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Who am I? I’m Shem Opolot, a health professional turned content creator, passionate about helping people be their best selves in life and work.
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HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 My mum turned 70 this week, which, while I’m grateful, I’m pretty sure she turned 70 last year, and the year before that. She’s still as vivacious and curious as ever. So naturally, I told her to pursue a doctorate. The circle is almost complete.
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LIFE
Young, dumb and old
It might be my mum’s 70th birthday, or the realization that time is flying by and my kids are outgrowing their shoes and clothes almost as fast as inflation; I’ve been thinking about being young and being old.
Lydia, who writes a great newsletter called Tangents and Truths, mentioned recently in an introspective piece that she was “becoming her parents.” I, of course, accepted her invitation for comments on said piece, adding, among other things, and quite unoriginally, that to age is to empathize with the adults of your youth.
When I think about aging, it doesn’t take long before I think about money.
The Instagram algorithm serves me a constant dichotomy: influencers offering financial advice for the future on one hand, and hedonists urging me to carpe diem on the other.
I struggle to figure out what ratio of commitment to those two extremes to adopt.
But as I think about the sacrifices we make in the name of “financial discipline,” I find that the trade-offs are less about money and more about prioritization. There are things you’re able to do now that you’ll neither be able to do in your 60s nor want to do at all. You may want to hike a trail or taste all the local beers in a small town now, but your 60-year-old self might prefer to sit with your grandkids or friends, share stories, and complain about the youth of the day.
This rumination on aging coincided with my reading Jane Ellen Harrison’s musings on the tension between the young and the old, where she says:
Anyone who honestly wants to be young again has never lived, only imagined, only masqueraded. Of course, if you never eat, you keep your appetite for dinner.
Harrison defines youth as a time of self-assertion, exploration, and selfishness; and aging as dominated by authenticity, perspective, and a growing affinity for community. She also asserts that the old and the young, who will always be at odds, are best served by leaning into their seasons.
Harrison talks about the youth’s propensity for masquerading, while claiming that old age precludes pretense because “real life”—which you might call “adulting”—forces your mask of choice to slip over time.
She gives a sobering reminder to old people—the kind of notice you should show your elders and yourself when you get there—that for as much knowledge as they’ve accumulated, the youth are often better equipped to handle what comes next:
It is a waste of time putting up signposts for others who necessarily travel by another, and usually a better, road. Old people are apt to make disastrous confusion between information that can be accumulated and conveyed, that is identical for all time, that is knowledge, and experience, that which must be lived and cannot be repeated.
But Old Age does worse than that. In trying to impose its experience as a law to youth it sins not only through ignorance, but from sheer selfishness. Parents try to impose their view of life on their children not merely or mostly to save those children from disaster — that to a certain extent and up to a certain age we must all do — but from possessiveness, from a desire, often unconscious, to fill the whole stage themselves.
And she effectively buries the old by saying:
…Youth starts life on the shoulders of Age, and therefore… sees farther and is actually more likely to be right.
Importantly, at least for me, Harrison says that youth is necessarily characterized by impulsivity, experimentation, exploration, and self-centeredness, because that process crystallizes a “specialized” individual who can now play their unique part in society. Aging is knowing your role, like a musician in an orchestra, playing your part and harmonizing with the group.
To crystallize your specialized self and avoid masquerading for too long, you must be critical about your priorities today—about which things you choose to put off til later.
Because now might be the best—and only—time to do these things. Because, as Harrison put it, “It is possible to stay young too long. There is a time to grow old.”
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THINGS
A quote
I started reading Middlemarch by George Elliot, and this excerpt—a description of one of the orphaned (and single) daughters—amused me.
Such a wife might awaken you some fine morning with a new scheme for the application of her income which would interfere with political economy and the keeping of saddle-horses: a man would naturally think twice before he risked himself in such fellowship.
A picture
I visited St. Louis, Missouri two months ago and I had to visit The Gateway Arch. It’s the kind of thing you do as a tourist to oversell the fact that you visited a place yet you, in fact, were only there for a little over a day at most.
To demonstrate the scale of the structure, I pointed out where I was in the picture. I spread my arms and legs out and stood as bigly as I could.
WORK
Try this*
The asterisk is such a powerful symbol in Excel.
If you want to count the number of gmail email addresses in a list, you can use the asterisk to tell Excel to look for every email that ends in “gmail.com” like so:
“*gmail.com” — tells Excel to search for text ending in gmail.com.
“*gmail*” — tells Excel to search for text that has gmail somewhere in it.
“gmail* — tells Excel to search for text that starts in “gmail” (which would likely return 0 most times).
PRODUCTS
A course
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FUN
The Friday Fix playlist
Your picks
> Can you solve these riddles?
> What did ancient humans do all day?
> Do you behave on a flight?
Have a great weekend,
— SO
