What a powerful observation.
Which isn't to discount the author's point. Their writing is introspective. But our perceptions are not always right, and it screws with our self-perceptions, especially of what success means and looks like. We are drawn to exceptions and anchor our expectations for ourselves within their stories.
- Neal Stephenson (My favorite fiction writer) published his first book in his early 30s
- Hemingway published great works in his early 20s
- Almost all of the most notable scientific breakthroughs in the 20th century were from individuals in their 20s. Schrodinger was the Old Man at 37!
- Most famous musicans started releasing their first, and often best, albums in their early 20s-early 30s. When they tour into old age, they're mostly playing their hits of youth.
You can find exceptions, but the exceptions are often not that old, and in the anecdotes I think of (Favorite authors, writers, musicians etc), it's hard not to notice the trend of youth. I want to find this trend to be untrue because it can be depressing, but can't. (This is at the core of the article)
Instead he took up a job at the mint. The job had some technical bits to it like designing coins that were harder to counterfeit, but is was mostly a managing people and society job. The coin clippers were literally debasing the currency to near worthlessness. Had they continued they would have been the internal cancer that took down the empire, as the state could no longer afford to pay for the ships and men needed to create and maintain it. Newton almost single handedly turned that around. It's not an exaggeration to say he saved the empire.
You say the older Newton could not do what the younger Newton did, and that's probably true. But it's also true the younger Newton could not have done what the older one did. He needed the experience and understanding of how men and society work that only decades of live could give him. So yes some abilities dim as you age. But other abilities grow stronger.
Crystallised intelligence increases with age.
Your comparative advantage changes.
There are probably roughly zero 20-somethings that are more interesting than the most boring 50-year old you know.
Is it maybe the case that 20-somethings have nothing to do so they futz around with science and writing and can do that. As they grow older they find better things to do?
Young people are good at developing talents involving physical skills, but rarely do you find young writers who produce any great literature. And of those young people who happen to be amazing writers, their skill only improves as they get older and wiser, they don’t really hit a peak until they have mental decline in old age.
So if you hit 40 and you’re not good at anything in particular in life, you might still find there’s time to be a great writer, the journey has just begun!
The point is, of course, that age is a necessary, but insufficient condition for wisdom. I know of philosophers who claimed to only grasp their subject matter in their 50s.
Not everything I did with this power was smart. A lot of my understanding of what that stuff is was learned "improvisationally", and major local customers, including the county government, paid the price. But what I did do was very successfully parlay this experience into a big-kid job (and a mega pay rise) in the big city, which then begat more such jobs. I doubt I could have rocketed that high, that quickly, if the small-town ISP weren't willing to let ambitious but inexperienced people like me screw up, in exchange for paying them semi-student wages.
It's not usually the purpose.
Before global media, for the most part if you were comparing yourself to other people it was largely comparing against your friends, family and community. Sure, there may have been that one outsized success, but it still wasn't presented as the norm - you knew all the other friends and family that just had average lives. And for most of human history where social ranking was explicitly classed based, it's not like if you were a peasant you would think "Darn, if I only worked harder I could be a noble".
If you want to feel "less hard on yourself", I highly recommend disconnecting from digital media. It's hard for our human brains to deal with the constant onslaught of stars/celebrities/moguls/exceptions and understand how rare those examples truly are.
Imagine if you had directed those hours towards learning or training some sort of skill. You would, almost certainly, be in the top percents of humanity by now at that skill.
It's not just about innate inability but about dedicating yourself to something of value. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of people choose not to do that.
But the point I would emphasize is that this is a choice.
It's actually quite the issue as well, because it's so enticing to choose to do nothing. Would Einstein in an era of endless entertainment, banter, porn, and so on have nonetheless chosen to spend his days wandering about pondering the mysteries and paradoxes with the speed of light?
I mean maybe...? But there's a strong argument to be made that we haven't done away with meritocracy but rather made it fabulously enjoyable to do things of no real merit.
There is something to be said about solitary (socially and intellectually) activities being bad, but i would not be anywhere near the whole person i am without my online experiences.
People like him are horrid traps for optimisers. They’re pointing out errors, and being so desperate to improve you’re encouraged to keep listening and value them greater instead of tuning their overeagerness out.
There’s an irony that actually getting hung up on minor comments and suggestions is in itself poor optimisation since the error becomes a distraction instead of a learning point.
(Having said that, restarting a game over and over in order to force your one perfect linear optimal plan to eventually work out can be lots of fun. But this is not an option in real life.)
While I'm on the cheesy aphorisms, I'll throw in "life is what happens while you're busy making other plans". But that one's too pragmatic, I think. It's not as if we have zero control. Maybe a more accurate statement would be "life is what happens while you're busy making loosely similar plans".
It is possible to lessen the effect of these things if you put effort into it.
I have all-too-brief moments where I experience a visceral sense of literally meeting myself, and the joy therein. I believe that is the work I am to do at the moment, and those small epiphanies are the guideposts.
or the moments where I experience a visceral sense of literally meeting myself and feeling aversion because I realize I'm not the person I thought I was and I need to do and be better.
