The Theory Of Eight

and now for something completely different

My ex-girlfriend and I used to keep Idea Books. These were little sketchbooks and journals that we would jot down ideas in, keep score while playing our various card games, and draw weird doodles. I guess this was one of our favorite things to do together: Sit around and play cribbage or rummy or poker, make cocktails, listen to music and talk about whatever bullshit came to mind. I miss those nights quite a lot, though often they also included drinking too much, and eventually even this fun little past time slipped away. Curious how the things we love invariably fade, if we’re lucky enough not to have them broken first.

In any case, one of the things we dreamed up on one of these boozy, smokey evenings was the the Theory of Eight. I’m not sure if it would hold up in court, but I figure I should jot it down somewhere that isn’t a sketch book full of weird scribbles, scoresheets and half-baked ideas.

The Theory of Eight posits that human lives are roughly divided into eight-year segments. We often think in terms of decades—your 20s’ or 30s’ for instance—but I think that eight year sections make more sense. So, birth to your 8th birthday; 8 until your sweet sixteen; sixteen until you turn twenty-four and so on and so forth. Here’s how I think of it, at least up until my own age:

The Childhood We Don’t Remember (0 - 8)

“We emerge half-formed and hope whoever greets us on the other end 
Is kind enough to fill us in” ~ Father John Misty, Pure Comedy

Almost nobody remembers being born or the first year or two of being alive, but most of us also have a difficult time remembering our earliest years, the first years of Elementary School, how we learned to ride a bike or the first day of school.

The first Eight of our existence is our True Childhood, the one we experience without any care for the future or any sense of the past. We are essentially morally and temporally untethered, and so, without an anchor in time, we forget. If only we could hang on to that skill later in life.

In this first Eight we live so entirely in the present that we only carry scraps of it with us into later years, and often these are just photographs we build memories around, or stories other people tell us.

True Childhood is a time when we must be cared for almost entirely, for better or worse. Scared of the dark but we don’t know why.

And then just like that, innocence begins to slip away.

The Childhood We Do Remember (8 - 16)

"Here we are now, entertain us" ~ Kurt Cobain, Smells Like Teen Spirit

From about 8 onward you start to learn about the bigger picture. Life, death, the terrifying realities of an uncertain future. Kids could be mean when you were younger but now you learn the word “drama” and all that this entails. You round out your Elementary School years as the big kids in school and then find yourself thrust into Middle School where kids have boyfriends and girlfriends and can make your life miserable in new and creative ways.

This is the childhood where, no matter how good your parents raise you and how kind you’re treated by family, you will learn what pain means. You are given a taste of adulthood but none of the brain chemistry to deal with it. You are slowly overcome by hormones and hijacked by an underdeveloped frontal lobe. And then, at last, you turn 16.

The Dawn Of Adulthood (16 - 24)

"And that's about the time she walked away from me
Nobody likes you when you're twenty-three" ~ Blink 182

Sure, in most places to be a consenting adult you have to be 18, but that’s a pretty arbitrary dividing line compared to 16—the real dawn of our individual sexuality. This is when boys and girls are really just young men and women, fully capable of having sex and making babies (and various other poor choices). I view this Eight as the dawn of adulthood, because in so many ways, in the last couple years of high school, kids aren’t really kids anymore—but those little grownups in college dorms and partying between studies are hardly adults yet, either. It’s an in-between-land of physical maturity and emotional immaturity.

During this Eight we leave our childhood and adolescence behind and start to form new selves through exploration, through getting jobs for the first time, through travel and so on and so forth. We start to think about careers and form our first long-term relationships (whether three months or three years). Many not-quite-adults have babies and start families, though really you should spend this time having fist fights with God, questioning your sexuality and experimenting with all that life has to offer.

This is a time of possibility and wonder. We still possess some of that childlike ability to live in the present, but we have all sorts of grand ideas about what we want in our future. We become artists, musicians, actors, start businesses, learn new trades. This is a time of rapid formation and change. This is when you start a rock band or go spend the summer traveling in Europe despite not really being able to afford it.

The Formation Of Adulthood (24 - 32)

"It's 2020, and I'm 30, I'll do another ten
2030, I'll be 40 and kill myself then" ~ Bo Burnham, 30

It’s not until this Eight that we find ourselves finally leaving childhood in the past. We probably can’t remember our first Eight much, if at all, by now, and even our second feels like a foreign country. Were we really 13 so recently? That person is a stranger.

We’ve graduated college (if we attended) and may even have a Master’s Degree by now. Even if we’re still in school, it’s probably a PhD program or Medical School (or, if you were me, you just dropped out a couple times before finally graduating).

Many people are or will become firmly rooted in a long-term relationship during these years, and by the end of this Eight, many will be going through a divorce, figuring out what to do with custody of their small children and learning some very big life lessons about the people we thought we knew very well, but really didn’t at all.

We will gain newfound hatreds: of the court system, the IRS, people in other political parties, middle management. You thought you hated your math teacher in high school? You didn’t know what hate was yet, sweet summer child. Now you have an ex-wife.

