"The years that pass eat up your margin for error until there is no margin left. The mistakes you make are no longer flaws of inexperience, they are flaws of character. To be young is to be constantly on the precipice of perfection – just a little further and you’ll get there – but you never get there, and suddenly you’re old, and find yourself in a permanent state of imperfection, which you must reckon with."
Something that strikes me about the tone of both the article and comments here is how hard on ourselves we can be. The folks here are of a particular variety too -- pulled in by grand stories of "achievement". The imperfection and the manner in which we reckon with it can be incredibly beautiful. Indeed it is probably the only thing we have, and the only thing we can really use to truly connect with others. It's all really beautiful if you let it be. On the other side, it can be torturous if you don't.
It's powerful if you agree with that perspective, but I don't. We are all imperfect by nature. Said another way, we are all sinners. I don't believe that time shrinks your margin for error, as much as it grows your capacity to learn. I don't think mistakes are always character flaws. Youth chases a fading ideal of perfection but age reveals a richer self-awareness. Life's worth lies not in perfection, but in acceptance, gratitude and love.
Look at it the other way. You're old as soon as you see imperfections as permanent and decide to be stuck in your ways. You can always grow if you care to do so.
It's true you can't be a _young_ genius forever but the rest of its not so bleak.
It's an overly harsh characterization of youth - as is much of the article. No need to say you have a character flaw just because you're 30 years old and didn't publish a book in your 20's.
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.
“Ten years later, as a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford in 1976, I experienced a minor epiphany about ambition’s degradation. At age 16 or 17, I had wanted to be another Einstein; at 21, I would have been happy to be another Feynman; at 24, a future T. D. Lee would have sufficed. By 1976, sharing an office with other postdoctoral researchers at Oxford, I realized that I had reached the point where I merely envied the postdoc in the office next door because he had been invited to give a seminar in France. In much the same way, by a process options theorists call time decay, financial stock options lose their potential as they approach their own expiration.”, Emanuel Derman, My life as a Quant
That reminds me of a specific line from A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin.
> 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.
The prevalence of such statements almost makes me want to believe there's a small cottage industry of sorts that wants to make people feel bad about themselves especially wrt aging. However, with self-reflection, people can always fix themselves, even when they're at an advanced age.
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.
I think as you get older (i'm 48) the consequences of bad decisions become more and more damaging. Just thinking about careers, a major change in career at 27 isn't as consequential as a career change at 50 because you have time to try again. Make a career change mistake at 50 and there isn't much time to right the ship and get back to at least where you were.
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."
I think something in this ballpark has been a driving force behind some mood issues that have been with me for the last 5 months or so, that have just recently been improving.
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.
The Michael Scott quote really sums it up for me pretty well:
"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."
I've often heard that this is a reason we sometimes don't want to try hard things. We don't want to try our best and find out that we can't do it because our best is not good enough. We prefer the ego-sustaining state of ambiguity and unexplored possibility.
It reads a bit like a verse from the song Time by Pink Floyd, which perfectly encapsulates the sense of existential dread that so many of us feel more and more often as we get older.
While I absolutely loved the writing, I want to challenge that last part and the dichotomy created. Perfection is an ideal. You can strive towards it at 25 or 45. It's too deterministic to say as soon as you're in your forties, it's game over. Permanent imperfection. Pure facticity. No transcendence.
"[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."
The thirst for perfection is replaced by the satiation of shame. I take great pride and pleasure in being embarrassed in my work of years past, as it means that I am growing, still on the path that leads to only itself.
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.
At 56, much of this piece resonates with me, but this passage seems to have been taken from my own thoughts:
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.
"What, then, fills the void where possibility once lived?"
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?"
As a guy who's dating in his 30s I'm just envious he's able to choose "the best woman" and doesn't feel his options are limited to the only woman in online dating who's willing to stick around
It's true that, once you make a specific choice, other choices that you could have made in its place are gone. Once one possibility becomes actual, the other possibilities that could have taken its place are gone.
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.
> 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.
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.
I have been struggling with the same problem for quite a while. When I was in high school and my early 20s I had a group of friends I was constantly hanging out with. I realized a few months ago that I hadn't seen or talked to any of them in more than two years. We all changed and went our separate ways. I wondered if I would see them again. I found it troubling to think that I might not - but the love was still there, even knowing that we might never all be together again. It can be difficult to enjoy something for what it is (or was), rather than for what it could be. As we age we are forced to reconcile the potentiality of our dreams with the finite reality of our lives. This can be discouraging (and even frightening) but it can also allow for a much deeper enjoyment of the present moment. I do not need to worry about what something might become - I can just enjoy it for what it is here and now.
Every long trip is a reminder of all the things I am grateful for at home. Friends, family, a home, plans. I used to go on these long adventurous trips, but every year they get shorter, because I feel like I'm sacrificing something at home by not being there.
> 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.
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.
> 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 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.
This is the allure of nomading for me. I can claim to live in a place and generally know it better than others staying for only a week. Right now I'm probably settling down with my wife but a part of me really hates to close off all the possibilities. I think it would be so exciting to live in a country in Africa. It really makes you think about how much you are giving up by buying a house or leasing an apartment.