That may be true up to a point. Once you start getting dementia or slip on ice and break your hip, maybe it won't feel like that so much any more.
This resonates. I'm also at retirement age. And when I look back over my career I realize that it was mostly luck. I was so anxious much of the time (afraid I might make a mistake or make the wrong decision) and I wonder if I would've been more relaxed knowing what I know now? And if as a result of being more relaxed I would've actually performed better. I'm pretty sure I would've felt a lot more at peace.
And yes, this is an ancient, ancient dream of mankind, one replete with cautionary tales about the Bad Things that will befall you if you attempt to actually solve it. (One such tale, The Substance, was nominated for a few oscars.) But so was human flight. We yearned for it, and our elders told us what fools we would be for even trying with things like the tale of Icarus... and then one day on a hill in Kitty Hawk, NC...
from what I’ve seen tales against a search for immortality are in regards to enjoy life while you have it, make relations, laugh, love, mourn, and remember, rather than have your entire life consumed in a desperate attempt to postpone the end, sucking all the joy out of it. we still have a long ways to go to avoiding death entirely, so I’d figure the best course of action is to enjoy life rather than to waste it in hopes of getting some extra time.
and yeah bringing up what you've brought up, I see your point. it does seem like the trope has been distilled down to "searching for eternal life is bad" instead of "don't waste everything in the hopes of eternal life".
There are, of course, also examples where the converse holds true. Finding a long term partner who you want to create a family with for example. But all in all the balance strongly favors that the error margin becomes smaller.
Example: the fact that I don’t have the DNA to be an NBA player is not a flaw of character. The fact that I don’t have an eye for painting or the brain for quantum physics isn’t a flaw of character.
This article basically encourages us to punish ourselves for happily existing.
We only live so long so we have to pick and choose. Especially as the years remaining clock down.
Is it a literal truth that I can’t learn to paint? No. Have I done enough of it to know my progress is extremely slow to the point of not wanting to study it formally? Absolutely.
I’ll do a paint and sip but I’ll never get much better than that even if I put in the hours.
Abstraction is one skill. It's quite useful, especially in an age of computation. But it's just one skill.
There are many other human skills too. They all have their own value (which may vary across time and space).
Few people are really good at more than one or two of them.
The drinking analogy is not a great one because that’s an obviously detrimental activity. A lot of activities are positive.
E.g., trying to publish a book when you’re 65 after failing when you were 25 is not a character flaw.
It's true you can't be a _young_ genius forever but the rest of its not so bleak.
Conversely, you're young as long as you believe you have control over imperfections.
Last year, I slipped in a puddle on my bike. Last week, my orthopedic surgeon told me I can never be a runner again. There is too little cartilage left in my ankle.
Yesterday, Strava told me I logged my 250th entry. Scrolling down my activity stream past the walks I logged recovering from my ankle injury, I saw the hundreds of runs I went on when I took jogging seriously. One of those runs is now the best run I'll ever do.
Not being able to run is an imperfection that is "permanent" and that I will never "grow" past regardless of how much I care to do so. That's what getting old feels like.
I couldn’t run, I sometimes couldn’t walk. People used to think I was a personal trainer because I was so fit. Diagnosis was 5 years ago.
Went through grief/trauma getting diagnosed with arthritis.
Now 5 years later, from just walking shorter distances more often and processing the grief, I’m back at the gym and started soccer and ran for the first time in ages. Felt very weird but I just work within my limits. I also cycle at least 30 minutes of intense cycling 6 days a week.
You’ll learn to adapt and adjust, it does get better, you just have to become a child again and approach it differently.
I ultimately will still need joint replacements at some point in the next few years, but I’ve had a complete mindset shift. My current goal is to become even fitter than my previous state.
I agree, there is a big mindset shift needed to make peace with our body not being entirely under our control. To me, that mindset change is a big part of what it feels like to not be young.
If think of a lifespan as an arc, it's something like:
1. In early childhood, you are gradually mastering the physicality of your body. Learning to control elimination, getting more coordinated, learning physical skills, etc. I think of it like learning to control a sailboat, harness the wind, operate the sails, etc.
2. When you hit young adulthood, you're at a sort of peak where your body can be an abstraction. You can do what you want in the world without having to worry too much about your body getting in the way. At this point, you are a skilled sailor on the open ocean.
3. Then as you get older and/or unlucky, things outside of your control happen to your body in ways that materially limit your own agency. You may want to do X, but your body means that's off the table. You can still do Y. Now you are navigating shoals. You can still control the sailboat, but there are rocks there and you must navigate around them whether you want to or not. Some places simply can't be reached anymore.
4. I'm not there yet, but assume that as we age, the number of rocks increases and we increasingly focus our attention on the sailing we've already done in the past and make peace with our limited journeys going forward.
That first time you crash into a rock and move from 2 to 3 is hard.
