So I thought getting another dog would be one of the last things I did as the single parent of two children. I was actually completely wrong.
In fact, getting a dog is one of the first things I did as the parent of two young adults, and, in a way that’s just an echo of the future right now but will emerge over time, one of the first things I did as a single empty-nester.
And on those counts, it has been unexpectedly soul-crushing—but I have to deal nonetheless, because these things are things that were always going to happen.
— § —
Life is changing. And I’ve known this phase was coming for twenty years, but I’m still unprepared for it and I am still not having a good time.
I’ve always been bad at life changes; I’ve always been the person that wants to settle in to a life and then just live it. I don’t live for change like my ex-wife did; I don’t launch into big transitions and revolutions just to keep myself from getting complacent.
I think it’s the lower-middle-class thing; money is always short, you’re always a disaster away from penury, there’s always the question of whether the car will start or whether the central heating will hold out whether you’ll get really sick and be unable to work.
On the lower half of the class ladder, you spend your whole life trying—and failing—to reach stability. On the upper half of the class ladder, ironically, you spend your whole life trying—and failing—to avoid complacency.
You’d think these things have something to do with the resources that you have at hand, but really it’s about culture. As I’ve grown older, it’s become clear to me that a lot of much-hated voices are right; to a large extent, the problems that you have result not from circumstances in your life, but from the way you are and act, the choices that you make, and the way that you carry yourself.
I grew up lower-middle class on the west side of Salt Lake City in the gang-ridden Glendale and Rose Park neighborhoods. My parents had one car and sometimes it worked. We ate a lot of boiled food that started off in cans. I rarely got what I wanted for Christmas. Money was always tight.
When I became an adult, I set off to learn about the world. I lived in Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, and New York. I got two bachelor’s degrees, then a master’s degree, and then a doctorate. I wrote a bunch of books. I went on TV. I spoke to a lot of audiences in auditoriums. I worked at think tanks. I got offered a job at the United Nations.
But at the end of it all, I have ended up with a life very much like my parents’ life. Often, I look back on what I thought were correct decisions and realize they were incorrect, or foolhardy. Meanwhile, people I knew as a young adult that are far less educated, and far less successful in career terms, live far more comfortable lives with far more money and far more security, somehow.
Because the life you end up with has almost nothing to do with your intelligence, or your work ethic. It has everything to do with your class and the class culture in which you were raised. Tacit knowledge is everything. “Education,” “learning,” and “training” don’t count for much, if they count at all.
— § —
So here’s how the rest of my life will go. I know it already because I’ve seen it in the environs in which I was raised.
I’ll continue to struggle along through the next fifteen years of work. It will get progressively harder and I will fall a few rungs on the ladder, possibly back into a manual labor or grunt work role.
It will continue to be tough to make ends meet. My financial life will get more and more disorganized and there may be some bankruptcy or some throwing my hands up in the air and just not having things or just not paying for things. Life will gradually become more precarious.
I will eventually be retired, probably due to health reasons, and be on social security. I will not have enough money to live. Lower-middle class people will look at me and just think I’m old and that’s how life looks when you’re old. Upper-middle and upper class people will look at me and see someone that didn’t make good life choices and wasn’t “smart” about preparing for retirement.
I won’t travel because I won’t be able to afford it. I will watch an increasingly large amount of television. I will walk with more and more of a hobble. I will develop one or a few chronic conditions that “will eventually kill” me. Maybe diabetes, maybe COPD, who knows. Things that create visible discomfort and shorten life and make people not want to spend too much time with you, but that give you a decade to suffer with them. I won’t speak to audiences in auditoriums ever again (in fact, I already haven’t done now for 15 years or more). I won’t be in the set that ages into the holders of wisdom and speaks at events. I will be in the set that ages into a kind of pitiable state and is mostly forgotten and ignored, and that speaks mostly to myself.
Between now and then, I will keep worrying a great deal about money and about my future. I will continue to try to save, and to try to invest, and to try to make progress in my career, but it won’t work out. When I look back on the decisions I make, a lot of them will be obviously wrong in retrospect, though they seemed right at the time and I agonized over them and studied them carefully.
Eventually, I will die. I will have been mostly for fifteen or twenty years. Not too many people will attend the funeral. Many of those who do will be do-gooders and busybody well-wishers from the neighborhood. Family members will say I lived a good life and helped other people in quiet ways even though superficially I don’t look like I came to all that much in the end, and they will say that now I’m no longer in pain.
— § —
The one path I’ve observed out of the lower-middle and lower classes over all these years—and ironically, the path I and many of my friends rejected most stridently when we were young—was the military. That was for real losers as far as we were concerned. But I look at the people in industry that I know now, and nearly everyone of stature or success served in the military—and many of them were born into disadvantaged circumstances.
So for any young people thinking that you’d like to be the first in your extended family to “go to college,” don’t bother. You’ll still end up in a broken down house with broken down plumbing and broken down finances, you’ll just be able to recognize your failure better, in ways that actually reduce your happiness.
Instead, consider giving in to the suggestion that you’ve no doubt received but fought against—and join the military. Then, work as hard as you can there. I increasingly wish I had, as I survey what’s ahead for me and feel entirely helpless, despite everything, to prevent it.
— § —
In the meantime, I’ll have a dog for the next twelve years or so. My dog won’t live quite as long as expected because I won’t be the dog owner who can afford $10k of annual healthcare for a dog through the last five to seven years of its life. Pet care professionals will look askance at me and imply that I’m not, and haven’t been, a responsible pet owner—in effect, that I shouldn’t have adopted a pet because I’m lower-middle class.
Unlike the people whose houses become more picturesque with the right dog, and who have dog walkers and dog groomers coming and going, my house, yard, and clothes will look far more disheveled and run down for the next twelve years or so, and there will be no dog walkers or dog groomers coming and going. Just me.
Some people will look at an aging and increasingly elderly man with a dog, the two of them walking alone in the park, and find it to be sad. Others will look and find it to be cute. Others will look and find it to be offensive.
I won’t notice any of them.