Conversation

There is a reason ambitious thinkers like Taleb, after a great opening act, often resort to generating piles of aphoristic rubble for their act 2 (and in his case, kinda retreat to increasingly refined 3d-projective repetitions of their Act 1 as their Act 3 elder game/late style)
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I'm no exception of course. Twitter is just easier for me right now than longer forms. It's easier to scurry around like a rat in the darkness, or a worm slithering around underground, generating 280 characters worth of thought at a time
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There IS an alternative, which is to get increasingly idiosyncratic, convincing yourself you are discovering deep, vast hyperdimensional truths, and that you're "merely" having trouble articulating them for the benefit of others. No, it's not a "mere" compilation problem.
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You are doing what I call vanishing past your own event horizon. Or to use a more evocative everyday phrase, your solution to the problem is to become part of the problem. Congrats, you are now as obscure as the problem you were trying to investigate.
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I've been thinking about late styles/elder games/Act 2 for a year now, and all the supposed good news is feel-good fake news. If it looks like somebody is doing very interesting things past 40 or so, look again. It's always tricks with mirrors or harvesting stuff done before 40.
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In The Science of Discworld, the authors talk a lot about "lies to children" ie how popular understanding of science is layers upon layers of wilfully crafted misunderstandings to give people a false sense of comprehension. Our culture is equally full of "lies to the middle aged"
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US culture is particularly full of this shit. It annoys me. It gets in the way of actually having a generative, alive Act 2. It fetishes the affordances of youth. It blinds you to the affordances of maturity. It accumulates a debt of reality shock that hits you eventually.
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Yeah, this is far more true than anyone will let you admit. It's one of the deepest taboos in modernity to admit that aging is NOT a bed of roses or a graceful ascent to the peaks of wisdom and insight.
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The solution to any problem is to reformulate the approach so that the problem no longer exists. Age may limit the repertoire of reformulations. Self-awareness is only one of the approaches.
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First, this is brilliant. I am not quite 40 but like you I have been changing careers and thinking what my true Act 2 is. I realize that experience does not increase the level of understanding of world but just pattern recognition. What next for you?
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