Things I Wish I Had Known When I Was 18

A few months back on the BBC website I came across an inteview with sociology professor Fred Furedi about five things he had felt he had learnt during his life (he is 63).  His five were: 1. Listen - because you can learn from anybody; 2. Question everything; 3. Rely on your intuition; 4. Always reflect on your motives when you are dealing with your children and 5. Things are never as bad as they seem.  Two things struck me about this.  First I was interested that almost all the points were completely the opposite to his (with point 4. I am only occasionally a pseudo-parent so cannot really engage with that point) and second it reminded me of a similar column I used to see in one of the Sunday newspaper magazines when I did a paper-round in the early 1980s which was entitled as I have entitled this posting.

I am not as old as Furedi, but I have experienced quite a bit of life.  I know that I came from a privileged background: my parents never divorced; we lived in the same house all through my youth; we lived in a middle class town in southern England not hit by unemployment and social problems as much of England was; I was not sexually abused (though I was physically bullied by peers and constantly humiliated by my parents who portrayed me as looking like someone mentally disabled); I had friends (though fewer than I realised); I had a room of my own to sleep in; I was well fed but not obese and when I went to bed it was not wet or cold.  I must say, however, that I have been incredibly disappointed with my life.  If I had written this posting some months or years ago, I might be more positive, but facing losing my house and having no work for months is clearly going to alter my view of things and make a lot of what I have done in recent years seem entirely wasted.

I will start with Furedi's five points and then add some of my own.  In terms of listening, I agree up to a point, but the more I have heard the more I have heard the same.  I have been struck by how small minded and bigoted the average person is.  I have lost count of how many times I have been told that the problems of the country are down to immigrants with absolutely no evidence.  Such things are repeated so often that they are no longer challenged.  The same with stuff around the Thatcherite agenda, such as deregulation and privatisation; that large numbers of people are defrauding the state and millions are getting more than their fair share.  I am sick of this stuff being repeated to me as if it is acceptable and beyond challenging.  I do not know how I would have reacted if at 18 I would have known this, I guess I would have terminated conversations with many people much sooner, simply walked away.  It would be better to be thought peculiar than to listen to hours and hours of this rubbish which I must have heard in my life, simply wasting time I could have spent reading a book.

In terms of Furedi's question everything, I think there is no point.  I thought this was the case when I was a child, but I think I was misled by the lingering radical lecturers at my university who had been students in the 1960s and had not thrown off such attitudes even with their prosperity and success (more likely because of them).  Basically, unless you are a member of the ultra-rich in our society, you are never going to be able to change anything.  There is no point questioning what happens.  Often it will be unfair and irrational, but whether it is how your company does things or how you are taught or how the country is run, you are in a position which means you can do absolutely nothing about it.  Even if you question it, the answer will usually be irrational and refer to habit or tradition and you cannot break that down.  This particularly applies in the workplace.  Most offices, factories, warehouses, shops, etc. have methods which are wasteful in terms of time and resources but never try to challenge these and suggest a better way, it will simply cause you to be complained about as a troublemaker or naive and certainly not being wortwhile employing.  An episode of the US series 'Malcolm in the Middle' (2000-06 in USA).  Teenager Malcolm gets a job working in a warehouse where his mother works.  He is charged with squashing up empty cardboard boxes and then taking them to the refuse.  The pattern is that the boxes are loaded into a lift taken down a floor, taken into the box-squashing area, squashed, loaded back into the lift, taken back up a floor and then to the refuse container.  To speed things up Malcolm squashes them on the floor they start off on and then takes them over to the refuse container, so saving time and electricity.  He receives an official report against him for not complying to procedure.  This kind of thing happens in every warehouse in the UK and in every office or shop or factory there is similar behaviour, but unless you want to lose your job do not challenge it.  In terms of wrongs in our world, complain about things, shout and protest about how wrong they are, but do not waste your effort questioning most things as you simply irritate people and generally they can give you no answer which makes any sense.  Save your effort.

Intuition is useless, you might as well toss a coin or throw a dice to decide the step to take in any situation.  Even when you have lived life it is impossible to know enough to make a judgement that will save you from harm or discomfort.  The best you can do is learn as much as you can about a situation and at least dodge some but certainly not all of the unpleasant consequences, e.g. use a condom when having sex should spare you from a pregnancy developing or getting a STI, but you are unlikely to avoid your partner's ex-boyfriend/girlfriend attacking you jealously, unless you have researched your partner's background and choose a different location or time to have sex with the person.  Intuition is far too often affected by superstition and prejudice and so often blinds you to the full range of options and in fact can channel you down fixed, bad paths and leave you with no alternatives that you might otherwise have seen.

