How have you betrayed your younger self?
By which I mean not merely changes in your tastes or preferences, e.g., you used to read fantasy books, and now prefer sci-fi, or you only listened to heavy metal in high school, and now you listen to other genres.
No, I mean renouncing or letting go of something that was really central to your identity for a significant portion of your life, something you felt was a permanent part of you.
Here are my two examples: movies, and to a lesser extent, books.
Books. I grew up in a family that loved books, and when I moved out on my own I kept buying books. I loved visiting book stores. I went to a Great Books college. By the time I was in my late 50s, my wife (whom I met at that college) and I owned well over 2,000 books, and that was after I had already culled a couple hundred before moving into her house when we married.
Then we moved. And moved again. And again. The first time into a much bigger house with a lot of built-in bookshelves. Great! Then to a smaller place, but with enough room for most of them. Then to a much smaller place with hardly any room for books. Which is where we are now, and will probably stay for the rest of our lives.
Even though we had professional movers do the heavy lifting (literally), the charm of owning books wore off around the time of the second move, and since the Kindle had come out shortly before the first of the three moves, I was increasingly buying and reading books digitally, not physically.
Before the last move we culled our 2,200 books by 50%, donating well over 1,000 to the local Goodwill. And here, in what we expect to be our last home, we have shelf space for a couple hundred. The majority of books we still own are in boxes in the attic.
For at least four or five decades, I would have called myself a book person. But three or four moves (after the age of 55) and the advent of e-books have convinced me that they’re just stuff. Yes, they look nice, and if you have a place to keep them and won’t have to move sometime in the future, I suppose there’s little downside to collecting them.
But at 70 years old, the idea of owning and collecting more and more stuff (of all kinds, not just books) has lost its luster. I haven’t bought more than a dozen physical books in the past five years. I buy and read all my new books on my Android tablet. I don’t miss reading physical books at all. One time recently, while reading a physical book, I had to stop myself from touching a word I wanted to look up!
Movies. Starting in high school, I became a film buff. I lived near Washington, DC, where a repertory cinema, the late, great, Circle Theater, ran double features of classic films, changing the program every few days. You could buy a book of ten tickets for $10. I would often go down a couple of times a week, with friends or by myself, and saw most of the films of Fellini, Bergman, and most other classic directors there.
In college I was a member, and later head, of the film club. After college I worked at the IMAX theater at the National Air and Space Museum and after being laid off 12 years later, continued working in the IMAX/giant-screen business for the next 24 years. I went to pre-release press screenings of feature films for many years and made a point of watching all the Oscar-nominated films, predicting the winners, and watching the ceremonies.
I was as committed to the notion a seeing films in the theater as anyone I knew, since, especially for IMAX films, there was no comparison to watching them at home. I remained committed even as flat-screen TV became cheaper and larger, and as theaters became less and less popular. My wife and I still went to see movies in the theater at least once a month.
But that has slowed down in the last few years. It’s a half-hour drive to our nearest multiplex. I’m 70 and she’s 65. Our newest TV is 77 inches.
The last movie we saw was the F1: The Movie, in IMAX. It was LOUD. REALLY LOUD! So were the trailers before it, and they were all for horrible movies we had absolutely no interest in seeing. Despite my age, I’m not hard of hearing yet, and the experience in that theater was just not fun. To say nothing of not being able to stop the film when we had to go to the bathroom.
I haven’t completely sworn off going out to the movies, and there’s a nice art house theater a little closer than that multiplex that we like better, and will probably patronize now and then. But for almost all ordinary movies we might be interested in, the home experience is vastly preferable.
My younger self is looking at me with disbelief and dismay!
How about you?
