I'm thinking that serious is an early adulthood stage (cf bildungsroman/Brahmacharya/early career development)
Gonzo-experiential is either a deepening commitment to a major project (career & family, or a major step off the conventional path)
Humourous is a sort of Ironic Sage
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Replying to
Hmm I wouldn't map these to life stages. I think you lock on to one of the 3 fairly early, like as a teenager, and pretty much stay there. You might take a tourist detour into the other 3 paths, but I've never met anyone who's shifted fundamentally.
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I think you're mostly right...
Howevs, I have definitely oscillated through all three.
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My original inclination, as a teenager (like you referenced), was quite capital S Serious. very interested in Meaning
Became inspired by very Gonzo types, and went through hardcore quest for the gonzo grail of experience
Am rapidly identifying less and less with those stances
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The distinction was that I don't think it was a tourist path through those two. some pretty hard core traumatic stuff intervened, as well as some Rao-ian "crashes"
Kind of reformatted a lot of my relationship with the world
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But your overall hunch that in general, these 3 stances don't map to life stages, and that they are personality attractor states that show up early in life and tend to persist, rings quite plausible to me.
my life arc isn't generalizable, even among outliers. (not a boast)
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This is a general bias on my part, and one reason I don't resonate as much with Kegan as and others do. I feel life-stage theories are in general overtheorized and life-variety theories undertheorized. Most people don't grow much. But they vary more than we think.
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Yeah that's actually a big part of why I follow you. In the parliament of ideas I like to hear from the minority parties, and you definitely have an interesting opposition to contrast with Kegan, similar theorists, and ' project.
I like that distinction...
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I don't know that I oppose that viewpoint so much as I am interested in a different scope. Developmental psych/philosophy approaches are instrumental in the sense of stack ranking the human condition and making the "best" in some sense better by unpacking it.
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I think I'm interested in the broadest swathe of the human condition, hence my interest in topics like mediocrity, non-growth paths, variety, etc. To the extent that I'm interested in a subset of humans, I'm interested in the ones that simply manage to survive.
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Ie, looking at adaptive fitness and survival as a mark of interestingness and living richness, without holding any particular opinions on what makes a life worthwhile/rich/meaningful or evolved/growth-oriented. If idiocy or green beards are adaptive, that's what I'm curious about