As I say I cannot comment on dealing with 'my' children.  I certainly think it is worthwhile checking your motives when engaging with anyone not on any moral basis but because it will allow you to see why you are truly doing something and whether that motivation is liable to alter or more likely flag as time passes.  A clear example is joining a club or activity because you know someone you are attracted to is a member/participant.  That is a bad motive.  The likely outcome is that you will be stuck doing something you do not enjoy and they will not be interested in you anyway.  You will endure doing something you do not like and wasting time that could be spent on more enjoyable things for you.  I am not saying just be a hedonist, but that your focus should be on the central activity not ulterior motives or possible by-products of doing that thing.

Things are always far worse than they seem.  As I grow older I adhere to the phrase 'it is later than you think', as used in a religious context, i.e. you must change your life and seek salvation as soon as possible because you are going to be judged sooner than you believe.  I do not see it in that particular way, but I think it is a good attitude when thinking about your life.  Often minor things happen, such as something goes wrong with your car or your house or there is trouble in your workplace.  Too many people, myself included, think, 'it is only minor, I have time to get it sorted'.  No, not only is it already too late when the problem becomes apparent, it is going to get worse, because one problem triggers a whole series.  You will find the repair to the car costs more than you think so you have less money or you get to work late and steps begin to remove you from your job.  In the current economic climate, no job is safe, even teachers and nurses could lose their jobs very quickly.  You constantly need to be looking ahead for potential problems.  You constantly need to be saving what you can to prepare for the dire situations that come up in your life.  Even then you have to recognise you cannot foresee everything and will get caught out unexpectedly.  Unfortunately there is nothing that you can do about that, it is part of life.  I know now that when I was teenager I was not cautious enough and rather than think I could survive in the business I dreamt of going into, I should have trained as an accountant or a lawyer and right throughout my life I would have avoided things like living in an unheated room above a chipshop sharing a bathroom with seven other people and losing the house I bought now.  Always be prepared for the worst that you can imagine, because, in reality, life will be even worse than that.  Anyone who tries to follow dreams, especially in their careers, will suffer badly.  Find the most secure occupation you can and cling to it; keep retraining constantly to widen your options and even then be prepared for not getting even a fraction of what you want.

Moving on from Furedi's points there are a few others of my own.  The first is that most people quickly forget when you have said something in passing that upset them.  I often believed I had offended people by what I had said and worried about it greatly and assumed they would hold a grudge against me.  Perhaps this stemmed from childhood experiences when people in my district constantly referred to mistakes of the past.  I was once at a party and turned down a dessert saying I was not allowed by my parents to have 'packet food' (I had assumed wrongly that it was 'Angel Delight' a very popular, very sweet dessert in a packet of the time) as they were into self-sufficiency and homegrown stuff at the time, the mid-1970s.  This offended my friend's mother who had put a lot of effort into the dessert.  Running into the woman more than 12 years later she immediately challenged me on what I had said at the age of 8 and was clearly still unhappy about it.  However, as life has gone on, I have found that people generally forget faux pas and inadvertently insulting comments incredibly quickly.  Not everyone, of course, but the bulk.  I do have a concern that in the age of social networking, we are all now experiencing longer duration of anger at such faux pas. I blame this on the hyper-emotionalism being brought from the USA to the UK in which all friendships have to be the greatest ever with constant contact and all groups gather and fall apart like girls in a US high school playground with snubs seem as some heinous insult, even simply not acknowledging immediately or daily is seen in this way.  Such attitudes, spill into the workplace.  Thus, at 18, I wish I knew that most people do not take faux pas to heart and let them fester for days let alone years, but at 42, I would warn myself that perhaps my childhood experiences are more mainstream now.

People do not want the truth they want a quick answer.  Being interested in many topics it took me many years to learn that even if people ask you a complex question they want a quick, simple answer with no context.  I have to rein myself in sharply these days because somehow a lengthy answer is now taken as 'improper' especially in the workplace where it seems to be insulting to the 'time poor' staff.  You have to keep thorough answers to your diary or your blog, most people want nothing lasting more than 3 sentences, you have to stick to simple concepts, generally engaging their prejudices, whether you are emailing or speaking to them.  Challenging someone's view of something unless done very subtly is seen as an insult.  At 18 I loved the complexity of ideas and events and assumed everyone else did and wanted to discuss them: they do not and will become irritated, even insulted, if you try.

