April Fools 2026 - The Folly of Self-Esteem

Good afternoon and welcome to the 21st annual April Fool’s observance! This is silly, right? Like, what even is this? You came to a holiday for fools? Well, at least I know what you think of yourselves. So like… in those situations when you feel like a fool, do you find it humiliating or just humbling? Can you laugh to yourself “Oh, what a fool I’ve been!” or do you self-condemn, as in “I’m an idiot!” How do you keep your self-respect when faced with your own foolishness?

Well, no matter what you think of you, I think you’re great, because you came and are here to celebrate with me!

This year’s topic is: The Folly of Self-Esteem. 

Now then. For anyone new, here’s what I’m about to do-- I’m going to attack self-esteem problems as nonsense, but then I’m going to try to solve them through more nonsense. I hope that makes sense. 

Since it’s polite to give folks a sense of how long I’ll be talking, I expect this will take about 14 minutes. 

Here’s why I’m focusing on this topic: Clients come to me and complain about having low self-esteem. More accurately, they complain about themselves and the way they complain tells me about their self-esteem. They insult themselves, shaming themselves under the weight of unrealistic standards, and ultimately reject themselves.

Actually that’s not the main issue-- that’s their issue. My issue is… I find myself coming up short when I try to help people with their self-esteem! Something is wrong with me. I’m so bad at lifting someone from absolute self-loathing to utter self-pride. I should probably quit.

This brings me to my first paradox on the matter, and honestly it’s pretty embarrassing-- I struggle to help people with self-esteem because… I don’t personally struggle with self-esteem! And when I can’t relate to a topic, my interventions are more likely to fall flat with clients.    

My failure here may also have something to do with my natural inclination towards cognitive therapy, in which every intervention has the same goal: to call out unhelpful thought patterns and to guide clients towards more adaptive ways of thinking. When I make these points, the client gets it, but it doesn’t move them towards change. My points make sense… but they don’t make a difference. I can think of two reasons why this is happening: (1) Because self-esteem as a feeling runs so much deeper than just ‘thought patterns’; (2) Because, for some reason, telling people that they are “doing self-esteem wrong” doesn’t seem to raise their self-esteem!

Honestly, I’d rather side-step the issue of self-esteem altogether. As far as I’m concerned, self-compassion is a much more important trait than self-esteem, so I wish clients would focus on that instead. But they don’t, which means I’m stuck with this dumb topic. So, at the risk of insulting my clients, let’s get into the errors of self-esteem. Overall there are two kinds of errors: ones that involve overgeneralization and ones that involve evaluating and valuation.

First let’s talk about overgeneralizing. My god, everyone overgeneralizes, like, all the time. There are so many errors involved here. I’ll use myself as the example-- while my self-esteem is usually buoyant, it sinks when I face my inadequacy in certain aspects of adult life. Car ownership, for example. Now, you may know that I am very smart, but did you know that there are many kinds of intelligence? I know! When it comes to things like spatial reasoning and technical reasoning, I fall short. I’d like to share a recent experience that was a real roller-coaster ride of self-esteem, and point out the many overgeneralization errors I made along the way.

Earlier this year, my key wouldn’t come out of the ignition, even though the car was in park. I found a workaround involving the fuse box, but the whole thing was pretty demoralizing. So I went to the mechanic and he took a look, and then came out to talk to me. I understood maybe half of what he said, and felt bad about myself for not understanding the rest. Then, and this was the greatest ego boost of my life, he praised me for the workaround I was using! I felt fantastic. We agreed that I’d come back soon to get it fixed, and before I left, he repeated his praise. Despite years of embarrassing interactions with mechanics, I drove away feeling great about myself.

I made three different errors in this episode, all of which involve overgeneralizing evidence when making a conclusion about myself. I had negativity bias, when 

I concluded that I was pitiful based only on the part where I felt inadequate. I had positivity bias, when I concluded that I was great based only on the part of the story where I was complimented. I had recency bias, when I concluded that I was indeed a fine human being, because praise was the last thing I’d heard. These are the errors of overgeneralizing evidence. 

