My first mentor was plastic. At age eight, I received a Talking Adventure Team Commander GI Joe, complete with life-like hair and kung-fu grip. Note his thousand-yard stare. He has seen things.
If you pulled his dog tag, the Commander said one of eight phrases. One is imprinted on my brain: “I’ve got a tough assignment for you!” I confess, by the hundredth iteration I gripped and shook the Commander, asking, “Well? What is it?” He remained silent.
Created in 1963, GI Joe was the first “action figure,” a word coined to avoid the suggestion he was a mere dolly designed to showcase military gear. By ’75, Vietnam put a stink on war toys. In response, Hasbro created the Adventure Team line—GIJoe as a private soldier of fortune—which seemed somehow worse.
Still, I admired the Commander. Most adult men I knew barely tolerated kids, annoyed we didn’t exit the womb ready to tie a sailor’s hitch or gut a fish.
The Commander never judged. Belittled by his father General Ignatius Joseph, Sr., he mustered out and pursued adventure teaming: recovering lost missiles, poaching tigers, and snuffing henchmen on Spy Island.
The Commander and I performed many missions, but I left childish things behind and met other bearded mentors who we’re more direct in explaining my mission. Mr. McDonald, my high school biology teacher, split class time between teaching bio and playing chess. He liked chess. Once, as we played, he asked, “Dan, what’s the most powerful force in the Universe?”
“Uh…? Black holes?” I guessed.
“Nope,” he replied, “Entropy.”
I blinked. He peered across the board.
“That is the meaning of life. It is our mission…to combat entropy.”
He never mentioned it again.
My teen years are a blur, but that stuck. “It is our mission…to combat entropy.” Entropy, the degradation of all matter and energy into inert uniformity. Life achieves meaning through creation—even if, inevitably, it all turns into nothing.
High school me didn’t fully understand that mission, but adult me met another beardo, Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who helped clarify it with bite-sized Stoic mantras like: “Soon you will have forgotten the world, and soon the world will have forgotten you.”
Thus, I present my grand unified philosophical theory:
“I’ve got a tough assignment for you…”
“Combat entropy.”
With a dash of Aurelius: “Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you. Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours.”
I hope this helps.
