake of having a list):

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. . . .

2. I wish I didn't work so hard. . . .

3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings. . . .

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. . . .

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

She notes that #2 especially affects men. I wonder if #3 does too.

Instapundit emphasizes the striking observation Ware gives in explaining #5:

“Many did not realise until the end that happiness is a choice.”

Althouse adds:

Why are you doing what you are doing? Do you need death staring you in the face to take that question seriously?

I don't know about that, but what seems clear is that death staring people in the face changes people's answers about what they regret the most. An article in the New York Times in March 2009 — back when the recession felt more dire — said:

Now that shoppers have sworn off credit cards, we’re risking an epidemic of a hitherto neglected affliction: saver’s remorse.

The victims won’t evoke much sympathy — don’t expect any telethons — but their condition is real enough to merit a new label. Consumer psychologists call it hyperopia, the medical term for farsightedness and the opposite of myopia, nearsightedness, because it’s the result of people looking too far ahead. They’re so obsessed with preparing for the future that they can’t enjoy the present, and they end up looking back sadly on all their lost opportunities for fun. . . .

Splurging on a vacation or a pair of shoes or a plasma television can produce an immediate case of buyer’s remorse, but that feeling isn’t permanent, according to Ran Kivetz of Columbia University and Anat Keinan of Harvard. In one study, these consumer psychologists asked college students how they felt about the balance of work and play on their winter breaks.

Immediately after the break, the students’ chief regrets were over not doing enough studying, working and saving money. But when they contemplated their winter break a year afterward, they were more likely to regret not having enough fun, not traveling and not spending money. And when alumni returned for their 40th reunion, they had even stronger regrets about too much work and not enough play on their collegiate breaks.

“People feel guilty about hedonism right afterwards, but as time passes the guilt dissipates,” said Dr. Kivetz, a professor of marketing at the Columbia Business School. “At some point there’s a reversal, and what builds up is this wistful feeling of missing out on life’s pleasures.”

He and Dr. Keinan managed to change consumers’ behavior simply by asking a few questions to bus riders going to outlet stores and to other shoppers shortly before Black Friday.

The people who were asked to imagine how they would feel the following week about their purchases proceeded to shop thriftily for basic necessities, like underwear and socks. But people who were asked to imagine how they’d feel about their purchases in the distant future responded by spending more money and concentrating on indulgences like jewelry and designer jeans [sic — the NYT uses no period at the end of this paragraph]

“When I look back at my life,” one of these high rollers explained, “I like remembering myself happy. So if it makes me happy, it’s worth it.”

Back when I was in school, right after I had turned in a paper, I used to relish the feeling: "That's it! I'm free. I can't redo it. No matter how good or bad a job I did, whether I put in too much work or not enough work, it's not my problem anymore."

Now, that feeling of mine was, in a sense, irrational and unrealistic. It actually still mattered how well I did on those papers I had turned in, because there were going to be other papers in the future that I'd also need to do a good job on. If you still care about the assignments you've already turned in, this can help you take your work in the future more seriously. Even if you're turning your last paper before your graduate, your concern for the work you've already finished is going to carry over into your work ethic in a job or a job interview.

But someone at the end of their whole life has no need for any such concern. If you're in hospice care, you have little motivation to analyze how various specific tradeoffs you made throughout your life actually affected how enjoyable and fulfilling your life was from day to day. If you know you have almost no future and one of your most important remaining goals is to minimize your pain, it makes a lot of sense to adopt a hedonistic perspective on your life. Though these sentiments may be some of the patients' last words, they are not the last word in how we should live our lives.

Back to that New York Times article — I found it from an excellent blog about psychology and statistics called The Mentaculus. The blogger, Andy McKenzie, has a "working assumption that every human tendency is on a spectrum." He describes how he used the idea of regret to channel his decision making before reading the Times piece:

I've used the regret heuristic in the past with mostly positive but somewhat mixed success. I've probably actively thought "Will I regret this?" around 15 times in the past year and about 10 of those decisions I would now characterize as positive. But there's something missing from that simple approach.