There are also errors of overgeneralizing identity, which I’ve also made throughout my years as a car owner. I once failed to realize I was driving on a semi-flat tire, and from this concluded that “I’m a clueless and careless person.” This is an attribution error, in that I took a situational flaw and interpreted it as a character flaw. Here’s another one: A mechanic once critiqued me because I’d been driving around for weeks without engine oil, and from this I concluded “I’m just not worth that much as an adult in the world.” This is an error of composition, in that I took a part of myself and then made a conclusion about the whole. By the way, there’s also a positive version of the error, which is similarly problematic. Driving away after that other mechanic praised me, I was euphoric, and literally said to myself “I can do anything!” Because I finally felt capable once as a car owner, I now felt capable of everything. 

So those are the follies of overgeneralization. If you’ve ever made a conclusion about yourself based on incomplete evidence, or judged yourself in all situations based on one situation, or all of yourself based on a part of yourself, then you can relate to what I’m saying here.

Let’s move on then to the errors of evaluating and valuation, which is where we really get into the “esteem” part of self-esteem. “Esteem” has the same roots as the word “estimate,” as in, “I need to get an estimate on these car repairs.” An estimate is an assessment of value and worth, and that’s what self-esteem is ultimately about-- assessing ones worth as a person. 

There’s something very wrong with this language. These terms-- assess, value, worth-- they’re all economic terms. It seems wrong to think of ourselves economically. It’s very objectifying, as if I could be reduced down to my exchange-rate. And yet… that’s a lot of what self-esteem is based on, isn’t it? How I feel about myself is, for good or for bad, largely composed of things like whether I’m attractive, interesting, employable, moral, useful in some fashion. Am I good to look at, to listen to, to hire, to trust? What am I good for? 

And this issue here is how this “good for” question places my self-estimation, my value as a person, in the hands of the social market. I wish I could one-sidedly declare myself attractive or employable, but those declarations are worthless if I can’t find at least one other person to agree with them. (So, thank goodness for Naomi and Zoe!) How others feel about me, how society feels about me, invariably plays a role in how I feel about myself.

In my life so far I’ve had the privileges that make this social influence work in my favor. Not to brag-- because I didn’t earn it-- but I live in a society that makes it easy for me to feel good about myself. Even in some areas where my value is iffy, there’s often a socio-historical quirk that saves me. In regards to my body shape, the general culture of American masculinity would dictate that my shortness makes me less attractive and less charismatic… but thankfully I’m Jewish so it’s been fine! In terms of social belonging, my obsession with philosophy made me a rather uninteresting (and thus less acceptable) person at frat parties at the beginning of college-- but it did make me very interesting in other, let’s say “chiller,” spaces in college. As for being employable, I think my self-esteem would be very poor if “therapist” didn’t exist as a career. What would I have done with myself 200 years ago? What value would my intellectual interests and abilities have if I didn’t live in this particular space and time? 

“But Matt!” you’re saying, “You shouldn’t care what other people think about you! Be your own authority about yourself.” And, you know what, there is something to this. If I can't be interesting to other people, but I can interest myself, well, at least I’ll enjoy my own company, and that’s something to feel good about. Similarly, when I work, I should set my own standard for quality and accomplishment, rather than unfairly comparing myself against standards that are beyond me. 

On the other hand, there are some major risks in reliance on self-validation. The delusionally high self-esteem of the Dunnings and Krugers of the world are ruining it for the rest of us. We should also take into account Aaron James’ “asshole theory” (yes that’s a real thing) which characterizes assholes partly by their imperviousness to criticism-- they, too, don’t care what others think. So… “I think I’m great” is perhaps not the best attitude to take.

But you’re not done challenging me. “Matt!” you say again, “Stop making your worth dependent on your usefulness! Why not just say you have inherent worth? Let’s say you deserve to feel good about yourself, just because you are a human.” Again, this sounds great-- because instead of an argument about worth, it’s an unconditional declaration. But the economic language still bothers me, and I think I figured out why: It reflects a problematic obsession with earning the right to treat ourselves with kindness and respect.

