'If Only': What you know by 40...

... is that 'if only' is the blue pill.

My favorite class in college was Logic.  You know...

Yes, that logic.  I loved it so much that I kept the textbook for 10 years until the thing fell apart.   Now, Logic was known as the most disgustingly difficult philosophy course at Xavier.  Ask anyone who went to X.U. in the mid 90s and they will tell you that, in Dr. Berman's Logic course, the struggle was not invalid.

Yet I got an A, got maybe two test problems wrong the entire semester.  I was so into it that I actually felt competitive with the one other student who was smashing the class.  She was a pre-med student who I would exchange narrow-eyed glances with when one of us would give the proof to a very complex problem before the other.  Both of us alternately fuming like, "You m'er f'er, I knew that!"

If only I knew then that logic is the basis for computer coding, that my favorite course in four years of college was the basis for the type of work that pays some people I know very well to work from home and cash in stock and work while traveling around the world for a few months and cash in stock.  True story.  If only I had pursued computer programing instead of using my logic aptitude to get a good LSAT score to get into (debt) Yale, then maybe I'd be newish rich right now, funding all the non-profits I've worked for over the last 13 years.  Ah yes, if only.

But by now I have come to understand that "if only" is by definition a contradiction.  'If' opens the limitless possibility of the unknown.  By contrast, 'only' implies only one outcome.  When you put 'if' and 'only' together, you imply that the limitless possibilities of life could lead to only one conclusion.  But life works not in that way (in my Yoda voice).  The only thing that does work in that way is death.

Short of death, 'if only' is a manipulation on par with Facebook's slogan: "Be connected.  Be discovered.  Be on Facebook." As if the only purpose of Facebook was connection and discovery.  Anybody breathing and on the verge of 40 doesn't need logic to recognize that as some malarkey, balderdash, and a card game called bull.  Facebook is a game of likes and a more honest slogan would be 'If Only.'

Anyway, my 'if only' myth centers around the assumption that if only I had made the choice to study coding, then the only outcome would have been rich Mike traveling the world and driving this...

A brother can dream can't he?

Yet, this assumes that I would have been good enough at coding to get a great job that would have survived the early 2000s dot com bust, that if I had survived the dot com bust that I would have managed my money well, that if I had managed my money well, that grief over losing my parents wouldn't have sent me binging on blow and gambling as opposed to Jim Beam and pizza (the only vices I could afford as a law student).

The seductive lie of 'if only' is that it is proof by contradiction, that it only seems true because if it were false it would seem to contradict the life we see someone else living.  The thinking goes like this:  I know my coder friends are rich.  So if I were a coder, I would have been rich.  But those types of comparisons are as helpful as comparing yourself to an octopus.  Albert Einstein, a logical son of a donkey if there ever was one, says "if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life believing it is stupid."  I agree.  If you compare yourself to your "successful" Facebook friends, you will get lost in the matrix of  'if only'.

In fact, 'if only' is the The Matrix architect's whole trick, his prestige (spoiler alert).  The Matrix architect makes you believe you have a choice, or in the case of 'if only' had some choice other than what you chose.  But your backwards looking reflection on what could have been, prevents you from making the choices that could create what could be.  The only way out of this Matrix, is to accept your life as the unique sum of infinitely complex fractals of factors going back through your nature, your nurture, and your non-sequiturs... to see yourself as the anomaly, in Matrix-speak.



In other words, the only truth is choice; what you chose and, more importantly, what you choose from this point forward.

Does this look sexy to you?  Now you millennials know
why we Gen Xers didn't all get into computers.  

'If only' assumes that I might have made another choice with some other information or insight.  When in actuality, there are countless factors that went into me not choosing computer programming, not the least of which was that, at the time, I could not give less of a crap about how computers worked.  For me, the only purpose of computers was word processing.  Computers made editing easier, and I loved them for that, but the notion that I would spend my time dealing with the innards of hardware or software was as asinine as the thought of me becoming a glass blower.  I mean, I used cups all the time, but I didn't want to make cups.  

Come to think of it, outside of the money, I don't think that I would enjoy coding the way I enjoyed the mental challenge of applying logic to  rhetoric as a law student, as an advocate, as a teacher, and as a poet.  Ultimately, I think I loved logic because it was communication in it's purest form, poetry without the affectation, boiled down to the essential oil that greases the gears of understanding.  Take this classic logic proof:

If Tom is a philosopher, then Tom is poor.
Tom is a philosopher.
Therefore Tom is poor.

So here's the question for Tom.  Would Tom be happier if only he wasn't a philosopher?  As a philosopher, Tom could spend the rest of his life trying to answer that question.

But me, 17 days before 40, I have come to learn that 'if only' is useful only if 'what if' is what could be.  'If only' is a powerful tool of mental manipulation.  It's the blue pill.  It is the power to compare the incomparable and it can make Tom go crazy or lead Tom to the promise land of a world-shifting philosophical principle and ample grants to go with it.  So in a paradox fitting of The Matrix Trilogy (how can a series be so good and yet, so bad), 'If only' can also be the red pill.

 If Tom, okay enough of Tom... if I say to myself, "if only I could get my writing in the hands of the right people, I'd get a great publishing deal to really launch my career...".  If I say that, then there are a number of choices that I can make right now to bring me closer to that desired outcome.  One choice would be to put my writing out to the world and ask, directly, if you, you satisfied reader you, would please share my posts with somebody, anybody.  If only you would do that, then maybe my writing will land in the right hands.  If only...

Take the red pill, my reada.  Share.  This.  Post. (in my Larry Fishburne in School Daze, "Wake Up! voice)