Age Traps, Oopsies, and Memorial Observations

As I go trundling through life, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about my age.  I am active. I am still learning lots of new stuff. I don't reminisce much or live in the past. The number of times I have orbited the sun while riding this Bootcamp Planet is not a restriction for me.

Until recently, I thought of my age as a 'middle adult' program that ran in the background and was never seen onscreen. I liked it like that. I had so successfully repressed my actual numerical age that if I was given a form to fill out that wanted that information, I would have to subtract my birth year to figure it out. True. Really.

Mentally, I would choose my age much like a fashion accessory. Some days I would feel 8, or 17, or 40, or 59 depending upon who I was with and what I was doing. The youngest person that I have a friendship with just completed kindergarten; from there, the ages of my friends run right on up to octogenarians. This broad-band approach has a lot of advantages. Believe me.  A lot of good stuff is even better when viewed through childhood awe, a lot of bad stuff is easier to dismiss when viewed through an elderly perspective, and many piddly faults are super-easy to forgive and toss to the wind when the immensity of eternity is considered.

But then...

Other people's expectations occasionally come up and slam me. For instance, apparently not knowing one's own age, as I described in Paragraph 2, is a very real sign of dementia in some paradigms.   I find it pretty scary that some people think I "need an evaluation" because I had to stop and think how old I was. I spent too much of my childhood living in emotional boxes, trying to please others, to now (as a middle adult) be left with any respect for control freaks who want to shove me into their new boxes.

But then at other times...

Regrettably, sometimes the age gap is much larger than I thought it was and I am completely taken by surprise. It happened this Memorial Day.

Time and geography have made Memorial Day a meaningful holiday for me. Every classmate in my elementary school had either a dad who had fought in WWII or a parent who had worked in the supply factories. Every adult in my life knew someone who "did not make it back."  I had teachers who had been widowed by that war. Every spring my Brownie troop would march in the local parade to the cemetery, carrying small American flags.
I do not dwell on those days much, but they framed me. The town nearest where I live now has an annual hometown-style parade for which I have built floats, walked the route passing out candy and prizes, and worn the t-shirts to support my candidate or cause.  Vintage Americana.  Red, White, and Blue. A memorial that reminds us of our sacrificial heritage, when we knew the honor of paying now for a better future.

Forward to 2017. In a space/time world of international gameplay on handheld devices, chat happens. Asians, of which there are quite a few, had questions about our holiday: Was it about Vietnam? Was it celebrating war?

The international audience was not getting accurate answers. The "Memorial" part— the remembrance of heart-rending personal sacrifice— was being obscured with the regular banter and gibberish. And on top of that, well-meaning Millennials started talking about Veteran's Day, which is a time for honoring the living.  (What have they been teaching in schools for the past 20 years???) 

Well, more than Oops, my response was a total travesty! My abhorrent social incorrectness was showing. How dare I? 

In this new time/space world's more liberal social policies, it is now an extreme offense to correct unintentional mistakes if people get touchy about it.  I am a complete idiot for not knowing this.

Facebook's Personality Tests

 Personality quizzes are a staple of my Facebook feed. I do not have to search for them. They come to me. Almost always, they come from a female friend. I guess men don't feel as much need to take a test to confirm the obvious.

And most of the test questions are pretty obvious. For example:
      What would you rather do on a Friday night?
a. Have a beer at the local karaoke pub.
b. Curl up with a good book.
c. Coach a ball team for troubled youth.

Now, can you predict which answer will get "You can be happy being alone" in the results?
Yes, I thought so. Most of the test questions are pretty obvious.

If I answer the questions honestly, it almost always results in "you are an independent, creative person" in one form or another.
The "independent" part may present as "you greatly value your freedom" or "you don't need others to make you happy." Six of one; half-dozen of the other.
"Creative" might show up as "you tend to think outside the box" or "you are a visionary who can.."   Same difference. 