Yes, that’s the damn problem. There’s a confusion at the heart of this topic, because what we've been calling “self-esteem” is actually two different behaviors: (1) How you assess yourself, and (2) How you treat yourself based on that assessment. It does make sense to combine these two things: If I think I’m doing well, then my self-talk is positive, and if I’m doing poorly then my self-talk is negative. It makes sense but it’s also dangerous-- if I’m doing poorly and then speak to myself harshly about it, that’s not really the healthiest way to get myself to do better. If I do better but still feel like crap, what have I achieved? 

Here then is the nonsensical solution: Let’s make self-treatment independent of self-assessment. This doesn’t mean I have to lie to myself, and tell myself I’m great. No, I can say “When it comes to this (whatever the activity is), I’m just not that great-- but I’m still gonna be nice to myself about it!” Let’s do the ridiculous thing, and let ourselves have low self-esteem but without shame. Low self-esteem, but high self-love. Assess yourself well or poorly… but don’t be a jerk about it. 

But, again, why should you be allowed to love yourself if you haven’t earned it? Are you ready for the mind-blowing answer? It’s because… it’s good for you! Yup. That’s the secret we therapists have, with our mystical “unconditional positive regard.” We don’t have to believe you are great, that you are worthy, that you have inherent value. Instead, we work by the belief that people do better when they are treated well. 

Duh! Screw deserving. Consider the lilies-- does a flower “deserve” to be watered? No! Lazy flowers, what have they ever done? A flower simply should be watered, because that’s how it grows. 

This is also the secret that all good parents know-- and can you believe I got this far into the topic of self-esteem without mentioning parents? Because let’s be real, it’s where my own self-esteem originally comes from. If my parents hadn’t accepted me while raising me, it would be so much harder to accept myself. Huh… but if I had a harder time accepting myself… then I would probably have struggled more with self-esteem… which probably would’ve made me better at helping my clients with their self-esteem! Ha! So it’s their fault I’m so bad at this. Thanks a lot, mom and dad! 

Upbringing is the major factor in what makes poor self-esteem so sticky. I said this right at the start, didn’t I? That self-esteem runs so much deeper than simple ‘thought patterns’. As children, our self-awareness is born out of seeing ourselves through others’ eyes, which gives those other eyes-- parents, teachers, doctors, peers-- a ton of power. Low self-esteem becomes a survival strategy in these circumstances, a way of protecting yourself from outside attack. Survival strategies become personality traits; so, though the client may want to break these patterns of negative self-talk, they also have a personal and emotional commitment to them. That’s why cognitive therapy isn’t strong enough, because these thinking habits stem from lived social-emotional experiences. As Yujia has told me: If someone arrives at a conclusion without reasoning their way there, then they probably can’t simply reason their way out of it either. 

To which I say… dammit. But! At the very least, perhaps, just perhaps, if I can treat my clients with unconditional positive regard, they might acquire a taste for the unconditional love that otherwise feels so foreign and undeserved.

Let’s wrap this up. What can I do for my clients and their self-esteem? Here are the interventions I’m recommending, while wearing my different “therapist hats.”

The stubborn cognitive therapist in me says-- develop the skills to support yourself emotionally, even when assessing yourself poorly. This is not about stupid positive affirmations. The key skill here is holding the tension between self-critical thinking with self-supportive thinking.

The behavioral therapist in me says-- behavioral activation! Which is fancy language for “act as if you love yourself.” It’s the reverse golden rule: Treat yourself as you would someone you love. If you treat yourself lovingly, you may start to feel lovable.

The interpersonal therapist in me says-- identify and stay close to the people who both support and challenge you. People who only flatter or only criticize should not be trusted. Take some power over who counts as the authority about you. There’s a beautiful tension here as well, to develop both yourself and others as trustworthy authorities, to weigh judgment from yourself and others to the right amount and for the right reasons.

I should also mention-- thanks to Tasha for this point-- that if your negative self-talk was learned from mistreatment at the hands of parents, peers, and other parts of your environment, then grief and trauma work can also help a lot, in ways that my own talk-relational approach won’t quite touch. 

