I’m not entirely sure who I’m writing this for. Myself probably. Maybe my two sons. But I am commemorating having survived somehow for half a century on this planet with a bit of reflection. I do not pretend to be some deep thinker, or original in my perception of life’s lessons. In fact I am certain that others ancient and modern have already observed these lessons in far more interesting ways than I ever could.
Nonetheless, how can I be a writer if I don’t write, no matter how poor a reflection these words may be to the wisdom of Plato, Augustine, or Rollo Tomasi? So with the comfort coming from the fact that very few people are likely to read these words, let me sally forth.
Note that I am a superstraight Korean-American man, so much of this is only from my perspective as such. Perhaps life’s lessons are dramatically different for others. I don’t pretend to have any universal wisdom; just my own.
1. The Single Biggest Decision of Your Life
After 50 years, I’ve come to believe that the single biggest decision of anyone’s life, but particularly a man, is who you marry.
When I was younger, I thought career was the most important thing. It is for a career that college was important. And because college was important, I spent most of my first seventeen years in pursuit of that goal.
I got lucky, but then again, I also worked my immigrant ass off… and I got the brass ring. I went to Yale. Then to NYU for law school. I have the sheepskins, the credentials. I had the fancy jobs, I had the startup experience, I’ve been doing my own thing for the last 12 years. I’ve moved across the country multiple times, pursuing this opportunity or that one. Each of those decisions felt momentous at the time, and frankly, many of them were life-changing.
But after 50 years, I’ve come to realize how different my life would have been had I met and married my current wife back when I was 29. Now I wish I had spent more time as a teenager or in my 20s pursuing a great wife and a little less time pursuing the Ivy League degree or the prestigious job at some prestigious firm. (But see below for more on this.)
Nothing will determine your success or failure in life more than your wife. Nothing. All of the sayings are true. Behind every great man is a great woman, etc. etc. It is impossible to understand the value of a good woman.
This is not the place to go into what a good woman is. Books have been written on the subject. But with five decades under my belt, I think the old wisdom had it right. I find Proverbs 31:10–31 to be quite relevant, even in the 21st century.
There is, of course, the flip side to this. A man should demand a good woman, clothed with strength and dignity, who can laugh at the days to come. He should look for that woman who speaks with wisdom, and on whose tongue is faithful instruction. Do not settle. Never settle. Because the choice of a mate is the most important decision of your life.
But to win such a woman, consider what sort of man you must be. That is what I mean by “pursuing a great wife.” It doesn’t mean hitting up every bar and nightclub trying to find the diamond in the rough. It means becoming the man she can fall for, that she can follow, that she can respect.
That is no easy goal, but one that is worth pursuing.
2. Evolution Takes A While
When I was young, I was a revolutionary. I wanted to change society, change the world, because of all of the inequality and injustice I saw all around me. I believed in education, in consciousness-raising, in action. I looked ever forward into the bright and glorious future. History was merely prologue and filled with evil of evil men.
Over the years, I have become far more of a fan of history. I realize now that one of the reasons I didn’t care for history is the way it is taught in our schools, as a list of dry facts, the doings of Great Men, the wars, the dynasties, and the like. If only high school and college were teaching history the way that history podcasts teach history: as a grand story of human beings over thousands of years….
In any event, what I realize now is that we humans really haven’t changed all that much from the time of ancient Greeks. Evolution takes tens of thousands of years if not longer; it takes numerous generations living, competing, dying, reproducing to evolve. We haven’t had that much time in recorded history.
What that means is that the way people were in Sparta and Athens is really not that different from the way we are today in the 21st century. We might be surrounded by high technology that looks like nothing short of magic, but at base, we’re really the same as we have been with the same problems, the same drives, the same wants and needs and loves and hatreds.
Utopia remains a dream because humanity has not evolved that much past barbarian tribes raiding each other. Men and women can be modernized and acculturated to all kinds of things, but we’re really not that different from the time of Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan.
This has two implications for me.
One, history can be very dark. Empires rise, empires fall. War, death, famine, destruction… the cycle goes on and on and on. The Zhou Dynasty ruled China for 800 years, but then fell into chaos, war, and death. Then another rose up, and the cycle went on. Rome lasted for over 1,000 years through the Republic, then good emperors and bad emperors and back to good then back to bad… and ultimately the lights went out.
It forces humility on a once-utopian revolutionary. Whatever it is that we achieve today is but a blip. Our empires will also fall, and new empires will rise. But it’s not about futility; it’s about something else.
Two, that something else is ultimately, I think, hopeful. Because what history teaches is that whatever problems we’re dealing with today are not much different from problems our ancestors dealt with time and again. One way or another, our problems will be resolved and for those of us that survive, life will go on. Read about the Fall of Baghdad during the time of the Mongols and see if anything you’re confronting rises to that level of despair. I really doubt it. So be cheerful and upbeat! It might be bad, but really… it’s not that bad, historically speaking.
