Life, The Video Game, by Paul Shirley

When I was twelve, my life was pretty bitchin’. My biggest headaches were feeding the chickens every day and swimming lessons in the summer. But I was learning to live with the crosses I was bearing: throwing some milo on the ground only took half an hour, and now that I was, like, five-foot-six, I knew I could always reach down and touch the bottom of the pool if I needed to.

I was a happy kid. I could sense, though, that something was waiting for me, up around one of life’s bends. And I could tell that that something wasn’t necessarily friendly.

Things were gonna change, and I could feel it.

It wasn’t puberty, per se, although that, too, was coming soon. (Assuming that ‘soon’ means ‘in five years.’)

No, I was worried about more big-picture concerns, like leaving home, going off to college, finding my way in the world.

I was worried about growing up.

Seeking solace, I went to this lady I knew and told her what was bothering me. She thought about my problem for a few seconds. Then she said, “You’re forgetting that there are lots of things to look forward to.” She brightened. “Like driving! You’ll see – driving’s great!”

I frowned, thinking, You’re not fooling me, lady. I don’t see people breaking into spontaneous smiles just because they’re behind the wheel of a car.

But that lady was my mother, and at the time I pretty much believed everything my mother said. So I put on a brave face and soldiered on.

Eventually, I found that there were a few great things about adulthood. Like Glenfiddich and kissing a beautiful girl for the first time and vacations to Mexico and exploring a new city by yourself.

And, yes, driving. (As long as you could afford a German car.)

But I noticed that, often, it seemed like I was only trying to achieve something I already had when I was twelve. Joy. Bliss. Happiness.

I turned 33 a few weeks ago. I have neither a wife nor children, and, thanks to a basketball career that was probably motivated, at least in part, by my little boy desire to avoid the perceived misery of standard adulthood, I’ve managed to dance around “normalcy.”

But now, I feel a lot like I did at 12. My basketball career is over and I’m not sure what’s coming. My sense is that the next stage of my life is going to grant me less happiness than the previous one.

There are people who would play the role of my mother – who would say that my life’s next phase will bring innumerable “great things.”

“Like…having kids!” they might say, their faces lighting up.  “Kids are great!”

But most of the parents I meet are miserable. They complain about how much time their kids take up, about how little sleep they get, about how they can never do anything fun.

And then there’s getting old. Soon, I will cast off my physical prime in exchange for middle age. I can’t imagine much joy associated with a lack of bladder control and the inevitable prescription for Lipitor.

Just as I was having all of these dire thoughts, which just happened to hit me sometime around the aforementioned 33^rd birthday, I caught a glimpse of the week’s edition of The Economist. The front cover declared, “The Joy Of Growing Old: Or, Why Life Begins At 46.”

My interest piqued, I opened the magazine. The cover article explained how life’s happiness curve is U-shaped. Or even better, check-mark-shaped. We’re happy at 18, begin a descent that bottoms at 46, and then start a long, slow improvement. When we’re something like 74, we pass our 18-year-old selves, until a happiness peak somewhere around 83.

At first blush, such a conclusion might seem to be just the encouragement needed by someone like me, who’s worried about what happens next.

But I’m not 46. Does that mean that my instincts are correct? That I’m right to be fearful? That the next 13 years are going to be worse than the past 13?

My existential evidence says yes. After all, the hunch I had when I was twelve was correct – life was about to get a lot more complicated, and I was about to get a lot less happy.

Here’s what I learned: Life is like a video game. You gain experience points along the way, and you might even pick up some cool weapons, but the enemies just get more and more difficult until, eventually, you get to the 6^th level of Super Mario 2, lose about 700 times in a row, and go play with your Nerf Bow & Arrow.

I’m not sure I want to make it past the 6^th level of Super Mario 2. I’m just figuring out how to deal with hopping snakes and quicksand. I don’t know that I’m prepared for ladder-traversing ladybugs and those goddamned electric circles that speed around whatever object they’re on.

Some people (maybe the same that trumpet the positive aspects of child-rearing) would tell me that I’m missing the point – that happiness and fulfillment aren’t necessarily the same thing, and that I’m mistaking one for the other.

I would love to believe those people. But when I look around, I see people staying in jobs/relationships/cities they hate. I see them settling for mates who not only are not perfect for them, but who are actively wrong for them.

They don’t seem too happy. And, unless fulfillment and happiness are at opposite ends of an emotions spectrum, they don’t seem too fulfilled, either.

So, why do people do this to themselves? Fear, I suppose. A lack of creativity, sometimes. But, often, I think, because they think they have to.

It’s true that we do have to get older. I can’t stop my body from breaking down anymore than I could stop myself from being terrified of a half-hour session of swimming lessons when I was twelve.

What I can do, I think, is learn from my twelve-year-old self. I can learn that moving on to the next level of the video game will be fulfilling, someday.

But that beating up on ostriches is pretty fun too.

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Header art by Scott Shaffer.

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