On Aging

I turned 65 yesterday.  The march of time is inexorable.  Indeed, it accelerates as one ages and seems ever more elusive.  The metaphor of sand slipping through one’s fingers is apt.  We try to hang on to the good moments, but they fly by and we stare in wide wonder as the years progress.  There are so many tropes about aging, and I am cynical enough to want to avoid embracing them, but certain facts cannot be wished away.

I have read that people are generally happier in their later years, that they seem to be less anxious or frustrated.  Psychologists depict the course of happiness or well-being over one’s lifetime as a U-bend.  We start out relatively happy, reach a nadir sometime in our late forties or early fifties (the notorious mid-life crisis) then make a U-turn and become progressively happier as we enter and roam trance-like through old age.  Of course, like all psychological studies, these results are based on interviews and surveys, with no real scientific measure of happiness.

When older people say they are happier, I wonder if they are simply trying to persuade themselves, knowing that their lives are soon to end and that it would be a pity if they went to the grave with regret.  Or perhaps that form of happiness is an acknowledgement that things could be much worse and that in relative terms one must be grateful for health, sanity and some measure of security.

For me, these later years are a mixed bag.  I am looking forward to the freedom of being retired and I am fortunate to be financially secure and in relatively good health.  My daughters are wonderful people who appear to be in good situations and I am excited about sharing time with them in the coming years.

But I cannot help feeling a certain melancholy about the loss of youth and the ever more rapid approach of life’s end.  It is true that I could live another 20 or 30 years, though I do have a fairly significant vulnerability that could curtail that.  Yet even if I live another 20 or 30 years, it will be as an old person with increasing infirmities and less physical prowess.  The thought of being one of the legions of baby boomers who will be shuffling around various tourist attractions is not one to inspire joy.  There will be so many of us that I would not be surprised if the millennials put a bounty on our heads and start hunting us down for sport.  After all, we will be emptying the coffers of social security and medicare and contributing excessively to global warming with all of our RVs and global travel.

I never went through much of a mid-life crisis, so perhaps I am overdue for a bit of depression.  I am reasonably satisfied with the arc of my life and achievements, and suspicious of any vain regrets about missed opportunities or riches, so I don’t think I will suffer a crisis of ‘if only I had done this or that’.

 

My depression, if it settles in to any degree at all, will be one of being too acutely aware of the fleeting moments of my life and the decay of my physical self.  When I took a hiatus from the business world and spent 3 years as a high school math teacher, I remember thinking that summer vacation would be such an idyllic break.  It was indeed enjoyable, but I recall feeling the weight of the looming ‘back to school’ date and wanting desperately to make each day count.  

I wouldn’t be surprised if something similar presses down upon me in these golden years.  Perhaps it would be wise to make yoga and meditation  my first retirement activity!

Game of Thrones and the Risk of Desensitization

I am watching Game of Thrones.   I started it about 9 months ago, watched a few seasons and then stopped.  Now I am back into it, but a bit uneasy about my interest.  I think the popularity of this show is a window into the complex and contradictory nature of the human psyche and of our desensitization to violence and horror.

On one level the series is a classic, cleverly crafted adventure story.  The characters are vividly portrayed, the action is complex and interwoven into multiple sub-plots and narratives.  The themes are familiar ones of power, wealth, ambition, honor, courage, cruelty and betrayal, to name a few.  The storyline is intricate and has enough depth to keep me intrigued, even though I am now somewhat jaded and bored by most adventure and special effects movies.

But there is something quite disturbing about Game of Thrones and its appeal for me.  Like so many streaming films, GOT proudly displays its MA – Mature Audiences - banner at the outset of each episode, letting me know which type of titillation I can expect:  Graphic Violence, Graphic Sexual Scenes, Nudity, Foul Language or some joyous combination of the four.

When I viewed the first few episodes I was shocked by the violence and the type of sexuality and nudity portrayed, and I debated whether to continue. But the story is captivating, and the characters are appealing, so I continued to watch.

As the carnage increased, and as many of the sexual acts were also disturbingly violent, I began to question my commitment to the series.  The frequent scenes of sadistic torture and horrific violence were very difficult for me to watch, and most of the nudity and sex scenes were either violent or predatory in nature, devoid of any romance or love.

But I soldiered on, suppressing my revulsion at the extreme parts and enjoying the interlocking pieces of the overall story.  The series successfully manipulates its audience into the addiction of needing to ‘see what happens next’, and I fall prey to this compulsion as readily as the next one.

Still, ‘what happens next’ is often a cruel disappointment and a bitter accumulation of vengeful hopes – a beloved character being brutally murdered, children being butchered, innocents being flayed alive, the leering rape of a virgin.  We are assaulted time and time again with hideous scenes and nightmarish images. What a price our sensibilities pay for this need to ‘see what happens next’!

