Aging is like scaling. You have to re-solve every significant life problem every 10 years.
Very annoying.
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Replying to
If you’re 40+ and habits you developed I early 20s still work for you, I’ve got some grim news for you: somehow you’ve managed to stay protected enough you haven’t grown. It’s not an eternal truth you’ve stumbled upon, it’s arrested development.
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Example: Productivity.
In your 20s is largely a motivation problem. You’re under- or overmotivated. Fix that with One Weird Trick and raw energy will get you Young Buck wins.
In your 30s it’s a skills problem. Fix with a system or two and you’re good.
40s: It’s a taste problem
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Example 2: Meaning
In your 20s, it’s usually a self-awareness and relationships problem. Look inwards, look inbetween. Meaning: Done.
In your 30s, it is largely an IQ-EQ problem. You just think-feel your way through.
In 40s, it appears to turn into an energy problem afaict
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And solving these problems is not really optional if you have a normal mix of good/bad fortune. At a normal rate of life entropy increase, the cost of the previous decade’s solutions is unsustainable. The only way out — arrested development through luck — is a curse of resources.
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Realizing this is why I pretty much stopped writing posts that even gesture at Advice on Basic Life Problems. Previously, I was ambivalent about it but occasionally succumbed to the temptation to at least write elliptically about them without descending into unironic advice.
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Generalized advice is a genre of Noble Lies for 20s and 30s set, with a half life of 3-5 years. There’s a chance it will work and do good before the limitations bite back. Past 40, generalized advice has a half life of like 1 month. Decays to useless in a quarter, noise in a year
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Exception: mediocrity advice. The advice I doled out in this thread is not actually in jest. If it seems that way to you, Interesting Times lie ahead for you.
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Free mediocrity advice for the next 15 minutes. One-tweet way-of-mediocrity suggestions for your one-tweet life challenges.
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Replying to
A friend of mine in her 30's once said to me in the definitive and self-satisfied tone of someone imparting an eternal life lesson: "I've realized that the only thing you can always count on to be there is your parents."
Me, quite a bit older, and recently orphaned: "Um...."
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