Fighting Personal Stagnation

Between my personal life and my professional life, I encounter lots of older people and lots of estates of deceased older people. These experiences have left me with a deep seated aversion to personal stagnation.

So many people buy a home, and then do nothing but the absolute minimum of crisis intervention to maintain or update their home or their furnishings after the first few years. Things that need minor repairs languish undone for decades. Chairs that barely hold up when you sit on them are still at the kitchen table. The outside pain in flaking. Burnt out incandescent light bulbs sit in their fixtures, unchanged. Refrigerators that aren't frost-free loom in the kitchen.

So many homes of people in their 80s and probate estate have children's bedrooms that are completely untouched since the children left home, or sometimes, when the children predeceased them. So many surviving spouses have their deceased spouse's clothing still filling their closets and dressers, years after the death.

Many elderly people have cars that meet the definition of "a classic" in Colorado for licenses plate purposes, because it is at least 32 years old. But this is not because they saved it for the purpose and have kept it up. It is because they bought it, used or new, to be their every day car, never replaced it, and have managed to avoid replacing it because they only drive it to church and the grocery store and doctor's appointments, or because it no longer works and is on the garage or front lawn, but they can't muster the effort to sell it or fix it. These "classic" cars are in a state of poor repair and ragged, even if they are street legal.

So many people listen almost exclusive to the music that they listened to when they were in their teens or twenties.

So many people haven't read more than a handful of books, if any, since they were in high school or college.

So many people dress in exactly the same clothing styles that they wore in their 20s.

So many people vote for the same political party that they voted for when they first started to vote, not because they are engaged with politics and believe in its policies or like its candidates, but out of habit.

So many people can't use even a tiny fraction of what their computers (usually desktops) and phones (the oldest models that can still have functioning batteries) can do, because they've never managed or tried to learn how to do so.

So many people pay their bills on paper invoices with checks sent in the mail because they can't figure out how to pay their bills by phone or on the Internet. They don't know how to "tap" a credit card instead of putting it into a slot where it is read either.

Some of this stagnation is a function of limited finances. Some of this stagnation is a result of working for decades so hard at jobs calling for no original thought that they had no mental bandwidth to think about anything else when they got home except running on autopilot when they aren't working. Some of this stagnation is a product of lack of curiosity and the ossification of your mind that comes from not using it.

I have a very intense desire not to be like that. Maybe, I even overcompensate. 

I listen to about 2500 new songs every year on Spotify and have musical tastes that have more in common with a typical member of Generation Z than Generation X. I finish reading 10-20 new books a year. I am abreast with new scientific discoveries in high energy physics, astronomy, gravity research, cosmology, historical human genetics, historical linguistics, and anthropology to the cutting edge of discoveries announced in the past week and month. I am aware of the domestic legal and political situation on a daily or weekly basis, and I am more aware of global current events and the daily situation elsewhere within the last few months and years in most cases.

My speech and every day expressions are not not frozen three decades ago. I've changed bad writing habits (run on sentences, clunky sentence and phrase structures, not using Oxford commas, avoiding starting sentences with "but" or "and", overuse of the passive voice, etc.), ingrained in me from horrible English writing lessons that I was taught as an elementary school student in Oxford, Ohio, although they die hard. The bad habits often appear in first drafts and need to be corrected in later revisions. 

I am at peace and comfortable with concepts like homosexuality and transgender identity (and have important people in our lives who are each), even though I wasn't really aware of either as a real thing and hadn't met anyone who was openly either, until I was in college. I've had Muslims and Hindus as employees and people we've met in other aspects of our lives and our children's lives and learned what that's like at the level of daily life interactions, even though I can't recall meeting either before college, and can't recall regularly encountering either until I had middle school aged children.

I regularly eat all kinds of foods that I first encountered only as an adult. I've adapted to sensibilities and attitudes, especially about water and weather, of the arid American West, that were unknown to me growing up in the Midwest.

I grew up in a family that attended an ELCA Lutheran church every week and did everything that comes with it, and I am now a secular humanist who raised his children unbaptized and without religion.

My little half-duplex on a 1/15th of an acre may not be much, but it is in good repair, and has been updated regularly of the 23 years that we've lived there. We added a swamp cooler and have it well maintained. We replaced a coal-fired boiler that was converted to natural gas with a natural gas one and abated the asbestos of the old boiler system. We replaced single pane windows with tin frames and an R-1 insulation factor with triple-pane windows fit for Fairbanks. We replaced a front door that was starting to crack. We replaced the roof. We added an up to code egress window to a downstairs bedroom. We renovated our kitchen and our main bathroom and have replaced all of the major appliances in the house at least once. We installed a shutoff valve to an outdoor tap that was freezing in the winter. We've repaired a guard rail and finished a basement room. We replaced an old, ugly ceiling fan and restored a fireplace that had been drywalled over. We replaced a broken second bathroom sink and toilet. Shortly after we moved in, a contractor removed a structural wall saying that it wasn't a structural wall, and compromised a support rafter that he said wasn't important, and we're now in the process of finishing a major structural repair that we commenced when we learned that those things weren't true because our ceiling has started to sink several inches and was cracking and buckling. We put in a patio in the backyard to reduce the amount of lawn that needed to be irrigated in a two decade long 1200 year drought. We fixed a garage door. We've updated the paint in the house. We repaired the gutters. We replaced the electrical box. We replaced the boundary fence. We redid the cracked sidewalk (at city insistence). We added a high speed Internet service line. We added coat hooks. We redid the landscaping on a walkway to the backyard that previously sprouted weeds between pavers every year and the space between the street and the sidewalk. We trimmed our trees when they became a threat to the neighbors and had our ash tree treated to prevent a beetle infestation. We repaired our attic access hatch and a guard rail. We replaced broken chairs and dressers. We added a pantry cabinet. We repaired an obstruction in the main drain. We've had parts of the  original galvanized steel plumbing replaced. We repaired a problem in the steam heat system. We have an agenda of several more things to update or fix that are less urgent over the next five to ten years when time, money, and bandwidth allow. Our children's rooms have been reclaimed for other purposes (an exercise and TV room for my wife, and a guest room). Our house is almost always sale ready or close to it.

Our cars have always been kept in good repair with current routine maintenance, and have been sold when we can no longer repair them, no longer need them, or they become money pits.

We know how to use most of the common features of up to date computers and phones. All but a handful of our bills are paid electronically. We've used ACH direct deposits and withdrawals, Paypal, Venmo, and Zelle. 

Our hairstyles and clothing styles are not frozen in the 1980s and 1990s for the most part. O.K., I still wear Converse All-Stars as my go to non-dress shoes, and have one or two college t-shirts and sweat shirts that I wear around the house, and my wife still wears leg warmers (and gets lots of compliments for them). We have donated or thrown away almost all of our clothing that no longer fits, or that is too worn or damaged to wear, and much of the clothing that we simply don't wear even if we still could.

We've gone to our regular physicals and dental appointments.

We are not living in the past and continue to grow and learn. We have not failed to maintain and tend to our things and ourselves.