Yes, I know the real world can be cruel and that GOT in some part mirrors our own sad history.  I know that there is a danger in making violence seem innocuous and tame, which was the legacy of our early film history.  The more realistic violence in GOT is certainly shocking, and if I believed that its impact would somehow empower efforts to rid this world of that type of violence I would heartily support its realism.

However, I suspect that the escalating realism of violence in film is not a matter of alerting the world to the brutality of violence, but rather a slow desensitization to it, along with a seductive awakening of a darker capacity to be titillated by appalling acts of sadism and cruelty.

And the sexuality portrayed in GOT is almost uniformly perverse.  I am no prude and I believe films should portray the full range of healthy human sexuality - love, romance, seduction, passion, ecstasy.  But GOT focuses on the very types of sexual predation that we have labored these long years to expose and condemn.  These types of sexual perversion may indeed be afoot in the world, but by bombarding us with their imagery I cannot help but believe that we play a dangerous game with weak or vulnerable psyches.

One wonders whether the story could have been just as compelling with a lot less graphic violence and sexual perversion.  Were these scenes truly indispensable?  Was it really necessary to show us flayed human bodies and dragons spitting out portions of flesh?  Do we need to actually see torture being inflicted in grim detail to understand that it happened?  Did we gain anything by seeing Sanya sexually assaulted by Ramsey other than a fierce desire for vengeance? Is the essence of the story not enough to carry it and keep our attention?

I am comfortable that my own visceral abhorrence of the violence and depravity is evidence that I have not yet been too desensitized, but I do wonder at my willingness to subject myself to it for the sake of a good story.   Is it really worth it?  I am hooked and will see it through to the end, but I am troubled that I have travelled this road.

Sleep and Dreams

Sleep is a very strange thing indeed.  And dreams are even stranger.  I have always felt like sleep is a kind of temporary death, because it is a period where you have no self-awareness and are not actively in control of your thoughts and body.  Dreams vary in terms of how realistic they are and what kind of experience they offer, but I almost never feel any real control in my dreams and even my ‘thoughts’ in dreams seem to be outside of my control.

We know a lot more about sleep now, though we still don’t understand exactly why we need sleep.  We know, for example, that there are five stages lasting a total of 90-110 minutes on average.   Stage 1 is light sleep, stage 2 is where we spend 50% of our sleep time and is characterized by much slower brain waves and occasional bursts of brain activity.  Stages 3 and 4 are called ‘deep sleep’ and there is no eye movement or muscle activity.  People awakened out of deep sleep are generally disoriented.

The final stage is the well-known REM sleep.  This is where most of our dreams occur.  Our breathing is rapid and shallow, and our muscles are paralyzed, presumably to prevent us from acting out our dreams.  This accounts for 20% of our sleep time.  As we go through the night, the deep sleep periods decrease and by morning almost all our sleep is spent in stage 1, 2 and REM.

We also know that sleep is linked to our circadian rhythms, which appear to be strongly influenced by light and other ‘zeitgeber’ (German for time-giver) cues.  The body produces melatonin to induce a feeling of sleepiness.

As one might imagine, sleep is a complex phenomenon and falls prey to many disorders.  A significant percentage of adults struggle with some level of insomnia, and sleep deprivation is quite common.  Sleep gets more precious with age, as a great majority of the elderly have difficulty sleeping.

So, sleep has yielded some of its secrets to the probing of electrodes and scientific study.  But what about dreams?  Dreams have content and that content cannot easily be interpreted from brain scans.  We rely on human beings to relate their dreams.  And it turns out that many of us have very similar dreams, and even similar nightmares.

For centuries dreams were interpreted as visions and omens, foretelling the future or providing insight into a problem or decision.  Some people solve problems or come up with ideas in their dreams.  Psychologists have used dreams as a major part of their psychoanalysis efforts – interpreting dreams in terms of repressed desires, childhood traumas and other psychological baggage. 

Freud famously associated much of dreaming with our complex sexual identities.  And certainly there is enough dreaming about sex and romance to make one believe that sexuality plays a significant role.  But more recent researchers have new theories that stem from analysis of what parts of the brain are active during dreams.  

One line of research suggests that dreaming is a type of data dump meant to clear your brain of the day’s activity and prepare it for the next day – a kind of garbage disposal.  The data is either transferred to long term memory or woven into a strange fabric of dreams that can be processed and eliminated as it parades through your sleeping state.

Another theory is that dreams are a simulation of possible future dangers and allow you to prepare for these threats with an unconscious fire drill while you sleep.  This might account for the dreams of anxiety that we often experience – missed exams, inability to flee a dangerous situation, and other disquieting dreams.  

On a brighter note, some dreams are an attempt to fulfill our deepest desires – flying, playing professional sports, riding a horse on a beach, kissing that girl you never kissed, and so on.

