Journal of Creaks:
The Best Part
10 July 2015

There’s no denying that I’ve become a lousy neighbor on the Web. Writing a thousand words or more every weekday, I read almost nothing. There is a pile-up of entangled explanations; what cannot be said is that I simply “got out of the habit” of reading other people’s blogs (such as remain). One of those explanations has to do with a very particular cause of Web fatigue.

I call it nailbiting, because it’s that unattractive — and pointless. Here is a précis of the idle complaint that I have read Enough, Already!

OMG, I can’t read anymore, can’t pay attention to a book, I’m always checking my email and Twitter and Instagram and don’t get me started on the YouTubes. The other day, I was so distracted texting that I walked into a cop. Assaulting an officer, he said! I know I should stop, but I can’t, I can’t! Now I’ve got a deadline for a ten-thousand word piece that will be universally TL/DR’d. Why go on?

For a long time, I responded to these lamentations with sardonic snorts. I get very little interesting email. (I have two Gmail accounts, one of them very successfully limited to long-form correspondents — people who respond at length. A week can go by without anything at all showing up in this account’s inbox.) I gave up on Twitter almost as soon as I signed up — I simply don’t understand it. Facebook can be fun; I rarely update, but I like to make snappy comments. Facebook is also vital for family connections. But it does not take very much time. I turn to it more or less the way I turn to FreeCell — to unwind, or to pass a small fragment of time. As for my phone, it does not ring very often; some days, it does not ring at all. I use the phone to check out the weather, to send the odd where-are-you-now text, and to set a timer for the laundry. An alarm rings at 9:45 every morning to remind me to take my pills.

I used to think, the quiet life is so lovely, so easy, so — quiet. What’s the matter with these young people?

For a clever guy, I can be pretty dumb. I am always urging people to remember the role of luck in our lives, and to resist taking 100% credit for successes, but that apparently didn’t stop me from feeling gratified about finally figuring out how to live a well-ordered life, even if I am at death’s door, more or less. (Everybody my age is.) In fact, I didn’t figure anything out. I did what I’ve always done: I followed my body. My body, now ancient and no longer restless, likes a quiet life.

It’s true that I myself have always wanted a quiet life — that’s why I’m feeling so “successful.” But my younger body had other plans. It wanted to go out at night. It found bars to be exciting, even interesting places (!). It was morbidly convinced that something tremendously memorable was happening somewhere else. The parts of my younger brain that were responsible for speech were not well integrated, leading to remarks that ought to have been catastrophic.

Now my younger body has become my older body, and I enjoy peace and quiet at last.

The moral of this story is:

(a) Stop with the nailbiting. Stop complaining about your addiction to social media. It’s normal! In his column today, David Brooks writes, “Being online is like being a part of the greatest cocktail party ever and it is going on all the time.” Yes! That’s the way it is! I shudder to think what I’d have made of myself if this cocktail party had been going on in the days of my younger body. We are living in an age of speakeasies, and to know the address is to know the password. Just remember: You’ll grow out of it. Well, your body will.

(b) Bear in mind that youth=unripeness=immaturity, age=ripeness=maturity. Do not struggle for maturity when you are only thirty. Strive to build good habits by all means, but do not imagine that you have achieved maturity prematurely! You really shouldn’t want to: premature maturity is often pretty sad. Maturity comes only with experience. Experience is not fun; it is not the same thing as “experiences.” It involves a wearying passage of time. But you’ll find that out for yourself. What I’m really saying is this: try to stay alive so that you can enjoy the best part.

(c) The best part is also the worst part. You will be, after all, at death’s door. Your body will be falling apart and giving you a lot of grief. You will spend an itself-sickening amount of time with doctors. All that aside, it is still the best part.

(d) Ergo, take it from me!

Bon weekend à tous!