The quizzes phrase the results in glowing terms,  but let's face it, "you are an independent, creative person" could also apply to a mad bomber, and "thinking outside the box" could mean "a difficult person" to any hard-core socialist regime.

So according to a Facebook Quiz, I could be almost anybody!  😕

Not quite as often, but still with some regularity, the personality quizzes find that I am "vibrant and friendly." The first few times I got that result, I actually went back and re-took the test, changing answers here and there to try to find out why they called me vibrant.
"Vibrant" is not a term anyone meeting me in person is likely to use.  I am not a physically-hyper, high-energy person; I am not the one everybody in the room notices right away! If "Vibrant" means pulsating with activity, then the quiz results were a couple rings outside the bullseye.

 Eventually, I decided that the quiz was calling me "vibrant" because of the answers that I did not choose! Even though I am not ordinarily throbbing with energy, I am not depressed either. I reckon that by not choosing the depression answers, I am by default, vivacious and spirited!  😵

I suppose that if you are going to draw conclusions about who I am based on a 10-question quiz, you have to economize somewhere. And "vibrant" isn't really a bad guess; it is just that I am far more vibrant in my daydreams than in real life.

So this week when another pop-psychology personality quiz showed up in my news feed, I decided that I would take the test by picking the last answer— the one that was the worst fit and least like me. Let's see if the quiz is reliable in reverse and describes someone who is pretty opposite from me...
Here are those results:
  You're a "just get it done" kind of person. You are driven, competitive, and you like to be in control. You are very action-oriented, and you appreciate efficiency.

🤔 Actually I do appreciate efficiency. But I am not action-oriented, driven, competitive, or a "just get it done" kind of person. As for liking to be in control, well, I need to define some terms here.
No, I do not like to control other people. I get a lot more enjoyment from watching where another person will go with a situation than I would from directing them to do it my way.

Let me digress a bit and go down a bunny trail here:  Surprisingly to me, this gets me in trouble with a certain kind of person: control freaks!  Control freaks flip out when I make a simple suggestion. They like to call me obnoxious and crazy and all sorts of unflattering expletives. They wrongly project their own paradigms and assume I am trying to control them.  Needless to say, I do not entertain control freaks as close friends; control freaks are about the only people that are major challenges to get along with.  (sigh)

So, back on the topic of Facebook quizzes.

Some of the personality quizzes on Facebook track you. I have stopped answering those that ask to see my email and friends list.

They generally rate five different traits:  five psychological traits of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. This trait-tracking even has an acronym: OCEAN

One of the big companies that do this is called Cambridge Analytica. Click for Website 
They have both commercial and political divisions. They collect and use the data from the Facebook quizzes to change audience behavior. They are very upfront about that. Cambridge Analytica uses data to change audience behavior.

They have been hired to work on American political campaigns and they were consultants for Britain's Brexit. In fact, their website makes this claim: "We are the global leader in data-driven campaigning with over 25 years of experience, supporting more than 100 campaigns across five continents."

Okay, so they've gotten enough free advertising from me. But the point I want to make is that if you are in the US, when you click that you like popcorn and a movie more than going to the rodeo, you are adding to their 5,000 data points on over 230 million American voters! And if you vote someplace else, they probably have a data bank for that as well.

Cambridge Analytica and their competitors are corporate control freaks!  Their amalgam of predictive analytics, behavioral sciences, and data-driven ad tech are being used to control your way of thinking toward whomever is paying them.

The next time that I am told, "You tend to ponder big questions like the meaning of life and these questions are as important ' or more important to you ' than smaller matters like what you should have for dinner," (and yes, that was a real response I had to one of the personality quizzes) then I will at least be aware that the control freaks are out there, and it is not paranoid to think they want to control your mind!

To survive on this Bootcamp Planet, we must find, develop, and become confident in or relationship with our Creator. There are many snakes slithering around the swamp, and they will tell us most anything in an attempt to control our souls. They may even try to convince me that I am vibrant!