No More Second Chances

The foreclosing of possibilities in middle age, age gaps in marriage and more in this week's roundup

A reminder, I’ll be speaking at this year’s Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology, April 26-28.

Age Gaps in Marriage

Flowing Data is a great data visualization site. It put together some great charts about age gaps in marriage.

Click over to read this piece.

Declining Possibilities

Janan Ganesh wrote an interesting column in the Financial Times about the myth of the second chance.

The surprise of middle age, and the terror of it, is how much of a person’s fate can boil down to one misjudgement. Such as? What in particular should the young know? If you marry badly — or marry at all, when it isn’t for you — don’t assume the damage is recoverable. If you make the wrong career choice, and realise it as early as age 30, don’t count on a way back. Even the decision to go down a science track at school, when the humanities turn out to be your bag, can mangle a life. None of these errors need consign a person to eternal and acute distress. But life is path-dependent: each mistake narrows the next round of choices. A big one, or just an early one, can foreclose all hope of the life you wanted.

There should be more candour about this from the people who are looked to (and paid) for guidance. The rise of the advice-industrial complex — the self-help podcasts, the chief executive coaches, the men’s conferences — has been mostly benign. But much of the content is American, and reflects the optimism of that country. The notion of an unsalvageable mistake is almost transgressive in the land of second chances. 

This provoked a strongly negative reaction when I posted it on Twitter, proving his point that Americans cannot accept that at some point, our possibilities in life decline, that some paths are now foreclosed to us. Or that some changes are enormously difficult and uncertain at best.

Coming to this realization, which starts to hit around age 35, is one of the underlying causes of the mid-life crisis. We start to come face to face with our own limits, and for the first time are able to emotionally connect to the future story arc of our lives. Very often we don’t like what we see in it.

It reminds me of that Henry Kissinger quote I once shared:

In the life of every person there comes a point when he realizes that out of all the seemingly limitless possibilities of his youth he has in fact become one actuality. No longer is life a broad plain with forests and mountains beckoning all-around, but it becomes apparent that one’s journey across the meadows has indeed followed a regular path, that one can no longer go this way or that, but that the direction is set, the limits defined.

Each step once taken so thoughtlessly now becomes fraught with tremendous portent, each advance to be made appears unalterable. Looking back across the path we are struck by the inexorability of the road, how every step both limited and served as a condition of the next and viewing the plain we feel with a certainly approaching knowledge that many roads were possible, that many incidents shaped our wandering, that we are here because it was we who journeyed and we could be in a different spot had we wishes. And we know further that whatever road we had chosen, we could not have remained stationary. We were unable to avoid in any manner our being now in fact somewhere and in some position. We have come up against the problem of Necessity and Freedom, of the irrevocability our actions, of the directedness of our life.

Best of the Web

This video from a men’s conference at a church in Missouri shows the “relevance” orientation of evangelicalism. It creates imitative versions of existing popular secular trends (in this case a mashup of things like UFC, WWE, and TPUSA), packaged for its own subculture. While these products are invariably inferior to the original, there's definitely a big internal market for "the evangelical version of whatever is popular now." This shows why they persist in this, even though they’ve lost enormous market share to online men’s influencers that have eaten their lunch. BTW: when I played that video, my wife said, "I don't know what you are watching, but it sounds like the WWE."

Ben Dunson: Agains Brokenness Theology - After “the triumph of the therapeutic,” the adoption of therapeutic language is a core pillar of an approach to church based on a strategy of relevance. We see it a lot in both the seeker sensitive and cultural engagement world.

Several people on Twitter were very upset that MAGA Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake in Arizona adopted an essentially pro-choice position on abortion. This gets at my previous analysis of the differences between social conservatism and cultural conservatism. Lake is a cultural conservative, not a social one in keeping with her MAGA orientation.

First Things: The Antifragile Brendan Eich

NYT: Sick of Your Blue State? These Real Estate Agents Have Just the Place for You - more on the political big sort.

London Review of Books: Where does culture come from?

No symbolic system in history has been able to rival religious faith, which forges a bond between the routine behaviour of billions of individuals and ultimate, imperishable truths. It’s the most enduring, deep-rooted, universal form of popular culture that history has ever witnessed, yet you won’t find it on a single cultural studies course from Sydney to San Diego.

New Content and Media Mentions

I did podcasts about my book Life in the Negative World this week with Down to Earth and That’ll Preach.

I was mentioned in First Things, the Washington Free Beacon, World Magazine, and by Anthony Bradley.

In case you missed it, my newsletter this month was about our identity being the foundation of everything.

I also wrote about how successfully competing with the manosphere will require a vision that is distinctively masculine.