* 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.
I was going to say I don't understand this mindset, but I guess I do. I can't really agree with it, though. How debilitating it must be to live with this pressure, to achieve something that maybe one in a million achieves, instead of aiming to make every day a happy one.
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.
I appreciated OP sharing their thoughts. But this piece didn't land for me.
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."
In college, I remember writing and posting to Facebook a poem about my frustrations with my own impotence in the face of Big Issues Facing the World, and ending it with something along the lines of glancing at a sunny window and watching, out of the corner of my eye, "my youth jump out it."
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.
Reads needlessly melancholic, depressive, bleak. Significance is just one of several human needs. Not everyone is driven by that particular need.
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.
I call shenanigans on the whole idea of publication as a success metric. I say this as someone who made a very successful career out of publishing for fifteen years. I was publishing non-fiction (scientific papers) rather than novels but I think the underlying social dynamic is the same: there is a small group of gatekeepers (peers in my case, publishers in the other) who decide your fate, and their decisions are not necessarily based on any kind of objective merit. In fact the whole idea of objective merit in fiction is highly questionable IMHO. Personally, I find most fiction to be unreadable, and "literary fiction" especially so. It's pretentious, designed more to be a virtue signal than anything else. You put the book on your shelf to make people think you've read it rather than actually gaining any value from reading it, just as you cite the paper not because you think it has merit but because the author of the paper you're citing is on the review committee. It's not all politics, but it's a hell of a lot of politics. At best the literary emperor is wearing a thong.
Why cant you write for the enjoyment of writing? Why do you need to write the best novel ever. I guess that's where I'm at in life. Whats the point of being great or the best at something? Do things because they're enjoyable, "the journey", trying to be the best will inevitably lead to burn out and not necessarily happiness. Ive frequently seen world champions say they didn't know what is next. If you write this world wide acclaimed novel, what now?
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
> But this silly desire to be an exceptional young writer wasn’t egoistic craving. It was a biological obligation.
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).
The best lesson I learned growing up is that there really aren't any adults, there are only older young people. This is either extremely comforting or extremely terrifying depending on your perspective, but as the years go by I've found it to be no less true.
I just wrote a novel at 41, and am starting the process of trying to get it published. Almost everything about aging in the article hit home, but something that struck me very differently about writing, is that I'm not trying to be "recognized." I made something I think is beautiful, and I want to share it with people. Hopefully one of the benefits of aging is being less dependent on others' judgement.
I wanted some amount of notoriety when I was younger. I wanted to do something important. Accomplish something that helped people. It was mostly notions of having done some really cool project that people would talk about.
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.
Moving read, what it does not touch on is having a moment of hype young and never reaching that level of success again. Plenty of people have one visible successful moment young in their career and never have a notable follow up.
"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
Youth is defined by growth and curiosity. We don't lose this to time, we lose this to the assumption that we know better. It is not a passive process, as the article suggests ...he was slowly stripped of his Youth, but an active one that we are in control of.
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.
Ambition, an elixir of youth for me, for so long. Then (of course!), the arc began to flatten, the sandwich (generation) turned out to be more than a foot-long, and, that thing I took for granted forever...health.
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.
[+] [-] y-curious|1 year ago|reply
What a powerful observation.
[+] [-] cnity|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] joshuamcginnis|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jayd16|1 year ago|reply
It's true you can't be a _young_ genius forever but the rest of its not so bleak.
[+] [-] cj|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bongoman42|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Nition|1 year ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] supriyo-biswas|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ronbenton|1 year ago|reply
This is an attitude that needs to be excised. Perfection-seeking is a curse.
[+] [-] svat|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] chasd00|1 year ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] getnormality|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hattmall|1 year ago|reply
"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."
[+] [-] getnormality|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] whiplash451|1 year ago|reply
Some people are wired differently and take calculated risks their whole life.
Read the life of Louis Pasteur if you need an example.
[+] [-] falcrist|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tijl|1 year ago|reply
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-... )
[+] [-] wcfrobert|1 year ago|reply
"[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."
[+] [-] K0balt|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jp57|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unethical_ban|1 year ago|reply
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?"
[+] [-] MaxHoppersGhost|1 year ago|reply
Children fill this void
[+] [-] asdfman123|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pdonis|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] PaulDavisThe1st|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lurk2|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nicbou|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] markus_zhang|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fowl338|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] analog31|1 year ago|reply
Laughing at the world for letting me exist.
[+] [-] cactusplant7374|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] danhodgins|1 year ago|reply
* 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.
[+] [-] stavros|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Min0taur|1 year ago|reply
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."
[+] [-] h2zizzle|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] airstrike|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] lisper|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tayo42|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] pier25|1 year ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] nancyminusone|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] moultano|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
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[+] [-] sircastor|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] j5r5myk|1 year ago|reply
"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.
[+] [-] AIorNot|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] dfxm12|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kristiandupont|1 year ago|reply
I prefer them read by Matt Johnson: https://open.spotify.com/album/67crhBYB2f2xIiZWSDsFvI?si=GLZ...
[+] [-] formerphotoj|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] djeastm|1 year ago|reply
You will feel young again.