Those things you listed to prove your point can all happen to any of us at age 12, and all of the rest save child-bearing can happen at any age.
All of them are external things that change our situation, sure, but your choice to be "old" or not based on them is still a choice, which was the parent's point.
But I agree with the gist.
When you're young, you don't know what you don't know, and usually you have much less to lose by taking risks. As you get older, risks become more costly.
Maybe one way to think about youth in a way that's not self-defeating could be to sit down and think about what youth means to you in the next 1-3 years, and make sure the definition is within reach. The worst thing you can do if you're feeling old is to lean into the feeling. But it's hard not to, because media, TV, etc tries to define youth for the whole of society when really it should be individualized and defined in a way that motivates the person to keep on feeling youthful as far into old age as possible.
> The truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing but does only and wholly what he must do.
Most recently, a significant life event happened, that drew my attention to a pattern of mistakes I've been making for the past couple of years. I've made it a point to reflect upon each incident and take copious notes of what I could have done differently in those situations; and hopefully I'll do better for the next event. While I'm currently at an age where I'd neither be considered "young" nor "old", I don't think any of this can't be applied to someone who'd be 10 or 20 years older than me, for example.
Eg if someone can’t handle alcohol -> don’t drink
Fat? Eat less and exercise
ADHD? Get medicated and embrace the condition and understand it
I think you can pick and choose to work on your flaws. I certainly am after a life event, but sometimes it requires an external strong force to make you realise you want to change for the better
This is an attitude that needs to be excised. Perfection-seeking is a curse.
There's always another challenge on the horizon, always more perfection to be sought.
Is the definition of seeking perfection different? Maybe these words are poor for the distinction between direction and target.
CertainlyI wouldn't want to be an unhappy perfectionist. But slowly perfecting/improving something is a happy thing.
That said, I struggle with the internal dialogue of some people that are never happy with what they do.
My wife and I were talking about making considerable life changes (career and living) in about 6 years as both my boys will be through HS then and out of the house. So these changes, whatever shape they take, will happen in my mid-50s. That's 10 years from my planned retirement (I'm in the US). Any mistake made in those decisions has dire consequences to the rest of my life (and my wife's life for that matter).
As for dealing with imperfections, I've told my therapist "i am who i'm going to be. If that's not good enough for you or society then you all are just going to have to deal with it."
And it turns out that you get better at calculating these risks, so...
Realistically, though, I've experienced falling short of all sorts of internal and external expectations for many years now, so I don't know what's special about this time.
"I'm not a millionaire. I thought I would be by the time I was 30, but I wasn't even close. And then I thought maybe by the time I was 40. But by 40, I had less money than when I was 30."
And a child prodigy at forty, That is a sorry case. Who could have been so much, yet Will never leave a trace.
(The song is based on the life of the poet Halbo C. Kool. Dutch lyrics here: https://genius.com/Boudewijn-de-groot-een-wonderkind-van-50-... )
Some people are wired differently and take calculated risks their whole life.
Read the life of Louis Pasteur if you need an example.
Understanding that the path of refinement and growth does not lead, even eventually, to perfection frees a person to do better, to be better, fearlessly.
Perfection is a cardinal direction. It is not a destination.
"[to be human] is to be constantly on the precipice of perfection – just a little further and you’ll get there – but you never get there."
I think the article is just existing to be negative and inject punishing thoughts about age, to make sure we all have these anxieties even if we don’t have them naturally.
The funny part about the young author example, how older authors are not exciting to discover? Yeah the richest and most successful author of all time was discovered when she was 32. J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit at age 45. Little House on the Prairie? Published when Laura Ingalls Wilder was 65.
I just don’t understand the point of this article other than to transmit bad vibes.
Like a soap opera dramatizes and exaggerates emotions, this article is a little too insistent on itself.
For instance:
> 45-year-olds aren’t discovered, they’re uncovered, like toxic waste, or a political scandal, or the murderer at the end of an Agatha Christie book. My god, that 45-year-old was lurking among us this entire time!
One way to read that is as criticism of people who think that way. It certainly seems like a complaint: the author is complaining this attitude is unfair. But whose attitude is it? Is this really the prevailing way of thinking about 45-year-olds? Or is the author just pushing paranoia to the readers?
I understand it’s about coming to terms with these feelings and uses these specific examples.
But the examples used in the article seem unrealistic to begin with, as if the article insists that a plurality of people feel this way about youth and aging.
I just don’t think that’s really the case.
Agreed. I felt like this article was grasping for something good, but remark that "45-year-olds aren’t discovered, they’re uncovered, like toxic waste, or a political scandal" is ass-backwards.
Tolkien and Wilder and both great examples of writers who produced landmark works basically as a byproduct of leading full and interesting lives -- not by orbiting the publishing world and champing at the bit to churn out some flashy yet forgettable novel at a record young age. When this happens, the only embarrassment is for the establishment "publishing world" which pretends to represent "literary greatness," not for the author who is "uncovered." Personally, I suspect that "uncovered" authors will endure at a higher rate than the "discovered" ones.
