Hi everybody! welcome to my weekly newsletter, Crone Life, in which I try to approach aging in a way that doesn’t embarrass anyone. Thank you so much for reading, sharing, liking, following and subscribing. Please continue these delightful activities (and tell your friends!)
Do you ever suddenly come to awareness and realize you’ve been staring into space and you don’t know how long? Do you often feel like you’ve lost time? Do you experience an urgent fear your time’s about to run out and you’ve accomplished nothing in your life?
I’ve never been an “efficient“ person in the popular meaning of the word, working busily and Getting Things Done, filling every hour with productivity. I am efficient in the sense that I try to get the most done with the least effort. I am inefficient in that I don’t really organize things, I just know where they are.1 Some of this stems from my existing mental and physical makeup. I just don’t have a lot of extra energy to bounce around with. It’s not age–I’ve always been like this. There’s so much effort spent engaging with a world where I don’t quite fit in and it’s exhausting to try. Being online has made this, in many ways, easier. I’m a good writer. I can express myself clearly in words without much effort. There’s less drag. Social interchanges are a different story. I used to coast, resting on pretty, and I still do sometimes. I guess this seems like I’m quite passive, but I think of it more as putting effort in under the surface while visibly serene (like swans).
But sometimes you need to put in the effort. I took a half day vacation on Friday and spent it calling insurance brokers in an attempt to replace my soon to be canceled auto policy. I was dismayed to learn that another policy will cost TWICE AS MUCH. It also took 2.5 hours on the phone combined with searching frantically for info I didn’t know I needed. Of course I couldn’t finish any applications online because, probably, privacy. By 5 pm I was ready to lie down and never get up again. I started thinking about how the world is made up of high-effort and low-effort people. I am low-effort, physically, and to a certain extent, mentally, in that I rely on other people to know important details about topics I find uninteresting. Like insurance. Fortunately for me I have a cute friendly voice and people are willing to explain things to me at length and don’t mind if I ask what I think of as “dumb questions.” The people I spoke with seemed to know what they were talking about. Maybe I would get a better deal if I educated myself extensively on this but my existing deal (until I blew it by being at fault in an accident) was great and I didn’t put any effort into it at all. I have no problem with letting things fall into my lap. White rural Americans who put a lot of value on “hard work” would despise me.
My current strategy for getting things done is to set some goals for the day, accomplish them, and that’s it. I do this at work and it helps me get home for the day with a little bit of juice left. I’ve outsourced my exercise to the physical therapists and my home cooking to That One New York Times Recipe You Cook On Repeat.2 At home I identify Things That Need Doing and then carve those projects into the smallest bits possible and do them a few at a time. That’s it, time to relax and stare into space or read. This has led to the beginnings of clearing up the horrendous mess in the spare room (where, 7 years ago when we moved in, we dumped all the things we didn’t want to deal with and there they remained), getting my clothing put away, and the aforementioned cooking. I try to have a regular routine (my guys are routine-oriented, me not so much). That helps too, although sometimes I feel it gets in the way of doing things I need to do for myself. Examples: going to the gym. Painting the bathroom.
Social media has allowed me to reconnect with my best friend from 5th grade and she recently sent an email responding to my newsletter posts. Here’s a quote
Oh, I hate summer, I hate heat and humidity. Winter is the only time I ever feel well and it is getting shorter and shorter. But we have found our extravagant escape from summer in sea travel. I hate to say "cruise" as the popular idea of cruising (sun! drunken escapades! all-night parties!) is antithetical to how I like to live (cool shade! hot tea! okay, an infrequent G&T! early bedtime!). […] we like to go away each summer on a ship which is extremely sedate and where we are still often in the younger demographic. We sometimes visit the ports, sometimes do several weeks on shore (last year a blissful 3 weeks [...]), sometimes we don't get off the ship at all. No pollen, cool breezes, European cities to visit.
She is, and has always been, allergic to everything. The world tortures her. But she doesn’t let it stop her. At 10, she would bravely come to visit me at my parents’ house even though we had two cats (and the occasional guinea pig). I admire how she has adapted her activities to find comfort in a hostile world. I’ve always tried, to my own discomfort, to fit in, to be popular and “cool.” Sometimes I liked things “(sun! drunken escapades! all-night parties!)” that were objectively bad for me. Sometimes I neglected nerdy pastimes that gave me pleasure for fear of ridicule.3 Now I try to be true to myself. I like art, I like design, I like reading all kinds of things whether “good” or not, I like fashion, I like walking around looking at things.
For the past six years I’ve avoided standing up and introducing myself at the president’s staff forums because she always asks “What’s one fact that not everyone knows about you?” and “What is your hobby?” and I can never think of non-embarrassing things to say. The first is hard because I don’t know what’s TMI. I could say “I have an enlarged optic nerve,” but yeah, no. I could say “I have written several books about design” but I don’t want to get into it. Plus then people ask me about home decorating or want to show me their collections. For the second–it’s not like I never do anything hobby-like, but there’s nothing that I do with regularity that I would call a hobby, unless you count writing this newsletter. I would rather not disclose its existence to a large number of my co-workers. Maybe I could go with “staring into space and thinking.” Probably “I just got my library degree” would suffice.
I am just not optimized for our current world. Human beings are flawed and we are going to stay that way. It’s time to acknowledge it. Is this the wisdom that comes with age?
You’d think library school would have fixed this but … no
I’m sure we all have our own version of this, here’s a guest link to mine.
I have her permission to quote this.
“There’s so much effort spent engaging with a world where I don’t quite fit in and it’s exhausting to try.”
Many other fine cris de coeur. My favorite post so far. I only demur that rural whites would recognize you as one very old-school American.
Joanna, you’re a Virgo. Virgos never do anything at the hobby level. We dive deep or not at all.
Loved reading this column. Made me feel we had a visit.
And I also feel the pressure of time gone by and we’re now at the short end of the stick.
I have a theory that doing everything by computer and app has. Add things harder for humans and easier for the computers, who really are going to rule the world, probably by the time our kids are our age. Maybe they already do. When my computer tells me I have to update programs, I better do it or it totally fucks me.
Hope to see you this summer! I’ll be in NY starting in May.