Are You Happy What You Have Accomplished Thus Far?

I am happy with the way my life turned out but I think a lot of it is due to good luck, not just my own striving.

Been married to the sweetest, most intelligent, best sense-of-humor woman in seven counties for 27 years. I take half credit for that. Although if I hadn't had the good fortune of my first wife running off (and it sure didn't seem like good luck at the time), none of this would have happened.

Got a good education because my parents believed in it. From the day I learned what the "college" was that my mother kept putting money in the bank for, I simply accepted it as unarguable that I would one day go there. CalTech at the beginning of the 1960s, no less. Talk about good luck and an astounding adventure.

Have a good career in IT. The whole industry is moving offshore because Americans simply can't endure the discipline necessary for a mature industry to maintain high quality instead of innovation and glamorous new features, but with luck I'll retire before this decade is over and there will still be a few jobs left. I get credit for this but again there was a lot of luck. My last quarter in college (1967), earning my degree in accounting, I went to the placement office to see if I could do something with that degree that didn't involve a green eyeshade and sleeve garters. They said that L.A. County had just posted some weird kind of job titled "E.D.P. Trainee," and that all you needed was a degree in absolutely anything and to pass an aptitude test. I got the highest score ever seen on the aptitude test and they wouldn't let me out of the building until I'd been dragged into the DP manager's office and promised to start work the first Monday after graduation. I've had a couple of odds and ends published, I'm regarded as a minor guru in my specialty, and I know enough about the state of the art to use a Macintosh at home.

Got a lot of pets, many of which my wife and I bred ourselves. Mostly dogs but also a couple of parrots. (Sorry, when you've been married for a long time you tend to think of yourselves in the plural. When you think that's really nice, you've got it made.)

Don't have children. I'd have been an awful father. You can just take my word on that, I'm not merely talking about the usual selfish baby-boomer syndrome here. I've managed to deploy my parenting instinct into constructive directions, such as posting my two cents here every now and then when the voice and experience of a true elder can add insight. I've also taught one-on-one ESL classes to several co-workers from other countries, and helped them get their careers moving. (ESL = English as a Second Language.)

Did all the things you're supposed to do when you're young, when I was young. Rode a motorcycle for all my transportation needs for fifteen years. Spent eleven weeks touring Europe on one of them. Experienced the 1960s first-hand, living in Hollywood. Got into the amateur music scene, sang folk songs at parties with my 12-string guitar and later played electric bass in a few garage bands. So now I don't pine over the things I wished I had done. (Well okay I never got a date with Lauren Hutton.

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) So now I'm content to be a homebody, just hangin' out with Mrs. Fraggle and the menagerie, listening to rock and roll and watching quite a few TV shows that we find worth watching.

But the most important vector in this lifetime of destinies fulfilled and opportunities grabbed was surely the unbelievably good fortune to have been born in the USA, in the modern era, as a member of the dominant ethnic group. Every day I ponder the cosmic significance of that. How did the Law of Averages manage to work so completely in my favor? I could have been born in any number of places and eras with an astronomical infant mortality rate, no opportunities for anyone not of the aristocracy, legal slavery, constant warfare, and not much use for a person whose only natural gift was an above average IQ.

I'm not saying I'm "proud" to be an American, because I certainly had nothing to do with achieving that condition. And I'm not ignorant of the fact that there are some other truly wonderful places on this planet to live. (I've spent enough time in Canada to know what my answer is to the question that is a hot topic on SciForums right now, and Australia looks like a bit of heaven too.) But I am consciously grateful for having taken my first breath in one of the most prosperous, democratic, and delightfully wacky civilizations ever to take up a major part of a continent.