I thought con­tem­plat­ing bits of every­day life I gen­er­al­ly ignore in favour of rail­ing about the state of the world, would be sooth­ing. Instead, it added to my confusion.

“Influ­encers”, for exam­ple. Appar­ent­ly it start­ed out as a hob­by for peo­ple who crave being on social media, and mutat­ed into an actu­al career choice.
The most-watched make hun­dreds of mil­lions of dollars.
Although why any­one would want to watch some­one per­form point­less and often dan­ger­ous­ly sil­ly stunts, or lis­ten to inter­net ver­sions of street cor­ner  preach­ers spew­ing what­ev­er is on their mind, with no fact-check­ing mech­a­nism or cre­den­tials to back it up, is baf­fling, to put it mildly.
That peo­ple who’ve reached the legal age for being deemed adults are among those influ­enced by said influ­encers, espe­cial­ly the ones who claim to have the key to more or less eter­nal youth, is down­right mystifying.
The lines, sags, bags and grey­ing hair they claim to be able to ward off,  are the beau­ty of  the meld­ing of joys, sor­rows and chal­lenges, mea­sures of a life lived as best one can.
That said, as any­one who has a loved one whose chance to delight in liv­ing has been cut short by any form of demen­tia will attest, it’s worth try­ing what­ev­er proves use­ful to keep it at bay.
That’s where it gets real­ly confusing.
The short­er the odds against slip­ping into demen­tia get, the hard­er it becomes to avoid being inex­orably wooed by the mod­ern ver­sion of  the Sirens who tempt­ed Odyseus, arti­cles and adver­tise­ments pur­port­ing to reveal what to do and not do to avoid los­ing all the knowl­edge you ever had.
What’s on offer instead, is as big a conun­drum as why the  Mid­dle East is such a bloody mess.
A recent sto­ry in the ven­er­a­ble New York Times tout­ed six “com­mon med­ica­tions” (which I take to mean drugs Big Phar­ma can make a lot of mon­ey push­ing)  that “may low­er” the risk of dementia.
Five days lat­er,  anoth­er equal­ly seri­ous piece of report­ing list­ed four drugs that “sev­er­al stud­ies” have found may increase it “by rough­ly 50 percent.”
That’s on a par with the odds of the Democrat’s chances of mak­ing enough inroads in the over-bal­ly­hooed, and for we out­siders at least, utter­ly con­fus­ing  “mid terms”,  to force any sig­nif­i­cant cur­tail­ing of the increas­ing­ly dan­ger­ous and demen­tia-like per­fi­dies of Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump.
And the fact that I’ve already allowed two sub­jects I was try­ing to eschew for sanity’s sake to slip into this is damn­ing proof of…I’m not sure what.

                     ANSWERS FOR EVERYTHING

But no mind, help is at hand.
Unless of course, like me, you find your­self even more con­fused by try­ing to find the right bal­ance among the dan­gers of car­bo­hy­drates, the ben­e­fits of microbes and detox­ing your brain. For rea­sons that have not been made clear to me, the answer to those puz­zles sup­pos­ed­ly lies in self-help advice with titles (and I am not mak­ing these up) that include “Build a Bet­ter Brain at Any Age”  and  “The Age­less Brain”.
As much as I like the con­cept, the thought of the ver­biage one would have to wade through to find the ulti­mate answer isn’t appetite-whet­ting enough to make me try.
How­ev­er, if it doesn’t involve too much prepa­ra­tion using sharp instru­ments, or sweat­ing  over a hot stove, “The Age­less Brain Cook­book for Seniors” has a cer­tain allure.

                      ALTERNATIVES, MAYBE

Sto­ries on all of those mag­ic bul­lets came with the advice and opin­ions of  “experts”, of which the Rolodex­es — sor­ry, show­ing my age — Smart phones  of today’s reporters seem to be over-stocked.
But that too, can be perplexing.
A health and well­be­ing head­line in a pub­li­ca­tion I won’t embar­rass by nam­ing, referred to “A Top Knee Expert…”.
Does that mean there’s  more than one kind of knee? Or the expert has spe­cialised in the top, as opposed to the mid­dle or low­er bit of a knee?
It made me think of the con­fus­ing des­ig­na­tion “top model”.
Does it define a mod­el who mod­els tops, or a mod­el at the top of the mod­el profession?
If you get your news from a broad­cast medi­um, the conun­drums can grow exponentially.
What cre­dence can be put in an “expert”  on any sub­ject, be it health, wealth, for­eign affairs or pol­i­tics (fields in which they seem to pro­lif­er­ate with rab­bit-like fecun­di­ty) ‚who says “kin­da” in the mid­dle of, or “right?” at the end of a sentence?
If you’re the expert, why are you ask­ing the view­er or  lis­ten­er for con­fir­ma­tion of your expertise.
Get­ting a break isn’t as easy as I’d hoped it would be.
As Shakespeare’s Julius Cae­sar said of  his neme­sis Cas­sius: “He thinks too  much. Such men are dangerous.”
Maybe mere­ly being con­fused isn’t such a bad thing after all.

Com­ments are wel­comed. Click CONTACT on the site header.
To receive e‑mail alerts to new posts, Click SIGN-UP on the header.
To SHARE, click the appro­pri­ate icon below.