Women do not like to have sex with virgins.  I was never very successful with women, but realise that at 18 I should have been far less picky and simply have had sex with any woman who offered it.  As a man, if you have not had sex by the time you are 21 then it is unlikely you ever will have sex.  Women, no matter what their age, do not want to be a man's 'first'.  The woman who was mine was incredibly angry when she found out and ended the relationship as she weirdly thought I would somehow be obsessed with her.  Given her attitude I was clearly quite happy to be rid of her.  Women expect a man to know precisely what he is doing, not matter how young he is.  You need to read up as much as you can, get to know all the current jargon and never, ever admit to your first partner that she was the first, not even years later, because even then she will turn strange and may spurn you, even if you have had lots of sex with her by then.  After 21, women will guess that you are a virgin anyway, it seems impossible to hide.  So, whilst taking precautions, I certainly recommend all men, who want to have sex in their 20s and beyond, having sex with a woman before they turn 21 otherwise your chances of ever having it drop to almost zero.

Women are very complex anyway and the input of all the media means they are often not making decisions for themselves but making decisions selected by others.  On one hand I wish I knew at 18 that some women will be gravely offended if you even dare to ask them out and you must be ready for how cutting they will be and how indignant that you dare ask.  Conversely, I would say, it is amazing who women will be attracted to and you may feel that you are incredibly gawky and ugly but there is at least one, if not many more women you will meet who would at least like to sleep with you and perhaps have a long-term relationship.  Certainly if a woman asks you out, it is usually genuine.  I often thought I was being played with, but with hindsight, I see that whilst some women might want you simply to get them pregnant, the vast majority simply would not bother asking you if they did not feel that there was something good about being with you even short-term.  I was always chasing women who had no interest in me and never knew how to handle those who actually had asked me out, thinking it had to be some kind of trick.  In this still too heavily male-focused society, any woman who has made the effort to ask you out is worth going out with.  The vast bulk of women of your age have no interest in you, so one who expresses an interest is to be treasured.  The other thing I would say to my 18-year old self, is that the most unexpected girlfriends are often the most successful ones.  We all have an ideal, but actually real happiness is found in the least expected place, in terms of a woman's interests, appearance, nationality, background, even age.  If you really want happiness have an open mind.

Do not reveal anything much about yourself to work colleagues, it will be used against you.  Never tell anyone if you are married or single or who your parents or siblings are or where you used to work, even where you holiday or what books or movies or food you like.  All of these things will be taken and used by someone in your workplace to disadvantage you.  Do not have family pictures on your desk or talk about your wife or parents, keep all of this secret.  If you have to, fabricate a life that fits with your colleagues' prejudices about what a 'normal' person of your age and position has.  Obviously, I would advise anyone to keep details available online about them to a minimum.

One thing I am glad I did adhere to when 18 is not to disrespect anyone, even if you disagree with their views, they are worthy of respect as being humans.  Certainly if you run into a dictator or a torturer challenge them as far as you can (without endangering yourself or others), but almost all people you meet in normal life think they are doing right and are doing it for worthwhile motives.  Even if what they are doing is wrong, do not lower yourself to become like them.  You are unlikely to change them by disparaging them, but your mean-spiritedness is going to put other people who could be your allies, off you.  As far as possible avoid unpleasant people and console yourself that they will pay a price whether you believe as a result of karma, being judged in the afterlife or by being left friendless because of their behaviour.

I would tell my 18-year old to go and visit more people.  Even if it means lengthy journeys, actually visiting friends is a rare commodity which will become rarer as you get older and you will look back at missed opportunities to spend time with friends.  It is important for your wellbeing to get out and see people.  There will be ample time for sitting at home in the future.  Travelling with people is a whole much harder thing, far more difficult than you could ever imagine and only worthwhile doing with individuals who can tolerate their life while travelling to be entirely different to everything they had at home, even if going camping in the UK or to a hotel in France, and who do not get frustrated when things turn out differently to what is expected.  Do not plan too much, people jam holidays full of stuff, just absorbing the place is often enough, do not try to adhere to a rigid, packed itinerary, it will simply raise the chances for frustration and problems.  Enjoying being away from home and with friends and family should be a far greater priority than seeing or doing everything you had considered doing.  Only travel with sexual partners if married to them, no other set-up will stand a holiday.  It is better for you to have short breaks and to holiday separately with same-sex friends or family until you have effectively become family to each other.  So many good relationships are broken by holidays and I am far from being the only person to note this.