One aspect of dreaming that intrigues me is how a specific sensation – melancholy, joy, fear – can manifest itself so powerfully in a dream and stay with me for hours after I awaken, even when I can no longer recall the details of the dream.

But I generally find dreams to be an unsatisfying experience – never quite real enough when they are pleasant, and all too real when they are disturbing.  The absurdity of having the same dream of missing class an entire semester and then facing the final exam over and over again astounds me.  Is my brain so pathetic that it can’t come up with a novel way to entertain itself while I am asleep?

Are dreams entirely a product of various electronic signals in our brains?  Is there a deeper significance to the strange brew of thoughts and activity that we experience while dreaming?  If the dream state is any indication of what existence will be like after the body has died, then I will be sorely disappointed.  I miss the full pleasure of my physical senses in my dreams.  They are not as crisp and clear. 

But of course once the body dies even the brain waves will no longer be present, so it is unlikely that dreaming is a preview of life after death.  If there is truly a ‘soul’ that exists once the body is gone then hopefully its sensations and experiences will be much more ‘realistic’ and enjoyable, and not the capricious mishmash that comprises human dreams.

The Sacrifice at Normandy – An Historic Remembrance and a Missed Opportunity

This week was the 75^th anniversary of the Normandy invasion.  Apart from the incredible irony of President Bone Spurs representing this country at the remembrance ceremonies, the event reminds us of the profound sacrifices that so many made in World War II to remove three fascist and militaristic states – Germany, Italy and Japan - from their cruel tyrannies over so many lands.

That the Allies who stormed Normandy beach and fought the ensuing battles across France are deserving of our solemn thanks is clear.  But it saddens me, and strikes me as a missed opportunity, that we did not invite and embrace Russia as a part of this somber recognition of sacrifice.

We Americans have sometimes been a force for good in this world, and no doubt we deserve to recognize World War II as a time of noble endeavor for our land.  But we also carry several myths about our involvement in the world wars that tend to skew our understanding of the world and estrange us from potential reconciliation with current adversaries.

Let’s start with World War I, the first war that saw us ‘save’ Europe.  That war lasted four years, from 1914-1918.  We declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary in April 1917 after three years of attrition had worn down all of the belligerents.  The first significant battle that the Americans fought was in April of 1918 at Chateau-Thierry, only four months before the German commander-in-chief Ludendorff confessed the inevitability of defeat in his missives to the German government. 

The arrival of the Americans in massive numbers through the summer of 1918 was certainly a morale booster for the French and British, but the Germans were already beaten.  The final 100 days offensive from August to November simply put the allies in a position where they could dictate draconian terms to the Germans, which of course set up conditions that ultimately led to the rise of fascism and the second world war.

The Americans lost 110,000 men in the war, of which 45,000 died of influenza.  The Germans, Austrians, Russians, English and French lost 2, 1.2, 1.8, 1.4 and 1.1 million respectively.  To say that the U.S. was anything but the final nail in the German coffin is to trivialize the unbelievable carnage that Europe suffered during this time.

World War II was different, particularly in the Pacific.  There the U.S. bore the brunt of the war and the bulk of allied casualties.  The sacrifices our armed forces made in dislodging the Japanese from their occupied territories were truly tremendous and deserve our eternal respect.

The European theater, though, was a bit different.  We like to think that the U.S. was the primary reason why the Nazis were beaten, but the simple fact is that Russia was overwhelmingly the most significant factor in ending Hitler’s grip on Europe.  The German army invaded Russia in the summer of 1941, and from that moment on it was engaged in a titanic struggle against the Soviet Union.

 

The Allies promised Stalin that they would open a second front in Europe by invading France in 1942, but that invasion was put off until two years later, and the Soviet Union rallied its people in one of the most amazing efforts in the history of warfare to hurl back the Germans and keep the majority of their forces in battle for the rest of the war.  The Soviets lost more men at a single battle, Stalingrad, than the Allies lost in the entire war.  The Allies broke promise after promise to the Soviet Union.

By the time we invaded Normandy, the Soviet Union was close to advancing into Poland and were routing the German army at every turn.  The reason we had total air superiority during the invasion and afterwards was because the majority of the remaining Luftwaffe planes were fighting desperately to slow the Soviet advance and were substantially outnumbered on both fronts.

All of this does not minimize in any way the sacrifices of the brave soldiers at Normandy.  But how much more poignant and fairer would it be for the brave survivors of the Soviet WWII army to stand together with their allied brethren at Normandy and recognize the common struggle that all humanity wages against despotism and evil, and the fact that war is to be avoided at all costs.

Perhaps it would even be the first step toward a deeper understanding of the US/Russian relationship, based on history and a shared vision of a peaceful and cooperative future.