Also I have to add that I rolled my eyes at the "evidence" of Emily Dickenson killed herself. So did Hemmingway, who was first published at 26. What's your point?
Despite all this, the core insight that "suddenly you’re old, and find yourself in a permanent state of imperfection, which you must reckon with" I believe is very true. Even those who succeed in one area of life (being published) have to grapple with it. What options did they leave on the table in order to have that success? What options have been lost due to fame and success (only a fool would believe there are none)?
Becoming a particular (and necessarily, imperfect) person instead of a potential person is a kind of horrifying first taste of death. I think that the healthy way to deal with it is to make peace with the fact that our ability to change ourselves is limited and our ability to change the past is even less. The serenity prayer and AA-adjacent ideas do this.
As a last note, I thought the movie "The Weatherman" did a really good job exploring this.
I am the master of my fate.
I am the captain of my soul.That doesn't help one bit in trying to figure out where it lies.
Always keep climbing.
In his youth, he vacationed differently. Everywhere he went was a place he could live, a potential future life. He could live here, he’d tell himself. Or he could meet a woman there, and start a family there, and become a citizen of that place. Mexico, Hong Kong, France, Italy, Western Indiana, etc.
Eventually, he met a woman and chose a place – the best woman and the best place – and his future was fixed. The world was good, but the world was no longer full of all these possibilities. What, then, fills the void where possibility once lived?
Much of middle age (and beyond) is a struggle to find meaning in the face of the realization of the finiteness of your remaining days. I think that, by and large, I'm doing a fair job at that, but I still struggle a bit with travel, for the very reason above. I used to imagine myself living in whatever place I visited, and those imaginings were plausibly something more than fantasy.
Now, not so much. It would be a huge undertaking for my wife and me to uproot our lives and move to someplace exotic and different, but even if we were to do so, we couldn't move to everywhere exotic and different. And anyway, we wouldn't be "starting a new life" there in the same way that a young person would.
I am 36. This captures my greatest fears. That finding one woman anything less than immediately perfect will cut me off from all the small, lovely moments I have had with women across the world in my life. That if I buy a house in my imperfect city, that that's the ball game. I'm here for a decade or more (even though let's face it, I probably am anyway).
I had a similar interaction with a 31 year old friend who has a beautiful wife, love of his life, and two daughters, a PhD and a position at a startup. He said "What are my goals supposed to be now?" The answer is clearly to be a good father and husband, and I think he knew and was happy with that. But it represented the sea change between youth, singleness and research vs. middle age, familial responsibility and work.
"He wants his home and security, he wants to live like a sailor at sea. Beautiful loser, where will you fall, when you find out you just can't have it all?"
You had those moments. You could keep trying to chase that bouncing between different partners going forward, but consider: a) more women exit the dating market with age (especially the good ones), b) there is a richness of experience also to be found with a devoted lifelong partner which can't be had with a mere fling.
As time goes on, your odds of success are harsher either way, risking being alone much of the time. But in particular, good long-term prospects more rapidly diminish.
Opportunity-cost goes both ways. Speaking from my own bias and experience, investing and relishing in a life-long relationship with a flawed-but-loving partner is worth it, having had the non-committal phase when I was younger.
It's difficult to maximize for some characteristics in a partner. Beauty, sure, you know what you like so you can ball-park. Many traits/qualities are difficult to discern and luck-of-the-draw: reliability and trust, compatibility and love, capacity to raise children well, etc.
No one is perfect and there is no unicorn, novelty is attractive in itself. My heuristic is if a partner can be assessed as "good", holding on is the right move.
I think about Voltaire's Candide often, and the lesson applies here.
I think it's important to remember we're happily compatible with many people, many houses, and many entire existences.
Have you considered what's said in "Why you will marry the wrong person"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EvvPZFdjyk
as you note you're already probably living in some imperfect city. you might consider buying a house more of a commitment to it, but how much more than coasting along in apartments thinking of where to buy the house, for example? you'll live somewhere in that time either way. you might as well commit to things.
Children fill this void
Not only that, but there are several different modes of meaning in a life. Family is one aspect, career/community is another, building yourself and heath is another. Thinking of the "one" thing that gives life meaning is very limiting.
Especially as what is meaningful to you may change as time goes on.
Part of maturing is realizing that you are but a link in a chain; and all the potential futures in which you saw yourself as the protagonist fade into a fuzzier (and less direct) set of potential futures which your children will shape and navigate through.
Meanwhile, we are also becoming captive to the stories that we tell ourselves about ours lives and the stories that our culture tells us about our value. But though it's not easy, you can change the story you tell yourself at any time... and watch your life fill-in with possibilities again.
I have three. No regrets, but I didn’t do it to give my life meaning. They are their own people and I am responsible for giving my life meaning, no one else.
At some point, you are back with yourself and own thoughts. This is neither good nor bad. It simply is.
