The tendency of men as they age to shrink into themselves and become resentful and moody and mean as their lives recede into the rearview mirror is something I really hope to avoid.
And something I feel myself fighting as I age to be honest. feelings of "Is that all there is?" and all the things you didn't accomplish start welling up. You've always been the bread-winner and the protector and then those things aren't needed any longer. That's good of course when you know your kids are going to be OK. But it leaves you wondering what, if anything, is next.
"Most men lead lives of quiet desperation." - Thoreau
The tendency of men as they age to shrink into themselves and become resentful and moody and mean as their lives recede into the rearview mirror is something I really hope to avoid.
I don’t think you will. You’ve had a different life than your grandparents or parents - exposed to a different society. Those who shrunk into themselves would’ve just withered away and died yelling at clouds had it not been for Trump and RW media who gave them agency to avenge their life-long grievances.
For myself, aging has been a time for introspection and reflection. I can’t fix our society but I can help my little corner of the world by supporting causes I believe in and by practicing kindness and empathy as I go about my daily life.
Reading this thread makes me extra thankful for my parents. My Mom can at times be a real [expletive], but she has a big heart and is tolerable most of the time. My Dad is a sweet heart of a man and is only becoming more so as he nears the end. He just did a 7 week stint in the hospital and all the nurses were there when he left and were all saying how he was the nicest patient they have ever had. It was sweet.
It would be heartbreaking to have some of the conversations you guys are having with your parents. I really do think right wing media has poisoned the minds of most of a generation. It's maddening.
My parents are going through a divorce right now, and the big motivator was my mom was feeling distant from her family, primarily her kids and grand kids, and my dad was driving a lot of that. It's a sad situation, but I appreciate and respect how she has realigned her priorities and took hard, drastic steps to ensure she could achieve the closeness she wants before it was too late and everyone grew up and moved on without her being a big presence in our lives. Even doing "the right thing" in these situations is really difficult. I believe that openness, embracing vulnerability, and being accepting is the antidote to the creeping insularity that comes with age. Just never forget that you get out of your relationships what you put in and sometimes that means investing even when you don't feel like it or you don't feel the person you're reaching out to is meeting you halfway.
My dads a bit conservative and was a big Limbaugh guy as well. More of a Fox News than cnn guy as well.
As I’ve become more center oriented and less blind right we’ve had our conflicts.
I’ve found that if we can keep it to broad (eg, long hair = inducing sex change, not that it is a bad thing) topics, it’s very easy to point out the inconsistency in any argument (eg, guys with long hair get laid a lot. Eg on an eg. Ted nugent. Tons of pu nanny). I mean it’s so easy.
If it goes deeper, somehow, I just start talking about how meaningless all this stuff is. Climate change, geopolitics, etc. Humans have say 500 million years to 1billion years to find a new home. Then the earths inhospitable. Couple bil later sun and earth collide. These are problems. And we’re arguing about long hair? Psssh.
Then chug a beer and say [expletive] man you got me depressed that our bloodline is doomed unless we find a way off the planet. Chug another beer. But even if we do get off the planet, space continues to expand, which it may do in perpetuity thereby making other exoplanets unreachable, or it shrinks back to another singularity which we won’t survive. Either way we’re doomed.
Ffs dad. Can’t we just drink some beers and enjoy our time.
I'm sorry to hear about these difficulties with aging parents, especially fathers. I'm really sorry about the tensions and even pressures to conform. I don't wish that on anyone.
I used to consider myself lucky, but if anything, my parents may have gone too far in the other direction: they left me with so much autonomy that they were almost completely disengaged, possibly because they wanted to maintain their own independence, and partly because they were depressive and struggling with their own personal demons.
I grew up in a family in which children were best seen and not heard, and I was expected to respect their authority throughout my entire life. My parents were children of the Depression and, while good providers, were never warm emotionally. Neither had happy childhoods, from what I could gather, and I never met either grandfather: one died a week before I was born, and the other was institutionalized with permanent brain damage. I wasn't close to either grandmother, as my parents weren't close to their mothers, either.
My father was the youngest in a large middle-class family of teachers: an "accident child" born when his parents were in their mid-forties, and who rushed him through school so he would be off their hands quickly. His father was an imperious man with a Math degree from Harvard and a Master's from the University of Chicago, and who was arrogant, elitist, and toxic. My mother grew up in a farming family in Southern Illinois and lost her father when she was three: he was kicked in the head by a horse and permanently disabled for the rest of his life. Her mother was a domestic who was also a devout Methodist, serving as church pianist. My mother couldn't socialize and had to go to church twice on Sundays. Mom hated everything about the bigoted town where she grew up, and only went back to visit her mother twice a year.
Long story short, my parents were emotionally disengaged. They attended to my education and provided well for us, but that was largely it. My mother's favorite saying was "Don't tell anyone your business." Neither parent wanted to know mine: my mother even stated that she never wanted to meet anyone that I dated unless I was serious about them. Which was a way of saying, "unless you're getting married, don't bother me with it."
So I was never pressured politically or socially, but my parents were so far removed from my life that I rarely had substantive conversations with them. I think their lives were too painful. They really missed out on spending time with their grandchildren. And I never learned much about their fascinating family histories.
That isolation meant that my parents utterly depended on each other and no one else, and had no social support. It killed my father, who wouldn't see a doctor regularly about problems related to Parkinson's, and I had to exercise power of attorney for my mother, who developed dementia and arthritis, and couldn't live independently.
Both my parents loved my children and didn't tell me how to raise them. But they also didn't see them enough to weigh in on the matter, anyway, which was a great loss, I think.