But that’s outside my expertise. I’m a good therapist in a few ways, sorely lacking in others. I’ve failed clients, and I will fail clients. I can esteem myself highly in some ways, poorly in others, as well as neutrally sometimes. I think I’ll have to love myself anyhow.

Thanks for listening!

The Folly of Moderation - April Fool's 2025

Good afternoon and welcome to the 20th annual April Fools Day observance! These just keep going, huh? I still remember the day the idea came to me; I think it was April… yes, it was April 1st. I thought “Life is full of paradoxes, and people keep trying to solve them rather than live them. I’ll get everyone together to share and appreciate the built-in tensions in life.” And so it started! But the thing is, I never made a plan for when and how this should all end. I mean, not when this particular party should end-- that’s easy, it ends when you get tired or I get tired or, more likely, Naomi gets tired. I don’t know when the observance as a whole should end. Every year it only exists if I make it happen, by writing a speech, inviting everyone, and making veggie chili. So… I guess I’ll just do these until I die, and maybe someone else will do them, or not? Can an indefinite plan be a plan? Know what, I’ll figure this out later, like tomorrow, or someday after that. For now, I’ll stop musing and start the speech.

My topic today is: The Folly of Moderation. As the tradition goes, I’ll start out critiquing moderation and end by endorsing it, thus hopefully confusing you and making myself seem even more foolish.

Moderation is all about striking a balance between starting and stopping any given activity. You can only eat pizza in moderation by starting to eat it and then stopping before it’s too much. You’re thinking, “That’s just common sense!” To which I say, screw you, if it’s so obvious, how come I’m so bad at it?! Anyhow-- there are two opposites to moderation, both of which make more sense to me: excess and abstinence. So, for the critical portion of this speech, I’ll explain why moderation is dumb, and why excess and abstinence are clearly superior.

I’ll start by praising excess, and really there’s no such thing as too much praise for that! All of my favorite things grow, continue, expand-- basically, I love epic things. Why settle for the 3-minute studio Dark Star when you can listen to the 47-minute live one from 5/11/72? Why go to a concert when you can go to a festival? Last year I biked from Pikesville to Annapolis and back; it was epic, by which I mean very long and very fun. When you have the capacity to enjoy more, then more is better. This is why I’ve never understood when people say things like, “This is too sweet” or “This pizza has too much cheese.” A moderate amount of something is less, and despite what they tell you, less is not more, that’s why less and more are opposites-- don’t be foolish! So, moderation is less fun than excess, or to quote the words of (John Barlow as sung by) Bob Weir: “Too much of everything is just enough.”

But enough about excess-- let’s talk about abstinence. In our current culture, the word is sexually charged (or rather, non-sexually charged), but I’m using it here to talk about any activity one might avoid. While abstinence is less fun than both excess and moderation, I appreciate it because it’s simple. That’s the appeal of “Just say no.” As someone who loves making structures and rules for myself, I appreciate the simplicity of an straightforward rule. When I decide to abstain from something, then great, it’s off the menu, and I’ll focus on what I can do instead. I’ve revelled in my love for abstinence in different ways-- keeping Shabbat in my teens, being a vegetarian in my 20s, and that 1000 days of sobriety in my 30s. I find comfort and identity in restraint-- I know who I am through well-drawn and well-respected boundaries. 

Are you seeing what makes excess and abstinence so appealing to me? They’re simple-- excess is “Just Do It” and abstinence is “Just Say No.” The good things are good, so keep doing them. The bad things are bad, so just stay away. 

And there’s really nothing wrong with excess… if you’re doing it right. People talk about doing things ad nauseam, meaning doing it until you’re sick. But let’s talk about ad libitum, meaning doing it according to your pleasure, which can mean doing something on and on, assuming that you just never get sick of it. So what if I don’t feel done yet? Why stop now when it’s going so well? What’s one more?

So. Let’s talk about being bipolar. The diagnosis shows up differently for different people, so I’ll only speak about myself. At the same time, you might relate to some of my experiences, even if you don’t share my diagnosis.

