Man, dating really sucks. At any age, but more so as you get older.

I’m not a really a go-to-a-bar-and-meet-someone kind of guy. I’m not terribly social. So, my only option, particularly in this time of quarantines and pandemics, is online dating. Which is the absolute worst.

Online dating is much like social media for single people. Between inaccurate (or totally fake) profile pictures and messages that never get returned, there is a decided cowardice and lack of respect in lying to and then ghosting someone. And from stories I’ve heard from female friends, it’s endemic to both sides of the aisle, as it were.

And when did “I love tacos!” become a way to demonstrate your date-ability?¹ C’mon, now – aim higher. Everyone loves tacos. And hiking. And being on the water. And world peace.

The one thing that dating HAS done for me is to grow more comfortable talking about myself. In fact, dating off-and-on over the past nine months has helped me develop a bit of a spiel that I can jump into, at any point along the continuum, to keep an awkward first (or second) date moving along.

I’ve written about some of this before, in previous blog posts. Here, then, is the more detailed, expanded version – The Origin of 56-year-old Steve: The Special Edition:

I’ve spent the last four or five years jumping from one interest to the other. It started with music, and continued with a renewed interest in math, followed by dabbling in computer programming, and then delving deeper into philosophy…but wait, it goes back farther than that.

I was a decent enough student in high school. I could have been a straight-A student had I applied myself. However, that was not the case. I piddled around the entire four years. My final two years of high school were marked by my step-father dying, leaving my Mom as a single mother having to work to earn money to raise me, my four-year-younger sister, and my twelve-year-younger half-brother. Money as always tight, and she did the best she could.

But college was never really an option as I began my senior year. The focus was solely on me finishing high school so that I could get a job and start supporting myself. So a few weeks after graduation, I found myself delivering pizzas for Straw Hat Pizza for nine months, then it was off to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, TX, for USAF basic training.

Two years into my military service, I was married to a fellow service member. We spent five years overseas together, then four more years in Denver, CO, before calling it quits. We split up shortly after I left the military (she had retired once we returned stateside), and I was on my own for a while.

Another whirlwind romance that ended in disaster brought me to Oklahoma, and this is where I’ve been for the past twenty-six-plus years.

Somewhere along the line, I began to regret not having concentrated more on my studies when I was in school. I went back to school, getting a business admin degree from the local community college. I dipped my foot in the pool of an actual B.A. program at OSU-Tulsa.

My kids are super smart – much smarter than I was at their age, and certainly much smarter than I am now. They began feeding me interesting YouTube videos. At first it was VSauce videos – Michael Stevens’ deadpan delivery of interesting science facts and thought experiments was extremely engaging. Then one of them started sending me Grant Sanderson videos, and we were off to the races.

I can still clearly recall one video where Sanderson was attempting to explain calculus in layman’s terms (relatively speaking), and I had a light bulb moment ten minutes into the video.

In this particular video, which was part one of a ten-part “Essence of Calculus” series², less than ten minutes into the lesson, Sanderson clearly and concisely explained how, when solving for the area of a circle, you are actually solving for the area of a right triangle, and my mind, to say the least, was blown. I distinctly remember thinking to myself (and repeating to anyone who would listen), “If I’d had someone teach me this in high school, I’d be a rocket scientist by now!”

I immediately hit Kahn Academy and began relearning all of the algebra I’d forgotten over the years.

In the meantime, I’d become enamored with British mathematician Matt Parker and his YouTube channel, Stand Up Maths. He is also a frequent guest on another great channel, Numberphile. One of my favorite parts of Matt’s videos is, on occasion after working something out on butcher paper or a blackboard, will then reveal that he wrote a quick Python program to verify his results. That sealed it – I had to learn computer programming!

And so I did – I now know just enough JavaScript, HTML, CSS and (of course) Python to be extremely dangerous. My crowning achievement (so far) has been to write a Python script that will take a block of text and send it, word by work, to an unsuspecting cell phone user via SMS. Beauty!

. . . . .

My most recent obsession, philosophy, is another thing entirely. And yet, more of the same.

I’ve always been interested in philosophy – my first blog post dealt with stoicism, and that was almost two years ago. This time, I decided to approach it with the same academic rigor that I’ve explored math, science, and computer programming over the last few years. I started at the beginning with the father of pre-Socratic philosophy, Thales, and have been steadily moving forward through the different schools of thought over the last 2,500 years.

One of the things that fascinates me most about the study of philosophy is that the earlier philosophers had nothing else to go on but their five senses and their minds, and yet were able to develop such insightful, and often (overly) complicated explanations for everything.

While there existed schools of thought that invoked the four classical Greek elements (fire, water, earth, air) there was a school called the Atomists that supposed that everything was made up of smaller, unseen particles called atoms that actually made up everything we see – and they came to this conclusion 300 years B.C.E, nearly 2,000 years before the Janssen brothers in 1590 C.E.!

But more to the point, the early philosophers never gave up, and never stopped building upon the thoughts and ideas of their forebears, sometimes eloquently expanding on their ideas, sometimes developing totally new ideas and doctrines.

And that, more than anything, defines how I’ve overcome that lack of desire (and, to be honest, motivation) and am now attempting expand my horizons through the faux-academic study of things that interest me. I keep building upon what I’ve learned previously, always striving to expand my knowledge of the world around me. Or, in the words of philosopher Stephen West, to always “know more today than I did yesterday.”

The key (for me, anyway) is, word for word, to always keep moving forward.

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Links

1. Self-proclaimed “snarky dating poster” Sarah Kehoe tweeted something to this effect – @sarahkehoe. If you have a Twitter, follow her!
2. “Essence of Calculus – Chapter 1” by Grant Sanderson (3blue1brown) – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUvTyaaNkzM

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If you haven’t had a chance to check out my first book, “What I’ve Learned: Random Thoughts on Various Subjects,” now it the perfect time! Bounce over to http://bit.ly/what_ive_learned and pick up a paperback copy, or download it to your Kindle!