Is it ok to have been me? Beginning with the end in mind.

FITW #100 !!

Before I get into this week’s post, I want to share this is FITW #100! It feels like it was just the other day I started this project, but it’s now been more than two years. Thanks for hanging with me and sharing your thoughts.

Now on to the show…

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I turned 55 this week. TLW has been joking it’s my “speed limit” birthday. There’s some truth to that, but I hope I won’t be slowing down just yet. She’s also more into numbers than I am. As symbols of meaning, I should say. We’re both professionally pretty into numbers, since she’s a CPA, and I’m … whatever I am. You know. But I digress. 55. It’s a big number. It’s weird to think about. But that’s what I’m into. So, please bear with my thoughts.

Aristotle wrote that all things have a telos – a thing they were supposed to become to fulfill their potential. An acorn’s telos is to become an oak tree. A human being’s telos is to become excellent, to become a person of virtue. But one does not become excellent by accident, or by simply being. One becomes excellent by striving, by engaging each of one’s gifts and exercising them so as to become strengths. There are an infinite number of paths to excellence, and similarly, excellence looks different in every individual, but it is impossible to miss excellence, whatever shape it takes.

I’ve been thinking about the stages of human development more recently. We are not so unique as we might like to believe – we have common facts to the course of our lives – being born, coming of age, becoming the person we will be, declining, if we are so lucky to live so long. At each stage of life, like Greek heroes on a quest, we have tasks that we must complete and questions we must answer. Like Mentor, I spend my days working with young people in the first phase of emerging adulthood – the “early transition” from childhood to adulthood, as they move toward the second phase of entering the adult world. As they ask the foundational questions, what kind of life do I want? What dreams am I forming? I am asking myself, What legacy am I shaping? What do I want the next 10–15 years to be about? Because the next stage is late adulthood, with its most frightening question, Was it okay to have been me? This summative evaluation is asking if one has achieved one’s telos.

I worked for a while with ChatGPT to summarize the literature on stages of adult human development (I left out childhood for this exercise). This chart summarizes the work of human development scholars such as Erik Erikson, Daniel Levinson, and Jeffrey Arnett. The age ranges are not hard breaks – in fact, they likely overlap for long periods of time – but these are stages we each work through.

"Ego Integrity vs. Despair" is the final stage in Erik Erikson’s theory of psychosocial development, typically occurring in late adulthood (around age 65 and beyond). It’s a stage of life review and existential reckoning, and the outcome shapes how individuals experience the final chapter of their lives.

My third FITW letter was titled I coulda been a contender, and was referencing the Marlon Brando movie, On the Waterfront. The turning point in the movie is when Brando confronts his brother saying,

I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender! I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it.

This is the terrible grief of despair that Erikson references for a failed late adulthood. One arrives at the stage of late adulthood and has to confront one’s life. Could you have been a contender, but for lack of striving, lack of courage, lack of commitment, you were instead “a bum”? Did you fail to “make a becoming use of one’s own”? I talk about Smith’s theory of distributive justice in the post On being lovely . “Making a becoming use of one’s own” means to do admirable things with the gifts one has been given – talents, status, beauty, wealth, etc. In the context of human development, it means that you have striven to become the best person you could have been, within the constraints life has presented you. Brando’s character knows he could have been a successful prize fighter, but he threw away his chance for his mobbed-up brother.

The opposite of despair in late adulthood is integrity. By integrity, Erikson meant a sense of wholeness and fulfillment. Integrity means one’s life has a sense of meaning, even with the mistakes and regrets. A person who experiences integrity in late adulthood feels pride, acceptance, coherence, and purpose. As we sense the curtain of life coming down, a person who has achieved integrity is surrounded by the virtuous glow of a life well-lived, having achieved her/his unique telos.

I like the saying, none of us are getting out of this life alive. That’s the ultimate democratizer of human development. We all have the same last act. So, the question is, how do we ensure that when we arrive at the end that we do not experience existential despair? I think the answer is to “start with the end in mind”, as Steven Covey said. If you want to arrive at the end in a state of integrity, you have to live a life that would naturally lead to a state of integrity at each of the stages before you arrive at the end. You don’t have to have the right answer at each stage. There are many right answers. It’s not a what, but a how. It’s not having the right answer but living rightly. The future is not just unknown but unknowable. But living rightly is knowable. It is simple but not easy. One needs to follow the worthy life model:

First, respect for person, property, and promises. Then follow on with a continuous and dedicated effort to make a becoming use of one’s own to create meaning. This is the road map to telos. Integrity, in this sense, is the culmination of generalized competence, contribution, and connection sustained over a lifetime – a worthy life in full.

The poet Mary Oliver has a frequently cited poem, The Summer Day, in which she recites what it is like to walk through fields and observe nature, and how this gives her fulfillment. Being in nature, observing it, writing about it, gives her meaning. This wouldn’t be enough for me, and it probably wouldn’t be enough for most of you. But this is her telos. Telos doesn’t mean grandeur, it means rightness for the individual, it means integrity. In the penultimate lines, she challenges us:

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

It does, and she is right. We all arrive at the end and we are all judged by the harshest of judges – ourselves. She ends the poem with a challenge that I would like to leave you with today:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

I turned 55 this week. They say it’s the speed limit, and maybe that’s true in some ways. I’m not as fast as I used to be, and the road ahead is no longer endless. But maybe the point now isn’t speed. Maybe it’s direction. Maybe it’s driving with clarity about where I’m going, and why it matters that I get there.

Integrity is not an exam you can cram for when you reach your sixties, staying up overnight as your birthday candles burn down to nubs. You have to begin with the end in mind, not to game the system but to fulfill your telos, to live a worthy life, so that when the final question is asked, you can answer, Yes. It was ok to be me.