Lack of Disinterest

I woke up a little while ago, let the dogs out for their morning potty run, and sat down at the laptop to write. Not sure what I’m going to do today, but this is a start. It’s also the second entry of the morning, so I’m on a bit of a roll.

I just stumbled across an article in Psychology Today, home of BS psychobabble, that describes anhedonia. It’s a term I’d not previously heard of, a depressive-like state that “comes not from a reduced capacity to experience pleasure, but instead from an inability to sustain good feelings over time…maybe pleasure is experienced fully, but only briefly.” I like this better than depression, a nasty catch-all label if there ever was one, and one that ignores most people’s ability to experience at least transient pleasure even in the throes of chronic and refractory moodiness.

As I googled for related articles, I came across this idea: “…my hobbies and interests are sleeping under my skin.” It’s one of those aha phrases, the ones that are at once succinct and (just maybe) profound. I don’t want to believe that being over 60 means we’ve lost the desire to do stuff we’ve always like to do, but rather that the paths we used to follow have gone from a bit overgrown and hard to follow, to so full of brambles and fallen tree trunks that they’re impossible to navigate anymore.

Self-help for seniors suggests there are so many cool other paths to follow, if we just open ourselves up to them. Things like gardening. And starting a lifestyle company. Or giving back by mentoring the younger generation with advice they rightly put into the category of obsolete. How about putting on a blue vest and greeting people at Wal-Mart? Okay, that last one was a bit snarky, but it leads to my next point.

Which is this: Just because traditional paths to gratification are limited or closed, doesn’t mean we suddenly become capable of taking the new ones. People with social anxiety don’t acquire gregariousness because they need something new to do. People reticent to try new things don’t become adventurous because they’re too bored to live in stasis. People who worked for someone else, being told what to do throughout their working lives don’t suddenly become entrepreneurs because they have become otherwise unemployable.

My wife reminded me the other day of an experience that seems apropos. We were hiking to Delicate Arch in Utah a number of years ago. It wasn’t a particularly challenging hike, and we paced ourselves and reached the top of the trail in due course. Off to the right from the path we took was the arch itself, maybe a couple hundred yards away across a natural bowl in the sandstone. The natural bowl, which was hundreds of feet across and on a gentle slope, ultimately fell off to a thousand-foot precipice. My wife, who has no problem piloting a small plane but doesn’t like other kinds of heights, nevertheless bounded across to the arch itself. I, on the other hand, who generally have no issue with heights per se but have a very big issue with edges into the abyss, literally cowered behind a boulder. I.could.not.help.myself.

There’s a song by the Drive by Truckers I like, called “I used to be a Cop.” Well, I used to be a CEO. Nominally, I still am, but it’s as the head of a small lifestyle company, not the big consultancy I once ran that I built from scratch. I know how to be a CEO, I like it, but I’m not much of a mind to build the company out that much. Well, I am intermittently, but not on a daily basis. That’s over; I just don’t care enough to work that hard anymore. But I do like to think, and to make things happen, and I don’t like working for anyone else after much of a lifetime working for myself.

I’ve compartmentalized this in order to do thinks like teach and run a program helping new startup companies, both inside a university.  I don’t have to pay much attention under these circumstances to bureaucratic nonsense, other than go through the necessary motions. I’ve had a good career, I’m comfortable in semi-retirement, and most of all I’m not dependent on their money so I don’t have to put up with anyone’s bullsh-t.

So there’s the push-me-pull-you of this part of my life. I want the CEO-ness and I know how but I don’t want the burden of it. I want to do something with my in-the-trenches knowledge of business, but many of the students I’m charged with teaching aren’t very good at learning. And I don’t want to work for anyone, because I’m too much of a control junkie to follow any directions that don’t make sense to me. (Not that this is a particular problem given rampant age-discrimination that ultimately puts everybody except the self-employed out to pasture.)

In other words, a lot of us are faced with a bunch of overgrown paths that used to be clear and tangle-free. So we tease in our minds other ones. I clicked on a link in Facebook yesterday that took me to the lifestyle in New Zealand. I saw an ad for St. Jude’s Research Hospital that made me want to help children with cancer. I wrote a manifesto for a new political party out of desperation for the direction our hopeless, inane government is taking us – that is, over that precipice I talked about earlier. And I ultimately landed on the baby step of writing this blog. It’s not big like I’m used to. But it does enable me to express myself, and maybe it draws in and creates a conversation around shared experience, and it gives me an outlet for writing (pending the emergence of that novel I’ve been saying I want to write since college).

There are paths, they’re just different. Smaller. Ones that lead to quieter places instead of ambitious leaps. And maybe we build up to something bigger again.  Or not. I’m coming around to the idea that it’s all good.