History also teaches that meaning isn’t derived from building great empires or raising tall buildings or whatever sign of success we imagine. All of those will eventually be ground into dust, left as ruins for future generations to tour in large groups. Meaning is derived from what we manage to do in our short time on earth to put a dent into the universe, to enjoy life to the fullest while we can.
“Gather ye rosebuds, while ye may” might have been written for virgins by Robert Herrick, but I think it applies to all of us no matter how aged. Because in the grand sweep of history, we all should gather our rosebuds while we may.
3. The Body… It’s Real
I don’t suffer from regrets. It is, I think, one of my strongest traits. But even with that, if I have one regret, it is that I didn’t take my body all that seriously as a younger man.
I have always been a bit of an intellectual. I always preferred reading to sports, and the life of the mind to the life of action. And I don’t mind that all that much; this is how God made me.
But after half a century on earth, I do think that I failed to realize that human beings are not just ghosts in the machine. We’re not merely souls trapped in our bodies, nor brains carried around by imperfect vessels. The body in which our consciousness dwells is very real, and it is very much a part of who we are, who I am.
I wish I had spent more time as a younger man strengthening that body, and taking care of it. I know I spent far too many years simply taking my body for granted, and not caring all that much what I could do with it, and abusing the crap out of it with too many late nights, too much drinking, too much junk food, too much smoking, too much of everything I suppose.
I don’t fully regret the all night drinking at clubs; those experiences formed who I am and it was fun as a twentysomething to live that life. I do kinda regret that I didn’t go work out after that all night binge, though. I do kinda regret that I never thought it was all that important to be strong physically, or flexible, or athletic (within the very limited gifts in that arena I was given), or whatever.
Life being short (see above re: history), it’s not too late, and I know that. But boy, I wish I had realized earlier in life that I am not a mind in a body but a perfect fusion of both. The body, it is real.
4. The Most Important Trait for a Man
If there is one thing I credit my younger self for, it is this insight. I have long felt that the most important character trait for a man is courage. Fifty years have reinforced that belief.
Of course we all strive to be well-rounded. Everyone should be (and I have tried to be) kind and considerate and wise and thoughtful and friendly and sociable and giving and loving. Yes, sometimes caution is the better part of valor. Yes, it is important to be smart and savvy.
But for a man, the most important trait is courage. It is that “Oh, fuck it!” attitude that has, in the long run, served me more than any other. It is what leads to taking risks; some pay off and others don’t. But it’s the ones that pay off that change everything. It is what leads to some sense of self-worth for a man not just in the face of danger, but also in the face of uncertainty.
It is best to plan, to think, to investigate, to consider, to strategize… but there does come a point where you have to decide Yea or Nay. And courage matters so much for a man, even more than I had thought as a younger man.
Again, the ancients had it right. Because we haven’t evolved that much. The virtue of courage is very much a manly virtue, because men were expected to be soldiers. In our 21st century society, that’s no longer an expectation… but we abandon the virtue at our peril as a society, and a man abandons the virtue of courage at the peril of his own self-respect.
Because sometimes, you have to be able to just say Fuck It and go for it. Whatever it is. And be willing to pay the price for that decision, which is part of courage. It is a virtue of battlefields, but it is also a virtue in business, in relationships, in life, in everything.
A coward is not a man; a man is not a coward. And only the man himself knows when he is being a coward, and that knowledge will kill a bit of his own soul.
(For what it’s worth, I’ve always thought the most important virtue for a woman was grace, or perhaps put differently, wisdom.)
5. On Money and Freedom
I spent so much of my life being concerned about money. Don’t we all?
Unless you’re born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you’re poor when you’re young. And even as we make more money with time and experience, most of us never have enough money.
So we all do what we have to do to make money. The careers, the businesses, and all that goes into those (college, education, training, competition, etc. etc.) all are concerned about making money and keeping money.
Money is important. There is no doubt about it. And political economic systems have nothing to do with the importance of money. Socialists and communists also need and want money.
But….
I have come to realize that at least I don’t want money per se. I’m not after money for the sake of money. I’m after freedom. And in every society of man since the birth of societies of man, one cannot be free without economic freedom. In this civilized world, economic freedom means money.
The trap that I managed to avoid that so many of my friends and peers have not is that they have traded their freedom for money. That is their right, of course, and oftentimes they do so because they have higher priorities, like supporting a family. Yet, it is plain from their own words and expressions and lives that they are unhappy in the exchange.
How many partners at the NYC BigLaw firm did I see making seven figures, with second homes in the Hamptons, every luxury imaginable, living the high life by any measure… who were miserable. They felt trapped. They felt unfree. They were locked into golden handcuffs by the money, the lifestyle that it afforded, and the responsibilities they took on because of that money. They all dreamed of quitting that seven-figure job and doing what they really wanted to do. So few of them actually did.
I have managed somehow to avoid that, maybe because of that early experience. If so, I’m grateful to Providence for that lesson. I’ve given up extraordinarily well paying jobs to pursue something else that I wanted to do: attorney making $150K a year, or a magazine editor making $28K a year? I picked the latter, because I wanted to. In a way, isn’t that what freedom is? To do what you want, when you want, how you want?