After reading the Times article, he concluded that the way someone applies the "regret heuristic"

will vary based on what time scale he/she chooses. Perhaps the best strategy is to estimate whether you will regret something in 5 days and also whether you will regret it in 5 years. Then, use both estimates in making your decision.

McKenzie's "regret heuristic" on a "spectrum" would seem to be a more sophisticated tool for making life decisions — if only you could keep in mind such an elaborate formula and apply it effectively. Whether you could actually manage to run your decisions through this heuristic, full of unknown variables, is another question. The goals expressed by Ware's patients — "happiness," being "true to yourself" — might seem more idealistic and hedonistic. But they're also more accessible and simple, which could make them more efficient decision-making tools.

IN THE COMMENTS: McKenzie responds.

What's happening to McCain's brain?

This article from Slate gives a detailed look at what's likely to happen to John McCain's brain over the next 8 years. (It's based on general trends for anyone his age, not on anything about McCain as an individual.)

It's not all bad — there's some good and some bad. For example:

• Bad: cognitive function is believed to peak around age 50 and declines after that.

• Good: "a greater appreciation for ambiguity."

• Could go either way: old people "are easily distracted," but "that inability to filter information efficiently often means they can take in more information."

But there's no question that it matters. The article points out the obvious fact that "a 72-year-old's brain is different from that of a 46-year-old."

The author of that article has an interesting theory about how McCain's aging brain could explain his ill-advised response to the American who asked him about the prospect that we'll be in Iraq for 50 years: "Maybe 100! That'd be fine with me."

Should we even be talking about this? Of course. The idea that we need to hold back from discussing McCain's age is ludicrous.

There are plenty of situations in life when the polite, proper thing to do is to avoid mentioning someone's age. But this isn't one of those situations. He's trying to become the most powerful person in the world! If you're an American citizen, you have a responsibility to participate in deciding whether he gets the job or not. It's not only acceptable to talk about the pros and cons of his old age; we'd be abdicating our civic duties if we didn't.

I'm in my 20s; I wouldn't want someone my age to be president, which can't happen since it'd be unconstitutional. The Constitution has only an age minimum, not an age maximum . . . but the "35 years old" rule still recognizes the idea that age can be a test of someone's fitness to be president. Just because the Constitution doesn't have a rule about who's too old to be president doesn't mean you, the voter, can't have such a rule.

If he wins, McCain will start out as a 72-year-old president, and he'll be an 80-year-old president if he's successful enough to serve a full two terms. (He considered making a one-term pledge but decided against it.)

And if it's true that the presidency has a dramatic aging effect, he might end up seeming even older than 80 by the end.

Do we want our president to be that old? That's a crucial question for Americans to answer. As with many things in life, it might be "not nice" to talk about, but we cannot simply decline to think about it.

(Photo of McCain from World Economic Forum.)

Vignette of an unmade argument

Got a call from my dad:

"I have this idea that I want you to blog."

He explained the concept, but I told him it just doesn't fit with what I want to blog about. Though it might seem like I'm willing to blog about any topic (music, politics, society, philosophy), I actually have a very heavy filter. I'm not interested in blogging most of the things I'm interested in.

So I asked him:

"Why don't you blog it?"

"No, I don't blog anymore."

"But you do have a blog. So start it up again now with a post about this."

"No, I wouldn't want to even if I were still blogging."

"Well, why not?"

"This is something I'd like to see someone make a reasoned argument about. I haven't been interested in making a reasoned argument in 30 years."

That got me thinking... In the past, I've often felt that you have to wait till you're pretty old before you have all the vast experience and wisdom necessary to write anything that's really worth reading. Oh, sure, you might come up with some nice little ideas here and there in the meantime, but it's more of a prelude to the really mature thoughts you'll think in the future. But maybe it's the opposite. Maybe I need to make sure I get my thoughts out into the world before it's too late.

That reminds me of an interchange between a couple friends of mine, back when we were teenagers. We were driving around at night and thinking about going somewhere -- I don't remember where.

P____: Well, we better get going. It's now or never!

S____: Heh... We're so young -- it's usually all about: "We have our whole lives ahead of us!"

P____: I love that not only did you pick up on the subtle humor, but you're also willing to analyze it.