In terms of myself at 18 in terms of travel, I would see be less afraid than your mother about me travelling to places.  I miss out a great deal in 1989 by not seeing the Berlin Wall before it fell and in 1995 in not going to Prague and Budapest, for fear that I would be robbed or not find someone to stay.  My holidays cycling in France would have been better if I had not been terrified of not finding anything to eat on a Sunday.  Whilst caution while travelling is sensible, fear actually reduces the experience and means it fails what the basic principle is of travelling, which is to have fun.  I certainly wish I had had the courage to do things at university such as 'rag hitch hike' and gone on more random trips because succeeding at them would have built up my courage to travel more.

Another personal thing which would not be broadly applicable, would be to tell my 18-year old self not to be deluded into thinking that I could learn foreign languages or learn any martial art.  I wasted a lot of time and money doing both, ultimately for absolutely no personal gain, and, a long the way a lot of stress and disappointment.  Despite what you are told by the people wanting to market their courses or their club, not everyone can achieve success in these areas.  It is certain I am an utter failure at trying to grasp foreign languages or do a martial art and yet I continued to delude myself that 'this time it will be different', it never has been.  Finally giving up on Mandarin for the second time two years ago and chucking in fencing back in 2005 were long overdue admissions that I would never be good at not only these specifics but at these things in general.  When I was younger I wondered if I should not have taken up the chance to study Japanese in Japan, but now know that was the correct decision.  I certainly should not have gone to live in West Germany in 1989 as my grasp of the language was just as bad when I came back as when I went and all the good things I experienced there I could have experienced just as well as a tourist.

I would tell my 18-year old self that I would never be published.  Though it was not as severe a situation then as now, I should have realised that there was never any chance that anyone would pay any attention to what I had written to want to publish it.  There are tens of thousands of full-length books being written in the UK now and the vast majority of these will never be published.  Before wordprocessors were common they were probably fewer in number, but certainly I wasted a lot of my life writing and editing stuff that no-one beyond myself is ever going to read and it is clear it will never be published.  It was a massive delusion on my part and I should have spent my time doing something else and saving my cash.  People do not get published because they have an ability to write good work, just look at the quantity of appalling books.  They get published either because of luck or most commonly because of who they know.

One thing that I would have told my 18-year old self to do is to attend more public appearances by people, particularly politicians, historians, scientists and authors.  I often could not stir myself to go to these things, but I severely regret that now.  Despite our television, and now internet age, there is nothing like actually being in a room with someone you admire or, conversely, strongly disagree with and I wish I had taken up far more of the opportunities that were presented to me to do this.

I would also tell my 18-year old self that whilst hard work is vital, it never guarantees anything.  Working until 9 p.m. most evenings of the week studying in the library does not get you a 1st class degree.  If I had stopped at 5 p.m., I probably would have still got a 2.1, but been able to do more of the things above.  I certainly warn my 18-year old self at 21 not to take the advice of what turned out to be a very foolish lecturer, and take time every day to read the newspaper.  Following that suggestion in my final year at university caused immense difficulties.  I lost hours of time which I should have been spending on my work, for absolutely no personal gain.  I knew more about day-to-day events of those months but they have given me no benefit then or since.

Anyway, these are the things that I wish I had known at 18.  I am a person who, when anything goes wrong, always analyses how better it might have turned out if I had made different choices.  In most cases, living in the UK in the times I have done, there is little change I could have made.  Getting some slightly different jobs would have made a huge difference, but if this recent glut of interviews has shown me, I have minimal control over which job I get, and the same applies for where I have lived, too often it has been Hobson's Choice.  However, if I had been able to get these thoughts back to my 18-year old self, I think a lot of the time between the difficult times would have been a lot happier and certainly satisfying than it turned out to be.  I think this is because unlike, perhaps Fred Furedi, there are very few parts of my life that if I had the chance to change them in some way, I would want to leave them just as I experienced them.