Well now I do get it that I have a son, but I'll never say that to him. He is only 4.5 so we will see. I just don't want him to feel that he owes me anything. He doesn't owe me anything. Whatever I do for him, I do so willingly and the result is all mine to take, good or bad.
I met her when I was 35 and she was 36. Totally unreal human who is the best person I have ever met. She settled on her ex-husband and after 5 years they split amicably, both understanding their mistake. She was "too old" so she figured she would just live a solo life. After a few years her friends made a profile for her and put it up. Its been two years and people are still jealous of our intense bond. Currently I'm looking for a ring.
Hold out hope, it's not totally over. I was you for many years.
I believe I will find the same eventually, it's just the search and the waiting that's running me ragged.
Happy for you, brother!
Not at all in relation to dating (rather to something related to age) that was exactly what I needed to read today :)
Who you marry is the most important decision of your life and ending up with someone you don't even like that much because she's the best you can do is a terrible idea. Who would want to be the woman in this situation?
The women you meet in online dating are much lower quality than the ones you meet in real life, and a part of you is aware of that. The answer is to meet people in real life.
That said, as I've entered my 30s things seem more strategic. I want love more than ever and after re-locating to the SF Bay Area women seem more sparse than ever.
Idk if modern women in america "stick around" anymore.
I think a lot of women use it as a hookup app but women often take their time and are more cautious when trying to hook up.
Women who aren't just looking for a hook-up often filter out because they meet a lot of guys who just want that.
Just maybe, fight for your passion and forget about family and kid. You might find them on the road that you avoid them.
But some possibility has to become actual at some point. Otherwise you aren't living at all. Life is making choices and living with the consequences. Dreaming is nice, but it's not the same as living. And if you spend all of your present imagining possible futures, you never have an actual life.
In other words, what fills the void where possibility once lived is actual living.
At your age, I left Philadelphia and ended up living in a tiny village in rural New Mexico. I had lived almost entirely in large cities since I was 10 years old. Since that move, I became a (volunteer) firefighter, and joined the boards of 3 village organizations. I learned how to shop for a week rather than a day. I've had to reassess my own landscape aesthetics, now that green is no longer the signifier of beauty (at least, not below 9000'). My construction skills have had to expand to encompass a house built of dried mud.
I would say that this has been as much "a new life" as any that I started when I was younger.
The longer the adventure, the more disconnected and odd home would feel upon return.
My family/friend situation is most likely a bit different though, for reasons that would make this comment far too long. It's time for a reset (~40ish).
Indeed. I'm at 40+ and is in this stage exactly. Nothing seems to be really meaningful. Work, family, kid, OK, then? I think it is ultimately a lone road as no one can help me to answer questions that only I myself can answer. I guess it's totally possible to not find an answer for the rest of the life.
I say this gently, but it sounds like you're trying to find reasons why you can't move anymore, none of which are very convincing.
Of course you can't move to everywhere exotic and different—that was never possible even when you were young. Of course you can't start a new life there in the same way that a young person would—even as a young adult it's often impossible to integrate as deeply as someone born there.
If that didn't stop you before, why does it stop you now? Do you perhaps simply like your current life enough that the incentive to move is much lower? If so, that's a great problem to have and should be celebrated.
Laughing at the world for letting me exist.
* Learned to pan for gold on creeks and use sluice boxes * Learned QGIS from scratch to play with mapping, data viz, gov't data sets and API's, etc * Learned to DJ, DJ'd 3 weddings as a wedding gift for others, and experienced profound joy in making mashups and remixes on the fly * Acquired power tools and started to learn metal working and wood working in my garage shop * Decided to learn to weld, so I bought a welder for 50 bucks on FB marketplace and learned with no in-person classes or courses, only YouTube university. Now I can weld, and a whole new world of possibilities has opened up as being able to create and make things is like a superpower. * Rediscovered skiing and snowboarding after being away from both for 20+ years
In terms of learning new things and acquiring new skills, my early forties have been a period of creativity and discovery, not to mention doing my best to be a good parent to our kid and a good husband.
I'm quite proud of these accomplishments, and none of them have anything to do with career or making money.
It doesn't even seem like these people live for others, they live because they imagine how great it would feel to be acknowledged. In chasing that ultimate pleasure, they forget to just make each day good.
Agree. I can sympathise with the mindset, because I watch so many others approach their lives with a "Grand Plan" - but it's not something I've ever set out to do so I can't claim to understand it.
I do daydream of successes - Olympic gold medals, pop band hero, etc - but that's all they are to me: daydreams. I was brought up to approach life with a "you've gotta laugh, innit!" attitude and, for the most part, it's worked out well for me. I never made it to the Olympics but I won a few races back in the day. I never got any of my novels published, but they're written and available for people to discover thanks to the wonders of modern technology. I've also been blessed with bucketloads of serendipity, taking me to successes I could never have guessed were possibilities for me when I was sub-30.
I ain't ancient, but I do know this: the keys to a Good Life are ... Good Friends!
