Dear George,
Another of my early-eighties birthdays is coming up soon. I don’t look forward to it that much. When I was a kid between eight and twelve, I was always excited about becoming a year older. Nowadays I wish I were going in the opposite direction. The two birthday aging things on my mind are death and dementia. Neither are popular with the general public. Death sounds the worst, but, when you think about it, it has its advantages. You’ll definitely never be bored or irritated again. I think that dementia gets a particularly bad rap. I’ve been mulling it over ever since Katja asked me to bring the laundry downstairs and I brought down two pillows instead.
My main thought is that dementia is not unique to old age, but really it’s around from the very beginning and persists throughout most of life. You can see this immediately by going to the zoo and looking at babies in strollers. We all, of course, begin life as babies, and it’s interesting to note that they have practically no minds at all. They gurgle, drool, pass gas, suck their thumbs, scream, cry, and poop and pee. That’s about it. When we think of the so-called symptoms of dementia (e.g., confusion, inability to comprehend things, difficulty learning new tasks, mood swings, poor judgment, disorientation, inability to concentrate, difficulty of thinking of words, risk of falling down, etc.), we are essentially describing what babies and toddlers are like for the first several years of life. This suggests to me that dementia is elemental human nature. On a 0-100% scale, I would say that babies get a dementia score of 98%.
Children, of course, are taught a lot of things as they grow older. They still, though, remain mostly demented. When I think of the highlights of my childhood from, say, ages five to twelve, what comes to mind is praying that the Easter bunny and the Tooth Fairy will come, not stepping on cracks which would break my mother’s back, setting the living room curtains on fire, and stealing my brother’s Halloween candy. Based on such experiences, I’d estimate that school-age children are about 80% demented.
Teenagers aren’t much better. They’re taller and possess better verbal skills, but they’re not much oriented than 7 or 8-year-olds. As an adolescent, I mainly remember being overwhelmed by social anxiety, alienated from my parents, subject to mood swings, perplexed in relationships with peers, beset by fantasies, obsessed with trivialities, and worried about psychic survival. Dementia level? Maybe 70%.
Adulthood is usually seen as the peak of mature mental functioning, but that’s a myth. Society demands a certain amount of rationality and logic in the workplace, but, below that surface level of conformity, we remain largely motivated by impulse and craziness. This is what Freud meant by the primacy of the Id. We just keep our real selves hidden away, though our demented selves regularly break through. At work, dementia = 45%. The rest of the time, 60%.
All of this changes in our older years when society kicks us out of the workplace. Rules, roles, and social expectations gradually recede, and we become free for our real selves to emerge – silly, confused, emotional, and bumbling. Though we get distressed about this, we could also think about it as a normal and liberating state of affairs. Dementia, creeping up to 75% or even more.
The conclusion seems clear. Rather than resisting or denying dementia, we ought to recognize that it’s actually our natural state throughout our lives and embrace its presence. Being demented, from this perspective, is the ultimate form of self-realization. Having resolved this in my mind, now I have to think a little further about death. Given my demented mind, that shouldn’t prove difficult.
Love,
Dave
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