Being 'Past It'

I have commented before about how having become 40 in the past year, I realised that all the things people said about this phase of your life were lies. Life does not 'begin' at 40, in fact so many things that had been open to you in previous years are now shut off. In the UK it becomes far harder to get a job when you pass 40 and you are more likely to be the one who is made redundant when there are cutbacks. Unlike in some cultures, experience is not valued in UK business, rather low salaries and malleability are those things that are the most rated.

As you are growing up you soon learn that the doors close behind you pretty quickly as you age. A school-aged child soon learns that they are now unable to go in the part of the park reserved for toddlers or sit around all day watching CBeebies and having a snooze in the afternoon. This is particularly the case in the UK where children now typically start school at 4 (compared to 5 when I began and 6 even now in Sweden and South Africa) and by the time they are 7 they are sitting their first exams. It is ironic that maturation of children is now accelerated in the UK by this country's (or certainly its government's) desperate need to monitor everything and yet, juvenalisation of adults continues.

We sort of freeze our children at 11-14 constantly sitting exams but never taking on any responsibility and being ferried around by their parents. Hence people in their 20s and 30s take on minimal responsibility for their health or their behaviour, so we have binge drinking and an unwillingness to recognise the consequences of your actions or make any effort to change them or society. This is a society in which our parents now take responsibility for us until they die.

Anyway, as we pass through life the doors are always closing behind us, but in exchange we get given new things. Okay, so now I have to go to school but I have a big group of friends and find out new things and go on trips and so on. So now school has finished and my life lacks structure and direction, but I can drink alcohol and take drugs and have sex without too much hassle and so on.

People are very aware of these stages, despite the fact that in the UK we have long lacked proper rites of passage which make it difficult to see these change. I think we should have a civil version of the Jewish Bar Mitzvah/Bat Mitzvah (the female equivalent) which comes around 13 and there is a recognition that the child is coming into adulthood and importantly, that they now put aside childish things. Such rhetoric is part of Christianity but the British Christian churches (despite the increase in popularity of their schools) seem to wash their hands even more of the role of maturing young people than they have in the past. Sorry, we are moving off into a whole new topic.


Back to the point, despite the British lack of rites of passage people are quite sharply aware of these steps, as I am here with being 40. When you become 30 you look around at/think back to how many of your contemporaries got married. I attended 6 weddings the year I turned 30. I felt it was like the party game musical chairs, i.e. when the music stops drop down on the nearest chair or you miss out. In many cases people marrying at that stage just seemed to have plumped for whoever was convenient, because otherwise they would miss the vital date. No-one saw me as a suitable candidate, perhaps because at that stage I was dating women either 2 years older than me or 7 years younger and I never anticipated being married myself even if they had been willing. In the former case she wanted a husband taller than her, rather than the same height (6'0") which I am; she did find him.


When you turn 40 you lose so much, as I outline in this posting, but there is nothing you are offered in exchange, there is nothing new that you are able to do or access. You have the same worries as you had at 35 but fewer opportunities to counter-balance them, no wonder we hit 'mid-life crisis'. The only thing to look forward in my life now is retirement. At a minimum that is 25 years away and more likely given population changes and economic needs, 30 years away. In addition, retirement is no longer the time when you can sit back and relax and enjoy hobbies.  Instead the financial restraints, the number of pension funds that have been raided by companies, means, actually, it is the time when you drop into poverty.

So, the next big milestone for me, like millions of other Britons, is going to be even worse than this one. My father, now 70 himself, once mooted why more pensioners do not take hard drugs. They have nothing to live for except dying when they can no longer afford to pay the fuel bills, so, he suggested, why now go out in a heroin-induced haze at 66? He is of the generation with good pensions and good health so is enjoying travel and exercising, reading, eating out, all those things that will be denied my generation as we fight each other to try to secure that job collecting up the shopping trolleys at Tescos so we can afford to have a single heater on in our homes.This is jumping forward in time a bit, let us come back to the situation for me now. In recent weeks other things have re-emphasised to me how I have passed a point of no return. Two colleagues in the wider business that I have tried contacting, have turned out to be on maternity leave, one with her first child, one with her second. Both of them are in their late twenties, but with lots of time to produce the three children which seems to be the standard number for middle class British families these days. I know, as a man, I can keep on producing children until I am in my 70s, but female contemporaries of mine are very unlikely to be able to do so. So, if I entered a long-term relationship now then there would be no children out of it.