We're all going to die, and we're all going to be forgotten eventually.
Sometimes it has nothing to do with being acknowledged, and sometimes do.
I think it's a question of conflating aging with ossification. I know I will die, leaving things undone, unmade, unsaid. My body is falling apart in a lot of dreadful ways. Yet I can still grow, still learn. I intend to gather, change, be protean, until life draws the curtain closed. What a thrill!
As I age, I come to see the vistas I imagined when younger as shallow, half-baked. I wanted shallow things, having nothing to compare my desires to, no context for the myths and narratives of my own life aside from the media and socialization I was exposed to early on.
How could I -really- picture the world beyond, the richness and pains I would stumble into, almost entirely on accident? How could I imagine anything true or close to the source, having lived for such a short time, tasted so little of the complexity of our substrate?
Which brings me back to the OP's lament: of course they failed to make good art: they were not guided by an interest in touching the true thing, only in being recognized as someone that can touch the true thing. Trading the vulnerability of unfiltered experience for the rigid belief in their deserved/desired social status. What good fortune they yet live, can yet grow and change and make art!
I am reminded of Tarkovsky's Stalker, and the Stalker's Prayer:
"Weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being! Because what has hardened will never win."
At 74 (he painted the great wave a little before this iirc):
"From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs. But all I have done before the the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy five I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At a hundred I shall be a marvelous artist. At a hundred and ten everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokusai, but today I sign my self 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing.'"That was half a lifetime ago. My depression seemed to have a better grasp of "what it all be" than my ambition.
Depending on how my health holds up and what my generation's asbestos turns out to be, I'm either over-the-hill or shortly on my way there. I never had exceptional strength or stamina, but I notice it yet diminishing. First gray hairs in my whiskers this year. And people look at me like a weird little old man, especially at nerd conventions and on public transportation.
Still, I can't shake the idea that I might claw my way to a Leslie Jones moment. I'm trying to abide by the Shonda Rhimes Doctrine, and build, rather than placate myself with thoughts that the real me is still asleep. But the balance between teenage dreams and adult realities is hard to maintain; and giving oneself wholly to either - to become a defenseless blob or a hollowed out husk - is out of the question.
I appreciate this meditation.
Oh, one last thought: reaching the age I can remember my parents being when I was in grade school has been especially sobering. Right about now, I would be preparing myself (and my siblings, one unborn) for a life-altering 700-mile move, and I just cannot imagine it.
Then there's this bit:
> Eventually, he met a woman and chose a place – the best woman and the best place – and his future was fixed. The world was good, but the world was no longer full of all these possibilities. What, then, fills the void where possibility once lived?
One's failure to find other ways to sate the desire for growth, contribution, and variety (other fundamental human needs) should not be mistaken as an inherent impossibility to find growth, contribution, and variety in one's middle age.
I wouldn't call a piece that confirms prior biases particularly powerful. As I've grown older, I've learned to differentiate depressive from powerful. I'd rather reserve the latter for labeling that which actually gives me power, rather than take it away.
Yes, of course. The target audience for that comment is today's version of my younger self, the one who thinks that if you haven't made ten million dollars by the time you turn 30 (or won a Nobel Prize or a Fields Medal or published a novel or had a screenplay produced or whatever) you're a failure.
... but otherwise I don't think about that movie, especially not 2 or 3 decades later. For me personally, it would be OK if it didn't exist. I don't plan to watch it again, ever
I'm very sure the author would say the same thing about what I'm doing -- i.e. "Who cares? It's OK if it doesn't exist"
I think the lesson is: don't take yourself too seriously, and don't take your own personal perspective too seriously.
I get where the author is coming from, and there are some very well-written sentences in this blog post. But I also think that to adopt this world view is a recipe for misery. It's one view of things, not absolute truth
Silence of the Lambs is just this author's version of that. Mine is a different movie - but the way the author talked about silence of the lambs resonated deeply with me about how I feel watching "my" movie at an older age, and comparing it to how I thought when I watched it at 14.
I don't relate to the travel stuff, travel imo isn't shopping around for a place to live. Its opportunities to learn about the world and enrich my life with experiences and learn about cultures and people.
You can still meet people you idolize, they're probably highly skilled in an area your interested in. Meeting idols is a chance to learn from them, thats exciting.
Aging sucks though, What i struggle with is being slower, more tired, weaker, maybe even less creative. it takes the day to day joy out of doing things. There less opportunities to reach personal goals
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I experienced the same when I was in my 20s.
I do think it fades away as you get older. I also suspect it's greatly motivated by biology. Doing something exceptional to be perceived as a good mating partner? Also possibly to personal trauma (low self esteem etc).
I'm in my mid-40s and I appreciate now what I couldn't then: Any kind of attention, greatness, notoriety, etc is entirely fleeting. You will have 15 minutes of attention and unless you do another great thing the best you'll get is "what have you done lately?"