A few years ago I was diagnosed with bipolar ii, a condition on the bipolar spectrum with hypomanic rather than full manic episodes-- basically, I have periods of pathologically heightened energy which aren’t as long or disruptive as in folks with bipolar i. But what is “pathologically heightened energy”? The key term here is pathological-- in psychotherapy, something is pathological if it causes enough distress and dysfunction. Being excited is great. Being so excited that I lose my ability to return to calm, not so great. 

Psychiatrist Patrick Burke describes bipolar in a way that really speaks to me. He calls it a “disorder of motivational systems and their regulation.” He talks about how bipolar folks live with a “heightened drive toward goals, achievement, and reward, even when there are negative consequences.” That sounds about right.

So-- now let’s talk about drugs. Being reward-sensitive makes me more inclined towards using what I’ll call experience-enhancing materials. Drugs are the most obvious example, though I’d say that music also fits this description. I often use music as a background mood-enhancing tool-- why do something silently when I can have some additional stimulation carrying the mood? Drugs can also work in this background fashion, contributing additional pleasure and painlessness to such grueling activities as dancing, writing, socializing, and even watching TV. Trust me-- back in 2014, when FXX had their 11-day “Every Simpsons Ever” marathon, I was sober at the time, and watching 12 straight hours of TV was definitely more of a challenge without performance-enhancing drugs. But somehow I managed to fit it in.

Drugs are also helpful at every stage of an energy cycle. If I’m having a good time and want to stay up, there’s a drug for that. If I’m ready to crash but can’t, there’s a drug for that. Caffeine maintains momentum. Weed cushions the collapse. With the right self-medication, I don’t get sick of the cycle, and then there’s no such thing as ad nauseam. Even a hangover is pleasant with the right meds. Excess is great, if you can get away with it, meaning, continue to function because of and/or in spite of it. There’s no need for moderation when you’re moving gracefully with the highs and the lows. 

Why, then, would I bother to affirm moderation, given how foolish and unnecessary it is? 

First, a practical but shallow answer: I grudgingly admit that optimizing an experience might involve doing less. On any given night, more is better, but sometimes looking back the next morning, less would’ve been better. Moderation comes out on top if you’re judging by the average of good feelings over time. Fewer highs but also fewer lows.

But that’s about looking backwards, but what about moderation in the present moment? Well, sometimes the right balance of elements in an experience can enhance it. For example-- Though I  do enjoy biking while listening to music while voice-dictating philosophical thoughts into my phone, there is also a certain speed of biking at a certain volume of music and a certain quality of thought worth jotting down for later-- there’s a balance that actually makes it the most enjoyable (and safe). When everything goes to 11, the balanced experience is lost. This is why I follow recipes when I cook-- I shouldn’t just put a heaping tablespoon of everything into everything. 

Annoyingly, moderation requires way more self-awareness and more self-monitoring-- I have to be a connoisseur of experience in order to know what goes with what, what’s too much, what’s too little, when to start, and when to stop.

But now let’s get psychological-- I want to understand why I avoid stopping doing things I enjoy. This brings me to a deeper, existential answer: Compulsive excess is a refusal to reconcile a seemingly limitless appetite with a definitely limited self, life, and world. I’ll say that again (repeat the previous sentence). This is very humbling, and it points out why I need to back down from my “always more” mentality. Because moderation is about living life on life’s terms. 

So let’s talk about “life’s terms.” We live in the present but are angled toward the future; this makes the experience of “enough” complicated and elusive. Do I have “enough” food? Yes, for now, but for the future, I don’t know. There might not be enough later, and that possibility makes me want to take more in now. Have I written enough? I mean, I’ve written all I can for today, but if there’s no tomorrow then I better get it all in now while I can. Have I had enough, which is to say, am I satisfied? Satisfaction, if attained, is still fleeting-- Even if you can get it, after time passes, it’s gone again. Truly in the ultimate sense, you can’t get no satisfaction.