In many ways, this is a time of formation. We have whatever skills we picked up in the previous Eight and we’re applying them to our careers, families and personal lives. During this period of time, many of our friends will make families of their own and we will start to awaken to a new reality of responsibility, sleepless nights, and friendships that are startlingly occasional in nature. This is a time of drifting apart (though never fear, when all those divorces start dropping you’ll be able to reconnect!)

We’re still very young and very foolish for the most part during these years, even if our raging hormones have settled down, and we gather a bit more wisdom via the school of hard knocks.

The Actualization Of Adulthood (32 - 40)

A man walks down the street
He says, "Why am I soft in the middle, now?
Why am I soft in the middle?
The rest of my life is so hard ~ Paul Simon, You Can Call Me Al

Wisdom never comes easy, and by the time we’re in our early 30s’ many of the people we know are divorced or saddled with a handful of young kids or both, deeply enmeshed in careers, and likely dabbling in alcoholism, if only its earliest stages, and credit card debt (on top of the school debt). The days of college parties are long gone, but a bottle of wine every night after the kids are in bed is hardly out of the question.

But this is also when you start seeing the payoff of being a grownup. Childhood is far, far in the rearview now. College kids look like high school kids at this point (are we sure those are college kids, they look fifteen, wtf?) and you can hardly believe that some people your age are dating 21-year-olds. I mean, you get why but also…why?

Despite owning a house and having car payments, maybe you now also have some travel money (if you’re lucky) and you’re off to Hawaii with your new girlfriend or boyfriend one year, and off to Italy with friends the next. Your frontal lobe has fully developed (at long last) and you’re facing a world with new challenges: How to make new friends, how to “find new hobbies” and maybe what a dead-end career looks like. (The answer to all these questions is often alcohol!)

That dreaded number keeps getting closer, of course. 40. And every inch you creep toward it, a new grey hair appears and you wonder “How did this happen? I was young just a minute ago and now look at me! Where did the time go? How is it possible that my darling child is a teenager now?”

For those of us who turned 40 during the pandemic, much of this was amplified—I swear I aged five years over the past two. I suppose this applies to every age, but turning 40 is a uniquely self-centered act. We are never more vain than when we turn 40 (at least I hope to be less concerned with such things by the time I turn 50).

I am 40 now, though only for a couple more months. My belief in the Theory of Eight has only deepened. I met my now ex-girlfriend eight years ago this coming May.¹ We spent nearly eight years together. She was in the last stages of her third Eight when we got together; I was in the early stages of my fourth. Now that we’ve parted, she’s wrapping up her fourth without me and I’m beginning my fifth without her. The wheel turns as the wheel wills and all that jazz.

I don’t know how to define that Eight just yet. Many people have told me that your 40s are awesome, and I’m willing to believe them, though I have to get my shit together in order to make that a reality. The pandemic and depression and family crises and the telltale signs of a long-term relationship coming to an end all drove me into what I can now see has been a fairly deep and persistent depression. I am working on that.

But I can already see how your 40s could be pretty awesome. My marriage ended at the end of my third Eight. I spent that Eight struggling to start my career, start a family, get along with someone I was fundamentally incompatible with. My 20s were way harder than they should have been. My 30s were way more fun. My last relationship was never a marriage but it may as well have been and honestly, for a while anyways, it was the best time of my entire life. My 30s—other than some family crises and the pandemic—were way better than my 20s.

So it stands to reason, with the pandemic drawing down and, through pain and struggle, my wisdom meter fuller than ever, this next Eight should be better than the last, even as I grow older and greyer. I spent so much of my adult life in long-term relationships and I’m finally at a point where I realize that it’s time to just be okay being on my own, taking care of myself and my kids and focusing on my career and my craft. Better late than never.

Maybe this whole Theory of Eight thing is silly and I’m sure, if you wanted, you could spin it to be a Theory of Seven or Nine or Ten or whatever. Like I said, its genesis was the Idea Book, and the Idea Book was simply a way to jot down our silly under-the-influence thoughts while we played cards and had weird rambling conversations about . . . whatever. But it has helped me think about my own life and the relationships that have defined it—whether my parents and siblings, my romantic partners or, now, my own children, both of whom are in different stages of their second Eight (a less charming time than the first, I must say, but also exciting in new ways—we can now all play Call Of Duty together!)

And the next Eight?

(???) 40 - 48

“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”
― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Thanks for reading and subscribing my dearest droogies. I know I have been infrequent with these posts lately. Life has been strange lately and I’m trying to drag myself out of the river and onto the far shore. Thank you, as always, for bearing with me.

1. When we first got together she was 29 and I had just fallen in love with both her and the song Slow Show by The National, which contained the lyric “You know I dreamed about you, For twenty-nine years before I saw you, You know I dreamed about you, I missed you for, for twenty-nine years” which I considered a weird marriage of fate and romance. Now I read the other lyrics with new eyes: “I made a mistake in my life today, Everything I love gets lost in the drawers, I want to start over, I want to be winning, Way out of sync from the beginning”.