BALANCING YOUR WORK-LIFE ON THE HEAD OF A PIN

“Don’t ever let your day-job disrupt your basic core.”

That was my dad, back when I was still in high school, dispensing unsolicited advice at the most arbitrary moments. Like on his way out of the bathroom or during a commercial break watching the Super Bowl or in the drive-thru waiting on a Mcmuffin and coffee.

That was dad with his enigmatic pearls, to say nothing of his prescient use of that Silicon Valley term-of-art three decades before it became an annoying commonplace.

Like most things he said at the time, I ignored it – or rather I denied its importance while storing it somewhere deep within my temporal lobe, hoping, despite my posturing indifference, that one day I would refer to it and even value its insight.

Call it the serenity of hope, the irrational confidence one places in oneself while still gestating within the callow arrogance of youth. I don’t know whether to credit my father for this but I’ve always held the firm belief that beyond the reeds of recalcitrance – those silent rebellions one wages as a kid – there lies a wealth of accumulated wisdom drawn from the desecrated idols of authority. I reflect on this as I watch my sister struggle with her fifteen year-old son Emory.

She hovers over her strapping offspring like a billowing mass of admonition and gloom. She projects into his future with a stiff, Stygian foreboding. The poor kid can hardly breathe.

You’d think this straight A wunderkind was a slacking fuck-up the way my sister rides him. Emory, an insanely precocious, socially awkward kid has his heart set on becoming rich. He’s aiming for Princeton with an eye toward going into “financial services.”

My sister is convinced that she created a monster.

“Lighten up,” I tell her, “he’s going through a very healthy period of emotional differentiation. We all did it and we all turned out fine!”

But my sister wants no part of it. To her Emory is a careful project gone awry, as if she thoughtlessly forgot the baking soda and the cake no longer has a chance to rise.

Which brings me to Darcy.

My friend Darcy is the only person I know who welcomes the ubiquity of the robocall. “I’d rather be in the hands of a competent computer than subject to the sloppy courtesies that lubricate human interaction.”

Darcy went off the deep end when, upon discovering in her childless forties that her chances of conceiving were rapidly narrowing, embarked on the path of artificial intervention. Her under-loved husband who until then played the part of the unlicked, inevitable lover was now recast as the inadvertent donor. Their union soon came to resemble an agribusiness where no reproductive GMO was left untested.

Months went by and when science finally failed them Darcy quickly consigned her mate to the category of superfluous -and annoying -shopclerk. Sex had lost its utility and as a “value proposition” it was discarded like an expired coupon.

Darcy sees marriage as one of those necessary bullet points of respectable adulthood and has as much talent for love as I have for spinning china on dowels. She loves to text, or rather more precisely, if communion is unavoidable, the more impersonal the better.

She looks forward to the day when apps finally replace all those toiling in the service economy. Who needs checkout personnel when your smart toilet paper and cheerios are encoded and linked to your fitbit, automatically drawing from your credit card by the simple act of putting them into a bag and leaving the store? This dystopian future where the neighborhood butcher who used to put aside a few neck bones for your mom is exchanged for a touch screen and a drone delivery is something that Darcy actually looks forward to.

My sister is afraid that Emory will become a sort of Darcy 2.0. She sees the anti-intellectual trends of frictionless technological advance as the dry fossils of an artless future. She’s panicked and she’s laying all her anxiety on her poor, practical son.

But I’m not worried. The Darcys of the world are doomed because our collective core is a flame of feeling and to those of us who still value the senses, the gorgeous, languid and ineffectual pleasures of living will never be supplanted by a mad craving for efficacy.

Thank God Darcy couldn’t get pregnant!