It sounds glib, but really you do need to become comfortable with yourself where you are. I don't even know if that's possible in youth, and I don't want to discourage people from chasing their dreams, but you set yourself up for a lot of self-inflicted misery otherwise.
"You always want to be warm, never want to be hot" as the film director Roger Avary (who directed the film adaption of Bret Easton Ellis' Rules of Attraction) said about a career in the arts. He himself winning his only Oscar at 29 for working on the story for Pulp Fiction.
On another note, I just watched Frances Ha and for the first time watching a mid-to-late-20s coming of age story about a young artist trying to make it I found myself just barely on the other side of being older and more stable than the characters in the film. So it goes.
One good thing about getting old is that you worry less about what people think - these kinds of feelings are powerfully emotive and urgent while young but, given our position in this world just navel-gazing ultimately
I know this doesn't help if you had time-bound goals for your life, but I have to stress, people actually don't care. Raymond Chandler was not "uncovered, like toxic waste" when he published The Big Sleep, his first novel, at 42, but celebrated as anyone else.
I prefer them read by Matt Johnson: https://open.spotify.com/album/67crhBYB2f2xIiZWSDsFvI?si=GLZ...
This is where I think we humans must be connected, committed, and invested in something larger than ourselves to transform ambition into...transformation?
I thought I fit my big-boy pants. I see I need to consider a tailor now.
You will feel young again.
Diversity is a good thing to cultivate.
Spend as little time at home as possible. Travel. Find community. Live in a big city and make a ton of friends and throw lots of parties and bring people together, forming your own community. That's what I did and I feel like my 20s have been fulfilling, and I'm looking forward to what my 30s bring.
2) Travel abroad alone at least once if you haven't already, ideally for a few months. Shorter trips are costly and will interfere with suggestion #1. If you're still living with your parents, this can be a good way to test out living on your own.
3) Do not waste your time. You can be out partying, traveling, working, praying, or studying, but don't be doing nothing waiting for a more opportune time to make something happen.
--Missing those days... Every mistake I make will be forgiven... The pain as a grow-up grows as I age. Responsibilities never fade.
The article is written by a writer, so of course it is chock full of pithy statements, emotional frisson, and historical comparisons. But the term that is missing is “growing up.” This just a maturation step, albeit one that apparently takes some people decades to get to.
Last week I saw some photographs of the campus in The Cornell Daily Sun that I thought were just atrocious, like, I wouldn't post photos that bad to social media where there are no gatekeepers, no prestige, nothing. [1]
I've been taking photographs as a hobby for 20+ years, though in some of that time I was carrying a camera around everywhere but not taking any pictures. It was just last summer that I developed a style for landscape photography that really feels distinctive and branded
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/113365041910591036
and I feel like I've just "cracked the code" for sports photography after about two years of going to games.
This weekend I participated in a Hackathon run by a student game development club, no way was I going to do it myself, the whole point was I wanted to be in a team. We won the "Player's Choice" award: we didn't have the best game, but we had the best game demo.
In everyday life I'm the kind of developer who takes the time to get to the bottom of things and ties things up in a bow so other people can maintain them afterwards. But my adventures in startup land have taught me to make the most of whatever preparation I've got. The artist I worked with was great and the other developer was much more experienced in Unity than I was, but I had a good sense of "the definition of done" (what a good demo looks like) and stayed cool under pressure, so we had two levels that looked awesome and fun. We had five minutes to present but used only three which was fine because we had people's attention and didn't call people's attention to anything that was missing or broken. So the value I brought wasn't my technical experience but really the startup attitude that I've been cultivating ever since I was a teen.
[1] My wife says I shouldn't expect much from The Cornell Daily Sun since young people don't have much perspective or much to say.
I developed a style that involves a very small aperture for wide depth of field (f/22 if I can get away with it) that uses DxO's noise reduction if that means cranking the ISO too high (got DxO at the recommendation of other photogs because I was having trouble shooting volleyball indoors) and boosting microcontrast to make up for the small aperture softness and using color grading to brand the image. 'Ugly' turns into 'opinionated' and even though it is digital end-to-end it comes across like a picture you'd find in an old book that was taken with a huge view camera and a long exposure.
Unrelatedly, I just finished reading the semipublished novel of a member of our community, who I believe is in his late 40s and who could probably never get through today’s traditional publishing because he is clearly autistic. I had low expectations, but it’s shockingly good. As in, if it had the right people behind it, it would easily be one of the top books in a given year. And I think the books written by people of his age are slightly different from those written at mine, and of course both perspectives are radically different from a Gen Z 20-year-old’s.
When you read young novelists, you get the first draft of a new generation’s perspective. I barely understand Millennials and Gen Z is still opaque to me because so few authors of real talent have bubbled up. They exist for sure, but nepo kids get exposure first so I have really hard to find the good ones.
