Live a good life, be that guy

Me and my dad have had a contentious relationship for as long as I can remember which, on… Me and my dad have had a contentious relationship for as long as I can remember which, on account of a pretty serious drinking problem, is about six years.

Part of the reason we don’t get along is the simple things. If he were reading this column right now he most likely would have stopped after the first paragraph, furrowed his brow and said, “It’s ‘My dad and I,’ Tom. ‘My dad and I,'” to which I would have replied, “I know grammar, Dad. I’m using a literary device to illustrate how you’re more ‘rules-oriented’ than I am. I wouldn’t have had to explain that if you’d actually read the second paragraph before starting to criticize,” to which he would’ve gruffly mumbled, “You should have majored in engineering.”

Imaginary (and deeply flawed) exchanges like that aren’t the reason we don’t get along, though, at least not any more than heat index is the reason Baghdad would be a bad place to vacation. Our inability to peacefully co-exist is more deeply rooted than three lines of quasi-clever banter can demonstrate.

The point of this rant isn’t to piss and moan about my problems with my dad; rather the point is that because of these problems, my old man bestowed upon me the most meaningful piece of advice I’ve ever been bestowed – which, fittingly, wasn’t even his advice.

When I was 17, the two of us didn’t speak for about seven months over something so earthshakingly important I’ve forgotten what it was. Because this particular estrangement happened to overlap with the holidays, when he came to pick up the rest of my siblings for a Christmas dinner at his not-so-humble abode, it was mutually understood that I wouldn’t be joining them. In light of this, rather than a gift, he brought me a twice-folded sheet of notebook paper which he had my youngest sister run inside to me. I read the note over a mug of hot chocolate and two blueberry pancakes. It said just this:

“If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is the stuff that life is made up of.” -Benjamin Franklin

At first I didn’t know what to make of it. I just sort of sat and stared, not really thinking or feeling anything outside of a vague awareness that 1. Something important had just happened and 2. I didn’t know what that thing was.

After finishing the hot chocolate and consulting a thesaurus, I concluded the thing that happened was an epiphany. This specific epiphany was that each of us has a finite amount of time to be alive, and thus we have a responsibility to ourselves to make that time count. I needed to make my time count.

Immediately following this admittedly trite insight, I ran into a problem. I had no idea how to make it count.

Anthropologist and near-centenarian Claude Levi-Strauss has long posited that the human mind operates in polarity; that black/white, rich/poor and clean/dirty are the prisms through which we understand the world. This model of binary thinking is a type of structuralism.

One of the phenomena that structuralism best explains is the ubiquity of the expression, “There are two types of men in this world, those who ____ and those who ____.” Though this is, obviously, a ludicrously simple way of explaining differences between people, I think it’s also a good starting point for introspective but intellectually lazy people who want to make sense of their lives.

As far as I can tell, there are two ways to lead a good life; two inherently conflicting philosophies that I can build my existence around. There are two different people that I can be.

Person one would be played in a movie by a young Alec Baldwin. He’s the plan-ahead, eye-on-the-ball, upwardly mobile and ambitious sort. This guy would get a kick-ass job out of grad school, marry a Midwestern beauty queen and probably buy his daughter a Civic on her 16th birthday. He’s trustworthy and hardworking. At his funeral, someone will say, “He was the most honest man I’ve ever known,” and they will not be lying.

Person two would be played in a movie by Owen Wilson. This guy is the live in the moment, thrill a minute sort who probably plays guitar passionately and without skill. People like him for reasons they can’t readily articulate. He falls in and out of love a lot. He sleeps on his sister’s couch and coaches intramural soccer. He thinks “didactic” means the kind of dinosaur that flies. His life will be made up of a string of enormously satisfying moments that don’t really add up to any sizable accomplishment. He will die happily but with little fanfare.

I think the question is this: Is a good life one where you live in every moment and make it as good as it possibly can be, or is it one where you frequently put off immediate happiness to further the pursuit of a larger goal? What is it that accounts for a life well lived? Which one of these guys is wasting time?

E-mail Tom at tes12@pitt.edu.