As it is, for me, the age of relationships seems passed. This was re-emphasised by another colleague, a newcomer to the company, working as a PA. Initially she dressed in a low-key almost, dour way, but in the past week her wardrobe has changed to over-the-knee boots, shrugs and short dresses and her hairstyle from a simple ponytail to elaborate tresses. The mumbled conversations on the telephone in the office, with her back turned to the door, suggest that a relationship is afoot which has provoked her changed style. There is no way I can envisage, at my age, provoking such a reaction in a woman these days, let alone actually starting a new relationship. From men I know, a decade or so older than me, I am aware that even if you can get a woman to go out with you she is simply interesed in a platonic relationship and any steps towards anything physical, however mild, ends the relationship immediately.


Of course, the women out there of my age are unlikely to be particularly enthralling. Recently I stumbled across an online discussion about making Easter gardens, by a woman I had known at university. At that time I knew her, she had been incredibly sweet but also sexy. As I have recounted before, I completely bungled any relationship with her, something I had regretted up until now. However, reading the discussion about such a mundane issue on a website group for Christian mothers, I did think, well, even if we had hit it off, then no doubt this would be the kind of woman I would be married to now, and my life would be no better than it is for me anyway.

I suppose we all turn into our parents. For me that is a particularly unpleasant phenomenon and I shudder when I hear my father's expressions in things I say as I would loath to be ever as mean spirited and have such a violent temper as him. However, what I am saying here, is maybe we cannot escape that development. At best, we can only be incrementally different to our parents, despite how we may appear in our 20s. To discover the sweet and sexy woman has mutated into a Christian mother and an expert on Easter gardens reveals that it can even happen to those you do not expect it from.


The other thing is health. Compared to even just five years ago when I would spring from bed and cycle to work I am now in a situation in which getting up in the mornings is a long and painful process. My joints seem to hurt constantly and lethargy is also a constant companion. It does not matter how early I go to bed, I still wake exhausted. Even a light meal leaves me bloated and without appetite; nothing seems to have flavour. All my faculties seem to be crumbling away rapidly. I already take seven medicines each day and a varying number to counter their side effects. I still have 25 years of working life, if not more, as the working age is liable to rise in that time, what is it going to be like trying to get ready for work when I am 65 if it is already so tough now?


Life does seem incredibly tedious. By the time you reach 40 there is nothing unexpected left. You have a very jaded attitude to things. Nothing is stimulating, it is simply tedious. I suppose we know too well how expensive everything costs. Travel and holidays are too expensive to consider and anyway, you know all the things that are going to go wrong at the airport, with your luggage, with the hotel, with the food, with thieves, etc., etc. Exotic places seem simply to hold hazard, expense and trouble and prove to be more of a burden than if you simply sat at home. Even going to Belgium and to Bath, hardly exotic in anyone's view, proved to be a series of problems and expense. It is not that I am jaded from having seen and done too much, in fact the reverse.

The 1990s were probably my decade of opportunity, I was aged between 23-33. However, I earned £5408 (€6,814; US$9,626) per year at the start of the decade and £9500 (€12,065; US$16,910) at the end and, of course, that was with UK high prices on food, clothes and rent. I had three holidays in the 1990s: one week on a canal boat in the Midlands, one week in a house in France and two weeks cycling between cheap hotels in France, that was it. I did not experience any of the changes in Eastern Europe or go to India or anything. Of course if I had tried, no doubt I would have had all my belongings stolen or I would have been killed or caught some terrible disease. This sort of thing is going to be very common for people who have just left university this year and have thousands of pounds of debt.

Due to the difficulty of finding work, I was a little ahead of my time. British young people today are being constrained into the kind of dull life that I experienced even before they turn 40 and they will envy their European counterparts who at least have a little more ability to experience something different. My brother's wife is about to have a baby in Belgium and I can tell now that his/her life will be far more interesting than that of the 6-year old living in my house who will never go to university and will probably be shot dead in Iran or Syria as part of a British invasion force 12 years from now. The same applies to that boy's cousin just about to be born, though, given how repressive his parents already are, his grim life will start from the moment he sees daylight.


I know I am 'past it' as the popular British phrase says. I have got as far in my career as I will ever get. I have had all the relationships and all the travel that I will ever have. My income will decline from now on and my life will be grey and plagued by ill-health. Of course, anyone over 40 knows all this. However, this message is to anyone who is under 40, even if you are 35: get out there, spend and travel as much as you can, have as much sex and alcohol as you can get. There is no future. You have another forty or fifty years once you turn 40 and the greyness of those years will seek to erase any excitement that you might have had up to then, so you must build up an excellent resource of thrilling memories.