To be satisfied is to feel “full”, and full is a hard target to hit. Maimonides, a medieval Rabbi and doctor, advises people to stop eating when they are “3/4 full.” But when the heck is that? It’s simpler to eat until I feel totally full, which is to say, “overfull.” Overfull isn’t quite the same as satisfaction, but it definitely avoids the not-enoughness I associate with dissatisfaction. Excess is an attempt to feel utterly certain that my appetite has been satisfied. To put it another way, I’ll know I’ve had enough when I can’t stand any more, literally or figuratively.

Finally, literally and figuratively, let’s talk about death and fullness. Just as those who’ve had a full meal are ready to leave the table, someone who’s had a full life would thus be ready for death. But-- are we ever full? If we love life, if we love ourselves and the people around us, can we ever simply have enough? It would seem that someone who loves life cannot get full, and therefore cannot get satisfaction. If we have a limitless appetite for life, then we are always greedy for more, and we’ll never feel done.

This is what makes moderation so odious, and also so wise: Moderation is a reckoning with an overactive appetite, a recognition that satisfaction is illusory, and coming to terms with the fact our bodies, minds, capacities, and life spans all hit limits. And, as I’ve said before (in 2014, The Folly of Self-Acceptance), to grow we have to expand our boundaries but also respect our limitations. 

 Weirdly enough, the myth of Sisyphus bears this lesson for us. Folks may be familiar with the nature of his punishment, to roll a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down, and then to start again-- for eternity. But-- does anyone here remember why Sisyphus was being punished? (Anyone?) There are three different accounts, and in two of them he’s punished for trying to defeat or cheat death. Sisyphus, for his crimes against death, is condemned to push upwards and fall downwards for eternity. And, y’know, it kinda makes sense! He’s forced to go up and down, because he refused to let there be a stop. Wanting more life and refusing death leads to this incessant up and down cycle, and I find this highly relatable.

Moderation is a reckoning with our uncertain future and relative powerlessness to make the absolute most out of life. Moderation could be an act of faith that there will be more, that there is a future one can bank on. Or it’s the kind of faith in which one is simply open to what will be. Either way, it’s about letting go and letting be. There may never be enough. There will be waste. For the sake of health and balance, I may need to leave food on my plate. For the sake of a balanced life, I may need to allow for interruptions like death. I have to get better at endings.

The practices of moderation involve negative actions-- to stop, to take less, and to do fewer things at a time. And I’m learning; I’m working on it-- I’ve never taken more breaks in the course of writing one of these speeches than in writing this one-- most were to give my body a break from sitting, others were to give my mind a break from composing, and after the existential conclusion above, I took a break because it was just too emotionally overwhelming. I’ll hopefully keep working on this. I expect it to be a lifelong lesson in course correction.

Camus ends his essay on Sisyphus by saying that “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” No-- one must imagine Sisyphus taking a goddamn break.

The Folly of Aging - April Fool's 2024

Good afternoon, and welcome to my 19th annual April Fools observance. Wow, 19. Is it just me, or is this getting old? I worry that I’ll run out of steam or, even worse, run out of topics. I actually had a whole other topic set up for today, but my damn therapist ruined it by helping me find resolution and peace. Resolution and peace are great for mental health, but a mixed blessing when it comes to growth. When we’re at peace, there’s really no need to change anything; without agitation, why bother changing? Agitation, the struggle with the internal and external contradictions of life-- well, it’s the lifeblood of this sacred observance. What if I simply grow up, and find inner and outer peace? What if, truly self-actualized, there are no struggles left to take on, and therefore, no more April Fools? How awful!

But I shouldn’t get ahead-- for right now I can reassure myself that I will always have something to worry about. 

So let’s get into it. Since it’s good practice to notify you how long I’ll be requesting your attention, you can expect the speech to be about 12 minutes from this point on.

My topic today is the folly of aging. 

This topic feels particularly foolish, which delights me. For one, I’ve been corrected by the congregants of Beth El, and by every older member of my family, that I am not actually old. Since it’s all relative, especially with my family, it’s safe to say that they are both right and wrong. But I will no doubt sound foolish, explaining aging to the aged. I even expect that older versions of myself, the audience I will become in due time, will also see the foolishness in my words today.

