Fight Club Lessons

I'm sitting next to my brother Jimmy at the Grand Lake theater in Oakland. October 1999. With heavy anticipation we are about to watch the movie Fight Club. When the movie was over we both shrugged "it was alright".  

Watching it again last night, 22 years later, it struck me differently. The first act of the movie was fantastic and the rest good if a little long at times. What really struck me was the Ed Norton character realizing the pointlessness of his early 30 something life. The need to be something beyond IKEA, a good job, and lattes. He wanted a human connection. He wanted to be masculine, not emasculated. He wanted to be a badass like Brad Pitt. So he blew up his life figuratively and literally.  Not sure why, but I didn't catch that then, when I was in my early 30s and was in the middle of blowing up my life. Quit my stable job for a fragile startup. Quit my wife for a whisp of what could be. Moved from the suburbs to the city. Started over. There isn't sentence that can capture how that worked out. I can't say things worked out for the better. I can't say they worked out for the worse. It is a mix of things which leaves me here, typing on this coach in Beijing at age 55.

At 55 I find myself in a bit of limbo. Two years ago I didn't think I would still be working or at least not as intensely as I am. A year ago I put together a two year plan to retire but now I feel I'm not in a rush. What would I do? My eldest child is about to start college and has been pulling away from me emotionally which I know is part of the deal. My second and third child still have a ways to go.

I think when I retire I will finally learn Chinese. Or at least study it. And I will do some coding again. Or at least struggle with it. And I will write more; try my hand at a little fiction. These things I would do, respectively, for pride, ego, and serenity. I would learn Chinese because there is some shame that after 16 years in China I cannot hold a conversation. I've tried now and then to learn but give up after the initial lessons. I tell myself I'm too busy. As for coding, I used to be a damn good coder in my day but I don't get to do that for my job anymore. Frankly, the coding work at my company doesn't look like that much fun. But the coders stand a bit taller, like they know how to do serious work compared to what I do. News flash - all work is equal. I know this. I also know my ego wants me to code to show them I can do it. Finally, for myself I'd like to write and improve as a writer. Not to be published or read, but for my own sense. My own meditative sense.

So the message of flight club that should have landed with me when I was 30 lands with me now. Not that the message really applies now, not in the same way at least.