Do not believe the lie, life does not begin at 40, it begins its agonisingly slow descent to death. I suppose I am fortunate. I was told back in the 1980s that I had a life expectacy of 51. I have had premonitions, surprisingly precise ones, that I will die in a car fire in Spain in 2024 when I am 57. The premonitions suggest my father will die in 2020 at the age of 83 and my mother, 8 years later, at the age of 90. So they will have had a good 'innings' as us Britons describe it and I should only have to bear the next 11-17 years. Looking at it that way, however, it seems like ages. So, anyway, do not be like me, heed my warning, and live an interesting life before the greyness subsumes you.

Get A Life! A Second Life?

This posting is looking at Second Life which is a social network system, launched in 2003, that allows users to interact with each other via avatars (i.e. animated three-dimensional representation of themselves) which can be as realistic or fantastical as they like. The space in which they opeate are 'islands' that people and companies and other organisations (the Chinese government famously has recently bought a very large island) and put in structures, buildings, shops and so on. By paying in real money, people have currency within the environment. See: http://secondlife.com/ Second Life now has 13 million members predominantly from the Western countries. There are other less popular ones appearing and so are more game orientated (most controversially the Miss Bimbo one recently launched which encourages young females (from aged 9 upwards) to have an avatar who becomes a model and buys expensive fashions and has cosmetic surgery, etc, in their own words in an effort to: 'Become the most famous and beautiful bimbo in the world..': www.missbimbo.com It is currently being investigated by Ofcom the British communications watchdog see: technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3628914.ece ). Sorry, I have got on to the controversial aspects already before filling out the background. Second Life is not a game; its activities are created by the users moving around and interacting with each other and the devices and buildings there. Other rival worlds include: IMVU, There, Active Worlds, Kaneva and the explicitly sexually-orientated Red Light Center.

There seem now to be regular presentations how getting into Second Life is an essential part of marketing a company and you see regular reports that IBM and Gap and many others are setting up their own spaces in the system and effectively marketing is what the Chinese government is doing with its own island. People can walk their avatars into your store or whatever and see about your products, your company identity, etc. However, as someone at a presentation said 'why would you want to buy a Gap teeshirt when elsewhere in Second Life you can be a panda'. All over the internet are people creating outfits and bodies for avatars by the hundreds. Searching for real clothing you constantly hit websites promoting virtual clothing for avatars. For other similar, more game orientated sites such as World of Warcraft which I have mentioned before: www.worldofwarcraft.com/ people actually sell products that can be used in the game via the eBay online auctioning site as if they were real items not just some computer coding. So to some extent real world companies are having to compete with the more fantastical items that you can buy to use in this other world.

Right, well this is all well and good, part of our modern society and the step on from more mundane social interaction sites such as Facebook and MySpace. There of course are the usual hazards of online interaction in that 'online no-one knows you're a dog' to quote Peter Steiner from 1993. The avatars which do not even have to be human often do not reflect the individual operating them. This can be liberating as it allows people to play out very different roles, in a 'safe' environment, for example as different genders (or even species) and interact in that way. In Second Life you can be as beautiful and as trendy as you like and never age. Those playing against type might find out useful things about themselves online, notably if they are concerned about coming out as gay/lesbian they can use this as a first step to interact with others on this basis. In addition, it soon becomes clear in any search of the internet that there is a lot of cybersex of all kinds going on and whilst this is 'safe' compared to physical sex in terms of risk of sexually-transmitted infections (STIs) and pregnancy, etc., it can have psychological effects. One interesting blog on that aspect is by Abulia Savant whose avatar over a period became more and more a sexually submissive character ultimately a sexual slave to other avatars, something she initially enjoyed but which has left her very concerned and discomforted. Her blog: http://www.abuliasavant.com/?p=207 shows that what goes on 'virtually' is not totally divorced what who we are in this world. Online a writer called Xah Lee has a tour of some of the more exotic elements of Second Life: http://xahlee.org/sl/index.html Note, some images are sexual, but most are anodyne. He shows also people whose avatars are dragons or humanoid animals, etc. which outlines how some people use it in the way similar to MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) are used, though lacking the quests and so on of those.