Meanwhile, there are SO many tensions and paradoxes in aging, so let’s get into it!

First, when exactly are we old?

There’s no clear line here, which means it must happen gradually, and gradual changes are really confusing. The classic version of this is the sorites paradox, in which a pile of sand has one grain removed at a time… and at some point it’s no longer a pile. But when? As the sand drips through my hourglass, at what point am I old? We could say “after the halfway point” but of course there’s no knowing when it was, is, or will be.

Even when someone draws that line, they inevitably move the goalposts. I used to be a member of the Moishe Kavod House, a community for young adults in their 20s and 30s. Now at Beth El, I’m told by the head of a certain club that they want to recruit younger members, “Y’know, in their 40s and 50s.” So that’s no help.

Perhaps certain milestones make us old? Moving out, work, rent, chores, marriage… heartburn? I used to say “You’re a kid until you have a kid,” a principle which renders me still a kid. Naomi often will exclaim “I’m an adult!” as a way of motivating herself, but I’m just not sure if that’s the kind of exclamation real adults make. Number of years, number of advanced milestones, these all could be indicators of aging; but I suppose the confusion isn’t just between whether we’re old or not, but also the fact that aging and maturing may or may not show up together.

And whether we’ve aged, whether we’ve matured, seems not to count for much, since there are so many adults who will still say about themselves “ I can’t believe I’m (x) years old-- I don’t feel that old…!” I have a hard time relating to this sentiment-- for one, go spend time with someone of the age you feel like, and you’ll quickly realize your mistake. If you still feel like a college student, go hang out with one. Of course you don’t feel your age-- you only just got to this age, you don’t know what it really feels like. True awareness of what 20 felt like only came to me when I was turning 30.

So, when are we old? I have no clue. Maybe I’ll get it when I’m older.

Second, is it good or bad to be old?

One would think that an unequivocal “Yes!” is the only answer here. Being old means you survived to old age. Being old, when done right, should come with some useful wisdom; I hope that, the longer I live, the better I get at living. If Cat Stevens can fault us for being young, then there must be some kind of improvement in store when getting old, right?

  And yet, in many places I turn, my elders are discouraging aging. The anti-endorsements pile-up-- Pete Townsend hoped he’d die before he got old; in the Bible, Kohelet tells us it only gets worse as we age; my great-uncle would often say he needed to go to the store to buy a new pair of legs; Naomi’s own grandfather discouraged aging (as well as marriage and children). Kurt Cobain, a musician known for not getting old, let us know that his pay-off for teenage angst was both old age and boredom. 

And I said earlier that it would seem that old age comes with wisdom, but we can be skeptical about that as well. Abraham Simpson used to be with it, but then they changed what “it” was. Seymour Skinner may think “it’s the kids who are wrong,” but we know that he’s the one truly out of touch. Jack Weinberg, the man who said “Never trust anyone over 30,” turns 84 this year-- if he were to say that phrase today, would we believe him? 

Economist Daniel Kahneman, of blessed memory, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, cites two studies as evidence that hindsight is not a privileged perspective but merely a different one. In these studies, one involving ice-cold water, the other involving colonoscopies (Thank goodness these aren’t the same study, am I right??), it’s clear that we assess our experiences differently in-the-moment vs in-retrospect, and each vantage point has advantages and disadvantages. 40 year old Matt knows something about life that 30 year old Matt didn’t; but the opposite is also true. 

Finally, let’s talk about the tensions we encounter in physical aging.

For those who grow up able bodied, able-bodiedness can still be a temporary state. There’s so much we simply don’t know about the future of our own bodies, our health, and our longevity. That uncertainty adds so much to the confusion of facing aging-- that it can involve major physical changes, major injuries and/or even illnesses… but it might not. I think of my grandfather, who played tennis into his 80s (and my uncle, 80, who still does), and I think of other relatives whose lives were cut short. 