As they age, writers get better at writing. But writing is not the sole determinant of good fiction and it is even less correlated to relevance. Old writers tend to produce books that are technically fantastic and that critics and career writers recognize as superlative in craft, and often quite creative contrary to stereotype because these people don’t stop learning, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be relevant to any current conversation. Young authors tend to produce work that is more jagged and less technically accomplished, but extremely relevant to the time. Ellis is a prime example: he wrote the quintessential novel of the Reagan Era—it’s shocking and disgusting and not brilliantly written, but well-written enough.
That said, “bad sentences” are one of those issues that writers agonize about but the fact is that editors will catch them if they’re truly awful. It also doesn’t have much to do with age, because old writers who understand grammar extremely well also make mistakes, which 95 percent of the time are typos. Either they are removed by the proofreader or they become part of the history.
Towards the end of my youth, I got to date a celebrity crush and work at my dream job. Both sucked and left me heartbroken.
The only possible thing that I could think of is that rather than looking at the achievements of the young age, (whether the writer published a novel within 30), can we just look at how much a person progressed towards their goals, which might eventually lead to achievement at any later point of life.
This is bit tangential to the topic. I think we need to devise some kind of incentive centered around progress, rather than, the end results of progress. Because the end results can be gamed with, at some instances. But progress can't be gamed with, as you need to show the consistent effort put into it. Though, I am not sure how to measure and show progress in a different way other than end results, in all cases.
While this is not the stuff of world-class legend, in terms of the range of sensations of overall grandiosity, pomp and circumstance I had felt in my own life prior to that point, this was all, at the time, very electric; my "meteorically ascendant" tech career was intoxicating.
Two realisations, only with the benefit of hindsight, were humbling:
1) At 30+, I was taken more seriously, but at the cost of shedding the social capital of a wunderkind. By this point, nobody was really shocked that I had deep domain expertise in some area, nor marketable skills. It was just table stakes now, and has been ever since. This means that peers who had also advanced in their career were now catching up, and the cachet of being that far ahead of the pack was long gone.
In purely relative terms, this can feel like stagnation or even backsliding, if your ego is calibrated to the presumption of always running circles around your peers. Tragic, I know, but I built a big part of my ego-protection forcefield around the idea that I was gainfully doing recondite things nobody understands while everyone else is flipping burgers and getting plastered--revenge of the nerds and all that. Everyone needs a healthy ego, but when the snooty argument underpinning yours evaporates, it can force a tumultuous confrontation with the fact that you're not, actually, all that special.
2) With how much I got patted on the head and told I was so, so brilliant in my late teens and early 20s, it was easy to overdraw this praise and improperly extrapolate it to other areas of life, and to believe oneself to be precociously brilliant in everything else, too. I bought a condo at age 21 (which ultimately contributed to financial ruin later in life, as it never came close to recovering its bubble-era valuation) because I was a savvy investor and a clever Economic Man, and I was absolutely sure I knew where I wanted to live and what I wanted from my life (and from my partner of the time), because I knew everything.
Nope, outside of my "wunderkind" sphere, I was mostly just an early-20s dumbass like the others--though I would have been aghast at the suggestion. I made some terrible financial and life decisions from time to time, as you might expect from someone whose prefrontal cortex hadn't fully baked. The difference is that most early-20s dumbasses are somehow means-limited from digging themselves too deep a hole, whereas I was a very well-paid kidult, and did not face this constraint. Some of the consequences linger to this day.
This never seemed a problem at the time; I was young, and in some stratum of my unconscious, sure I had time to clean up my act, get straight with Jesus, etc. But one day, you wake up, and the accumulated weight finally tips over some limit and crashes down on you like a ton of bricks, suddenly and all at once.
Among other brilliant decisions, a month after I turned 22, I was fired from my last job and became self-employed, at the bottom of the recession, and took on my ex-employer as my first customer (and 17 years later, they remain). I thought I was a pretty big deal, having graduated beyond mere, pedestrian employment. Hell, even the guys who just fired me wanted to do business. It would take years to realise that, while I had opened up a lot of flexibility and opportunities for myself in some areas, I had fatefully painted myself into a grim corner in others, and on balance, it's all a bit of a wash at best.
Notwithstanding all this, the bit about the shrinking margin for error resonates strongly. I've got myself killed eight times and I'm all out of lives. I've got a partner, a child, and serious economic burdens which cannot be waved away or whimsically discarded, while I've simultaneously got less energy, unavoidably less flexibility as one gets more set in his ways with age, and am just objectively more tired and can't pull heroics like I used to.
To those who balk at the cocktail of gloom of gloom in the article, I don't read it that way. The maturity and wisdom of getting older is, in my experience, to a very large extent understanding limits, that not everything is possible, that not all problems have solutions, and there's no time to do all the things. This may curtail the energy of youthful naiveté that occasionally gets things done that were hitherto deemed impossible and fantastical, but 19 times out of 20, the acute awareness of trade-offs leads to more realistic and achievable goals. There's something to be said for achievable goals.
15 years younger than when JRR Tolkien before he published The Hobbit.
Martha Stewart founded her company at 56.
The founder of HTC was almost 40.
This article is just a downer for no reason.