I know I could have made more money in my career had I made some different choices, but those choices, I think, would have made me less free.
Of course everyone must make enough money to be self-sufficient. One must take care of one’s responsibilities after all. Beyond that point, however, I have managed to learn that freedom isn’t free and I’m okay with that.
Money is great, but freedom is better. And money is sometimes a trap. A golden trap, but a trap nonetheless.
6. People Are People
One of the worst things I learned at Yale was that I was better than almost everybody else.
It’s the culture of the Elites that the Ivies and their ilk breed. It’s the chants at football games when our Elis were getting our butts kicked by Colgate: “SAFETY SCHOOL! SAFETY SCHOOL!” It’s the professors and the deans telling us over and over again that we have the Burden of Leadership because of our having been admitted to the hallowed halls of Yale. It’s society at large telling us that we are special, that we are smarter, that we are more accomplished… that we are better than other people.
It took a long time for me to break that way of thinking, but break it I did and I consider it a major step in my growing the fuck up.
Thomas Sowell, the eminent economist and public intellectual, once said that the best thing about having a Harvard degree was “never again having to be impressed by someone with a degree from Harvard.” I strongly identify with that quote.
I have spent most of my career in the real estate industry. It is not one that is populated by elite Ivy Leaguers. I consider it my great good fortune to have come of age in this industry because it helped me break that elitism from which I suffered as a young man. Some of the smartest savviest people I know went to schools that the younger version of me would have taunted. Some didn’t go to college. They’re impressive people nonetheless, and they order around lawyers and investment bankers with their Yale and Harvard degrees.
Furthermore, just because I’ve read Kierkegaard and Heidegger and know a thing or two about finance and law doesn’t somehow make me competent in truly important things, like fixing a busted sewer line, or laying down electric power lines, or (as I learned when my younger son got hit by a car) saving people’s lives. I’m a fucking moron in so many areas of life. Elite my ass.
People are people. Some are smarter than others, but they in turn have talents and gifts that the “smart guy” doesn’t have. Some are better looking, some are more socially gifted, some are harder working, some are inspiring leaders. Some are scumbags and others are malicious.
I have never and do not now believe in “equality” as sometimes expressed by the SJW crowd. Michael Jordan is in no way equal to me as an athlete, but I bet I’m a better writer than he is. What I do believe in now is “equality” as expressed in the classical liberal tradition: we are all equal in the eyes of God, equal under the law, equal as human beings.
I don’t get starstruck, because I have come to realize those big-time business leaders are just people. I’ve met CEO’s of major public companies; some are nice guys, and others are douchebags. Some are smart, others are not. Some are great, and some are horrible. I’ve met Jeff Bezos; he was a nice guy, but super nerdy. I don’t think he walks on water, nor do I think he’s an evil genius. He’s just a dude who happened to make a ton of money. I haven’t yet met Presidents, but if I did… I’m betting that I’ll think that Obama and Trump are just guys. Because they are.
They’re not superior to me anymore than I am superior to the waitress bringing me a drink. They just have more power and money, like I have more power and money than my waitress. But we’re all kind of the same underneath it all. That’s the sense of equality I’ve come to embrace, once I broke from the high-and-mighty sense of being Elite.
People are people. So are you. So am I. So are we all.
7. Lies Are Tiring
I’m no saint. I’ve told lies. Small ones and some big doozies.
Sometimes, lies are necessary. We all call them “white lies” because those small falsehoods make society possible.
“Hey, how was your weekend?”
“Oh man, my wife and I got into a big fight that ended in a screaming match and the cops being called. We’re looking into couples therapy, but I think we’re probably going to get divorced.”
That’s just not how coworkers ought to greet each other in hallways.
“It was great! How was yours?” is the white lie that lets us get work done.
But one thing I’ve come to learn is not to lie, not because I’m some fucking saint or some moralistic preacher, but because I’m lazy. Lies are hard work. And I no longer have the energy for them in most situations.
It turns out that one lie often leads to more lies to cover up that first lie. Then those lies lead to more lies and more deception to cover those up. Eventually, you end up with this fucked up house of cards network of falsehoods, and you need a relational database to keep track of which lie supports which other lie which in turn supports that other lie which underpins the original lie. It’s tiring.
It is just so much easier to keep your story straight if that story happens to be true. If push comes to shove, after five decades of life, I’d rather just stay silent than tell a lie, because I’m too lazy to keep all the different lies straight in my head.
Morality says don’t lie. It’s even in the Ten Commandments. But the lesson I’ve learned is that practicality also says don’t lie. It’s too much work to keep it up. The truth is always more efficient.
—
Well, that was cathartic in some weird way. If you’ve managed to read all the way through, well, I appreciate you. There was certainly no need for all that. But if any of this resonated with you, great! If it didn’t, that’s also great. If you hated some of it and want to argue with me… well, go for it. I enjoy a good argument.
Really though, it’s probably not worth your time. These are just a few thoughts of a middle-aged guy celebrating half a century on this planet.
Here’s to a few more before I shuffle off this mortal coil!
-rsh
