I Don't Know That Guy

The Germans have a wonderful word, Torschlusspanik, a noun that describes the fear that time is running out to take action, that you're getting too old to achieve a long-sought life goal, that it will soon be too late to seize an opportunity. We've all felt that at one point or another, but this blog is not about that.

This blog is about an inversion of Torschlusspanik — instead of being afraid of not achieving objectives, being depressed about the fact that when success does eventually come, it will not come to you, the person you are today. It will come to someone else, the person you will become, a person who has changed and evolved in ways you cannot predict. That person will probably live in a different place, have a different job, enjoy the company of a different group of friends, wear different clothes, eat different foods. That person will be as unlike the you of today as the you of today is unlike the unrecognizable, incomprehensible person you were a couple of decades ago.

It has been speculated by psychologists that one of the reasons procrastination is so seductive is that we never really identify with our future self. We know that if we take care of this task now, our future selves will derive the benefit. But if we sit around and do nothing, our present selves get to savor the pleasure of leisure. The immediate, tangible joy of being lazy and unproductive is much more compelling than the abstract idea that this person we will be tomorrow or next week will be glad that the job got done. We know that person will be us, but at some primal level we don't feel it.

I don't know what the real word is for this emotion I'm describing, but I call it "Letterman Sadness." As in the sadness you feel when you realize that you will never be interviewed by David Letterman. Not because you will never be a celebrity, but because by the time you become a celebrity, it will be someone else hosting the Late Show. (I came up with this term long before David Letterman announced his retirement, which I guess both helps to make the point and also adds an extra tinge of poignancy.) You can't picture the perks of your future in detail and apply them to the world you currently inhabit. Daydreaming about being a guest on some theoretical future talk show is not as satisfying as daydreaming about being a guest on the talk show you're watching right now.

Consider a young woman who is in her second or third year of college, working her way towards an eventual MBA. Let's say she has fantasies about being a wildly successful businesswoman, a stylish tiger in the boardroom, deft and cunning, smart and well put together, confident and radiant in her billion-dollar success. Maybe she imagines arriving to work in a helicopter, shaking hands with the President, being on the cover of Fortune magazine, having a bestselling biography by a respected journalist, owning half a dozen companies, being surrounded by admiring, envious subordinates. She wants all of her current friends and classmates to be impressed, to see what she has accomplished. But she must acknowledge that by the time all these things happen, she won't know most of these people anymore. With the exception of a few durable long-term relationships, the overwhelming majority of the people she sees every day in the classroom and around the campus will long since have faded into the obscurity of distant, vague memories. Right now she knows the faces and names of every single person in her statistics class; in twenty-five years, she might not recall ever having taken statistics in college. That's Letterman Sadness.

My goal is not to be a celebrity or a tycoon. My goal is to be truly free: free to wander the world, unfettered by budget constraints or time limits, able to seek adventure and fulfillment in whatever form happens to appeal to me at the moment as I drift from place to place, governed only by my whims as I ride the tides of happenstance. There are lots of different ways this could ultimately happen (and it probably won't), but even if it does, as a rational man I am forced to accept that it will be a very different version of myself who gets to relish the outcome. It might turn out to be true that a 54-year-old Austin or a 74-year-old Austin finds himself in the fortunate position of bouncing from one escapade to another, crossing oceans and crawling through caves, flying over mountains and hiking to remote waterfalls, from the luxury of the most vibrant metropolis to the serenity of the most isolated island. He will be parachuting in Patagonia and kayaking in Kenya, sailing in Sicily and diving in Dominica, signing copies of his novels at an event in London on Monday and soaking in a hot spring in New Zealand on Friday. And I'm happy for him, at least in a general way. But I don't know that guy, and I never will.


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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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