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Josh Knox

Just Joshin' #118 (Age)

Published about 1 month ago • 3 min read

1 Family Photo:

Last week, my dad turned twice my age.

It's an odd milestone. When someone turns twice your age, you are as old as they were on the day you were born. For that day, your birth marks the midpoint of their life. Why don't we have a word for this?

I propose we call them Doubledays.

Doubledays are like birthdays, but extraordinary. Birthdays are individual holidays celebrated once every year. Doubledays are joint holidays that can only occur once in your shared lifetime with another person.

You can calculate Doubledays in excel:

  1. Type your birthday in one cell
  2. Type their birthday in another cell
  3. Subtract the older birthday from the younger birthday to find how many days between the two dates
  4. Add that number of days to the younger birthday to find the Doubleday

Having crossed our Doubleday, I'm now living the ages of my father that I've known. I've been five-years-old, ten-years-old, twenty-years-old, but I didn't know my dad when he was 5 or 10 or 20. I only started existing once he was in his thirties. Is there some age-related insight about this man I've known my whole life that I will finally appreciate? Some perspective on early fatherhood or father time that will now make sense?

--

Calvin and Lawrence's Doubleday with each other was at the beginning of last year. We missed celebrating it. Doubledays can happen quite early in life if you're close in age with someone.

My Doubledays with Calvin and Lawrence will be in the 2050s. I hope I'll be there to see them.

1 Dad Joke:
Coming of Age

​

Highlights:
Ages

Tens

​On Turning Ten by Billy Collins​

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.
​
You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.
​
But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.
​
This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.
​
It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

Twenties

​Interview: Kevin Kelly, editor, author, and futurist by Noah Smith​

Your 20s are the perfect time to do a few things that are unusual, weird, bold, risky, unexplainable, crazy, unprofitable, and looks nothing like “success.” The less this time looks like success, the better it will be as a foundation. For the rest of your life these orthogonal experiences will serve as your muse and touchstone, upon which you can build an uncommon life.

Thirties

​The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce by Tom Wolfe (1983)​

In the Silicon Valley there was a phenomenon known as burnout. After five or ten years of obsessive racing for the semiconductor high stakes, five or ten years of lab work; work lunches, workaholic drinks at the Wagon Wheel, and work-battering of the wife and children, an engineer would reach his middle thirties and wake up one day—and he was finished. The game was over. It was called burnout, suggesting mental and physical exhaustion brought about by overwork. But Noyce was convinced it was something else entirely. It was ... age, or age and status. In the semiconductor business, research engineering was like pitching in baseball; it was 60 percent of the game. Semiconductor research was one of those highly mathematical sciences, such as microbiology, in which, for reasons one could only guess at, the great flashes, the critical moments of inspiration, came mainly to those who were young, often to men in their twenties. The thirty-five-year-old burnouts weren’t suffering from exhaustion, as Noyce saw it. They were being overwhelmed, outperformed, by the younger talent coming up behind them. It wasn’t the central nervous system that was collapsing, it was the ego.

iamJoshKnox Highlight:

​DoubleDay Calculator Template​

I made a Doubleday calculator template. What are your Doubledays?
(note: the sample birthdates are not for me and my dad).

Time to Chat?

Grab some time on my calendar and share a story this week:

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Book some time even if you don't know what you want to talk about:
​https://calendly.com/iamjoshknox​

Until next week,
​iamJoshKnox​​

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Josh Knox

Hi! I am Josh Knox. Read more of me here: 👇

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