Blog post #6
The overarching “story” for This American Life episode 583: “It’ll Make Sense When You’re Older” is about how some things could only be understood by getting older. The story is presented in different ways throughout the different acts, but generally it’s about people who think they understand something, and then they grow older and change, and see that thing in a new light. Sometimes, in the case of the first act, it may seem that the person knows about the thing the less they understand it; whereas other times, like the second act, there may be more to the topic than the person realizes, and they only find out by getting older. This lead neatly to the episode’s topic sentence: somebody does (or in the case of most of the episode, believes) something because they feel like they understand it, but they only truly realize what it is after they get older. In the third act, this is seen by the man who originally believes that the Alzheimer’s tests were a waste of time, until he eventually loses his ability to read a clock. It’s then that he realizes the importance of the tests, and also the mechanics went into his ability to how he lost his ability to read a clock.
The Alex Blumberg formula for this episode would be “I’m doing a story about getting older, and what’s interesting about it is that it looks into how our understanding of things we think we know seems to change as we age.” An additional aspect to this is the term “it’ll make sense when you’re older,” which, as explained in the introduction, is often told to children who already think they have the understanding required to make sense of these kinds of things. It is quite convenient that a common phrase fits so perfectly with the theme, otherwise I’m sure it would be much more difficult to find such a punchy title.
As for the specific acts, I feel as though the Blumberg template is most applicable to the different stories since it offers more flexibility than the focus sentence and the Wheeler template. For the first act, the filled Blumberg template would be “I’m doing a story about a boy’s relationships to high school parties, which is interesting because his perspective completely changes.” Another element to the story that makes it interesting, but isn’t a major theme of the piece, is that the boy didn’t seem to realize how much of a switch his perspective took until he was actually being interviewed. For the second act, the filled template would be “I’m doing a story about a woman’s experience confronting racism, which is interesting because it ties into her family history and her relationship with her mother.” This act is the most different from the rest, because it seems to have more to do with Sasheer Zamata’s family and the cultural context in which she and her mother were brought up. It still manages to fit into the larger story of the episode because it revolves around Zamata’s understanding being shifted after her perspective on the topic was changed. Additionally, the interplay between her narrative and her mom’s was an interesting take on the “when you’re older” part of the theme. For the final act, the template would be completed as “I’m doing a story about this man’s experience with Alzheimer’s, which is interesting because he has a unique take on how to deal with his memory loss.” This one is fairly straightforward, as most of the act is devoted to explaining who the man is and how he went about deconstructing analog clock notation.
All of these acts tie into the larger story of understanding and perception because they showed different ways in which people change as they grow into different stages of their lives. To borrow the final element of Wheeler’s template, these stories are relatable to every human on the face of the planet because everyone grows old, and pretty much everyone has had an experience where they thought they understood something until they grew older and realized that their perspective had changed. The stories themselves somewhat resist being categorized in these templates because mostly they’re based more off explaining a change rather than following a narrative, yet they still all contain a topic and a reason for being interesting.