Ok, so, I have three months of free Apple News. Which reminds me, I totally wanted to blog about that awful iPad advertisement where Apple crushed all the life out of the cosmos, but then I guess they pulled the ad, so that’s really tragic, because I feel like I could have had a lot of fun things to say about it. Color me sad that I have an Apple phone, but at least it’s really old and doesn’t work very well.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes! I have three months free of Apple News and it comes with a side of AARP propaganda. This is so epic (I don’t know how to get a link that’s free and clear, because…I’m old)—it’s titled “One Woman’s Search FOR HAPPINESS: Mary’s floundering gives way to flourishing after applying some practical, research-tested midlife interventions.” And, because we are old and slowly sliding into senility (sorry to my friend who hates alliteration—I just can’t help myself sometimes), it’s a bunch of badly drawn cartoons of a dumpy-looking middle-aged lady named Mary, interspersed with blocks of infantilizing text. Let’s see what Mary is up against, shall we?
The first thing we discover is that she’s not a real person, she’s a composite of “older Americans.” Her “journey is based on hard science and facts.” Her full name is Mary Gonzalez-Lewis. She is 60. And, she “sits in her home on a stormy day, feeling like so many of us—fed up with miserable headlines, worried about what’s coming next, and wondering if she’ll have enough money to get by without having to lean on family or white-knuckle it alone.” The cartoon writer asks that immortal question, “Isn’t this supposed to be ‘the happiest time in life?”
Wait, where did that idea come from? Or actually, all those ideas? The idea that you should “get by without having to lean on family?” That’s insane. And that this is supposed to be “the happiest time?” Who says? I’ve never heard that before.
But just consider the appalling assumption at the base of this journalistic effort. Mary is a single woman with, as we’ll discover in “chapter” 2, one daughter she hopes to take to a Taylor Swift concert. Which means that there must have been a man at one time, who isn’t there now. Mary is working full-time at a job she hates. Her finances are in disarray and she’s not “happy.” Somehow, for some reason, this sixty year old composite person doesn’t know the first thing about an ordered and disciplined life tethered to reality and relationships.
This is what the American “Dream” has come to. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness devolved into being a single woman, alone, trying to ingratiate herself with a single daughter, who doesn’t know the basic things about human existence—as the cartoon will show us—whose highest ambition is to not having to depend on any other human person for anything, except maybe the state, because that is somehow better than being embedded in a social familial network of emotional and material obligations that have literally been a thing since the dawn of time.
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