Before I continue, a quick note about ableism -- as a generally able-bodied person my whole life, my thoughts and feelings about loss of ability are, well, rife with ableism. It’s baked into my experience and sense of self, and something I’ll need to contend with personally. For now I’ll name that, in a society built on a collective ethics of care (ala Joan Tronto), our identities would be connected to interdependence rather than independence, and a lot of my concerns about ability here would simply be irrelevant. 

I see two major challenges regarding the physical changes that might come with aging. The first is how those changes can massively challenge one’s identity. Whether I think about it or not, most of my identity is bound up with my sense of independence. I need a whole bundle of abilities to keep my current active lifestyle. Ditto any of my hobbies and chores-- with a variety of conditions, I could no longer take for granted walking, writing, cooking, hula hooping, or even reading. 

If I am too identified with these activities and the abilities they depend on, then function loss will come with a crisis of identity. If this happens, then an existential task arises-- to redefine myself within these new constraints. A daunting task, but doable, I hope. I assume that the biggest hurdle would be making peace with the need to redefine myself at all. I hope I can remember this-- that even if my current self remains pretty stable for a few decades, I shouldn’t expect this stability forever. I have to plan to continue to grow, plan for my identity to keep changing, even if I don’t know when, why, or how it will happen.

The second major challenge is how physical changes may simply get in the way of feeling pleasure and avoiding pain. This challenge is way harder to strategize around. Honestly, when I think of physical pain, and how any persisting amount of it can ruin my mood and temperament, I’m not sure what I’ll do… besides drugs. Seriously, that’s as far as I’ve thought on this topic. Not that she was doing it out of physical pain, but my grandma’s evening cocktail hour makes more and more sense as I grow up. When I imagine life with chronic pain, I can only think of doctors’ advice, specifically Dr. Hibbert’s preferred tonic prescription, and Dr. Dre’s recommendation regarding daily self-medicating.

This is getting long; it’s time to draw some conclusions.

So-- do I recommend aging? I’ll make the obvious point first-- that I’m recommending maturity, with or without aging, but ideally with it. Aging without maturing is all-too-common-- I recognized this possibility in the cafeteria in college, noticing that some bananas went straight from green to brown; as with some fruit, so with some people-- we can age without maturing. And so it’s on us to develop, discover, and collect as much wisdom as possible as we age. 

But what kind of wisdom? The foolish kind, of course! This is the meaning of the sopho-more, literally the wise fool-- one who has learned enough to know how much they haven’t learned yet. We have to be wary of the end-of-history illusion, the notion that, at this moment, we’ve already done all the significant maturing and learning we will ever do. We seem to keep falling into the same trap, assuming that “when I grow up” is already here, rather than always ahead of us.

 Better that we should expect the unexpected, to know that our self-knowledge may require rupture and repair when we encounter some new emergency in life. With each new emergency, we are challenged to start somewhat fresh, to become young again in order to learn and re-learn who we are. That’s the final paradox, that to age well will require returning to a beginner's mind, that we must renew ourselves as in days of old, that we may have been older then, but we’re younger than that now.

And we should remain young even as we get old! I need to stay playful to survive and thrive. Call it being “young at heart,” if you like that expression. Personally I like the expression “children of all ages,” as in “Ladies and Gentlemen, children of all ages.” We can age, but we can strive to stay playful, romantic, adventurous and so on-- all the things we usually associate with youth. Aging doesn’t have to mean losing past selves, but rather collecting them, like a tree collects its rings. 

Let’s age but make sure that we mature. Let’s age but make sure that we remain playful. No one should take themselves so seriously; with many years ahead to fall in line, why would you wish that on me?

Ok, now an actual conclusion.

There’s a lot more to this topic that I left out, both knowingly and ignorantly. Maybe I’ll cover the topic again in 10 years (I should be so lucky). I mean, I wrote this whole speech without referencing death! A speech about aging… and I don’t mention death(?!)-- what kind of foolishness is this? Though to be honest, I should save that whole thing for a “folly of death” speech someday, should I be so lucky.

Well, from age 40, up to 120, and only with good health, for me and also for you. Thanks for listening.