It was quite a show on Sunday February 9, 2025, or so I heard: Kendrick Lamar performed in the cultural center stage of the Super Bowl halftime show at the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, Louisiana, decrying his supposed bitter rival Drake; I know this because I read about it in the news. I did not know who either was. I did not watch the Super Bowl this year and I never do. I did not know anything about the rival rappers involved, and I don’t care. Beef between two singers — this is worthy of my time and attention why? My answer: “No.”
I was told Lamar’s performance was quite the production!
In a related matter, I have read reports that the famous rapper “Kanye” is mentally ill and supposedly claims to be a fan of Adolf Hitler. My response: “Whatever.” You will hear of scandals and rumors of scandal: more grist for the tabloids, fodder for social media. Whether it is all really important or not is arguable. I can recognize the faces of the singers Beyoncé and Rhianna (I think), but I don’t know anything about their music of their lives (or care). They are Important Figures in the Entertainment Industry, I vaguely recognize. That is about all I know of them.
My disengagement from popular culture in the United States has happened over time. About twenty years ago I lost track of the new pretty female pop singer who was on top of the charts — there would be a new one soon enough, I figured. They all seemed sort of the same, and I lost track. The maw of American pop culture churned on without me paying attention.
Maybe this is because the entertainment ecosystem in this country tilts towards the young. And I’m not young: I will be 58-years old in three months. Maybe it is that simple. But I was not paying all that much attention when I was 28-years old, either. I didn’t watch the Super Bowl even in those days.
But it is not only sports or entertainment. I am a bit disengaged and disinterested in contemporary technological and business trends, too. (Because I am older?) I read in the newspaper today (yes, this old guy still reads newspapers, even as most of them are rapidly downsizing or worse) the following description of our economic moment in time:
“Today the political economy of the Western world — indeed the international system — is being radically rewired by novel forms of power. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, quantum computing and cryptocurrencies are the new black gold.”
Accordingly, the future belongs to Nvidia, Apple, SpaceX, OpenAI, Amazon, and their Chinese counterparts, supposedly.
The historian in me rebels against presentism and hyperbole in grandiose announcements of current “revolutionary change.” I might be wrong: maybe everything really is changing now. Yet I feel as if the world has moved beyond me a bit, and I am unqualified to judge. But I have my strong suspicions: Artificial Intelligence might be the future for my daughters, but I doubt it will be mine. In a little over two years I will turn 60-years old. I will be retired within five years. I am on the downward slope.
One of the benefits of getting older is that one mellows and begins to care less about the “burning issues of the day.” This has certainly happened to me. So I care less about almost everything.
I remember listening to my grandma back in 1977 claim that she did not care about the new Concord supersonic passenger jet, or the recently developed Atari computer game console, or whatever. She died of a massive heart attack a year later. My grandmother was done. The world had moved beyond her, and she knew it. She was ready to leave. My grandmother was staring her mortality in the face. Cutting edge trends in technology or culture were not where her attention was focused. The latest and greatest technological developments taking place during the presidency of Jimmy Carter did not interest her in the least. Here is my grandma as the matron of her thriving family in 1950:
And here she is with her son (my father) around 1965, some twelve years before her death.
My grandmother was a person of the 20th century. She did not even get close enough to glimpse the outlines of the 21st century. The biggest public events of her life were the Great Depression and WWII. She was a denizen of the analogue age, not the digital one. She did not care about computers. She knew next to nothing about them, even as the “personal computer revolution” had arrived by the time of her death.
What did my grandma care about? She cared about her family. Her Catholic faith and the church community around her. Local and tangible concerns, not abstract or macro-level ones. Born in 1905, my grandma looked back at her life during the 1970s and sought to make sense of it. She would let younger people, like me, look towards the future.
I am a very different person than my grandmother. But as I get older I see the commonalities. I have accomplished almost all of any work world successes I might reasonably realize in my life. I have (mostly) raised my daughters. In a few short years I will retire. I will be in the autumn and then the winter of my life’s journey.
What do I care about? It certainly is not cryptocurrency or generative AI. It is not which political party is in power, not really, and certainly not which pop singer or video game is popular currently. Social media seems to me an unending pit of noise and fury signifying nothing, or next to nothing; I would hardly spend the time and energy I have left there. I would not walk across the street to shake the hand of some “Instagram influencer,” although my teenage daughters seem a bit in awe of online celebrity. I’m not 15-years old.
What do I care about? I care about what is lasting and permanent. In a revealing comment in a revealing blog some way back, which even my close friends might be surprised at, I said if I could go back in time and choose I would become a Shaolin monk in medieval China. That still holds true.
There are things which are transient and superficial, and others which are not. There is a scale running from unimportant to important phenomenon. What is most important? My mortality and health (“mens sana in corpore sano”): remaining strong in body and mind. Philosophy and literature: this is where I live. Athletic exertion and mental focus. Epictetus and Seneca. Roger Federer and Andre Agassi. Michel de Montaigne and William Shakespeare. Jigoro Kano and Ginchin Funakoshi. They are cumulatively my North Star, providing guidance wherever stormy seas might toss me. Look there if you want to understand the tenor and texture of my heart and soul.
AI? Cryptocurrency? MAGA? LGBTQIA+? TikTok? Ozempic?
I am always open to learning something which might prove interesting or enriching, but I have my doubts it will come from those places.
So I find myself looking much more to the past than the present or the future, not unlike my grandma before me.
Perhaps this is a natural progression.
But it does tend to make me feel like a stranger in my own country – as if the present has passed me by. Because it has passed me by, mostly.
And I am happy to let it.
Isn’t that “aging gracefully”?
The pundits will claim that “a new age is upon us.” But is it really?
Or is it merely a new phase in the long story of humankind, with more commonalities than differences with the past? Is it really so “revolutionary”? Is life now all that different than it was in the past? Or is it mostly the same?
Historians are wont to focus on questions of change and continuity, Heraclitus and Parmenides. This is a medicine against failing to appreciate the bigger picture and place things in their proper context. Hyperbole and presentism are always a danger.
So I will always try to keep one eye on what is happening today, and what might happen tomorrow. Otherwise I might miss something important by being willfully oblivious to what I come across, just because it is new. I still live in the world of today.
But I will not keep more than one eye open.
Instead I will focus most of my attention – both eyes – on what I always have: my many heroes and role models from the past. I will try to remember to look down where my feet are as I walk, avoiding pitfalls in the road, both literally and metaphorically. My family. My circle of friends and acquaintances. Everything else diminishes in importance as it moves further away. First things first.
I will let minds younger, smarter, and more mercenary than mine worry about AI and cryptocurrency. Maybe “a new age is upon us.” Maybe not.
But I am uncertain that it really matters to me.
Amen.