To some extent the use of virtual worlds has long been predicted in fiction going back to the 1980s, especially cyberpunk writing which regular readers will know I enjoy. We have not reached the stage that those authors like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson (interestingly I was once in a college library which had Stephenson's fiction works in its section on technology; he also created a steampunk/cyberpunk crossover in 'The Diamond Age' (1995)) envisaged, with us physically connecting to the computer and our whole consciousness fading into it, but there is nothing to say that will not come. We have virtual reality headsets and controllers that shudder to reflect action happening on screen. In addition people do become immersed, such as the 26-year old gamer known as Zhang (a Chinese surname) who died in a cybercafe in southern China in September 2007 after playing for three days solidly on Morrowind. Many of us having spent a long time at our computers will stand up to find we have a full bladder that we had not noticed because our minds were so taken away with what we were doing on screen, so maybe we do not need it even more immersive than it is. It does seem though we are moving gradually in the direction envisaged by the cyberpunk authors and possibly ultimately even further towards the

The other area of concern that I would bring up stems from this immersion and relates to my recent posting about my failed holiday and the 6-year old's withdrawal symptoms from being away from computer games just for a couple of days. This week I talked with three mothers one who has a 9-year old daughter and a 13-year old son, one with two sons: a 16-year old and an 18-year old and one mother with a 21-year old son. It was agreed that boys/men are much more likely to become seriously addicted to online facilities whether gaming or socialising; girls/women do participate but are more likely to mix it in with other activities. All the mothers said that online involvement had harmfully affected their sons' academic work. One was now moving to set up his access so it chucked him out after two hours. This was a lot easier in the days of dial-up connections (which I was surprised to find are still common in many parts of the USA even) than with the constant broadband flow. To some extent the 6-year old in my house is finding that no-one knows what he is talking about when he goes on and on about the games he has played at home, but I imagine that the reverse will be the case in 5-7 years time and as an adolescent if he lacks a virtual presence people will ignore his physical one. Schools need to work with pupils not only about the potential dangers of the people they meet online (and it does appear they have been quick to add this to the lessons on 'stranger danger' regarding people in parks, etc.) but also how to manage gaming/online socialising in the same way they address drugs and alcohol.

I deliberately used the title 'get a life!' because in the past that was what was shouted at geeks and nerds who were felt to be too obsessed with their hobbies and interests. Things may be beginning to be turned on their heads and people who are simply present in the physical world are going to be seen as the ones missing out. The online world is going to be 'better' because we can be who we want to be. I can be the 25-year old Goth lord with steampunk technology rather than the 40-year incompetent with an old PC, so which am I going to choose? On this point I read that this was the reason why the first movie in the the Matrix triology, i.e. 'The Matrix' (1999) was so much more preferred to 'The Matrix Reloaded' and 'The Matrix Revolutions' (also 2003) because in the first movie the characters much of the time striding around in cool, shiny costumes with big guns whereas in the latter two movies they spent more time in dreary, gloomy settings dressed in shabby clothes. In that context the bulk of us want to remain in the matrix rather than go outside and face the cold, hard real world. This is fine when we can physically load ourselves into a computer and become a stream of electrons. However, for now, we have to work on ways at how we and especially children of today and tomorrow balance the needs of our bodies, to have a job, to interact with physical humans in this boring, mundane, uncomfortable place and leave the other life for an occasional break not the dominant facet of our lives.

P.P. Well, following all of this discussion I decided to give it a go and I must say the results were disappointing. On Second Life I registered on the CyberGoth default as Rooksmoor Oberlander (you get a limited number of surnames and for UK citizens they all seem to be German or Polish surnames) and went in for orientation. It was like a basic point and click computer game. The key difficulty for me was that the graphics clearly clash with my computer as rather than the cool CyberGoth male all I got was what looked like rags hanging from a scarecrow and no feet. Other people either looked the same or as mis-shapen boxes. I talked to a few and then gave up as it is difficult to interact when you cannot see the people as people. I then tried Red Light Center, much more involved in downloading, but seemingly less developed when you get there and you cannot even do the most basic thing there without having to spend real world money. I suppose it is a commercial business and they seem more concerned to push contact websites so I found it difficult even to access the world, so I de-installed that one.

Clearly there are more challenges than I envisaged becoming virtual. No-one could explain my graphics problem on Second Life so it seems insoluble. My computer is only a couple of years old and capable of rendering the complex graphics of 'Medieval II Total War' with hundreds of people in it, far more detailed in image than on Second Life. Maybe my broadband is too slow to render the avatars properly.