This sounds like death to Americans raised on memetically modified high gritcose hustleporn syrup. I think the lack of visible growth after 40 for the vast majority is a good thing. It means growth has gone past healthy solipsism horizon. They’re living life on their own terms.
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I think what breaks is not the ability to learn but the ability to care about what other people think about you (which is of course predicated on the ability to maintain the delusion that they’re thinking about you at all).
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Of the 15% who continue publicly legible growth, maybe 1% are growing in a generative way, while 14% are in arrested development, stuck in Act 1 ruts. ~85% stop visibly growing. Of this, 80% stop growing, period. But 5% are in “dark growth” visible+legible mostly to themselves
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Of that 5%, the dark growth is visible to intimates in most cases, but rarely legible. So most intimate relationships are likelier to grow apart than grow together. Dem’s the odds. Divergence is the default, not convergence.
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It’s mostly cordial acceptance of growing mutual inscrutability though, rather than growing stress. Otherwise divorce rates would be far higher, and far fewer friendships would last as long as they do. That’s how/why loneliness increases with age, *without* social unraveling
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I have this growing impatience with the framing of the 40+ life experience as “slowly failing youth” unless you’re in the minority that stays on an obvious extension of the under-40 script. It’s like this annoying fog obscuring the truly interesting life-stage challenges.
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Imagine if at 30 you had 16 year olds constantly asking you about what grade you got on the test, taking your reticence to mean you got a bad grade because they don’t get that school ends and there’s a different life beyond, and judging/shaming you loudly for not studying harder
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That’s kinda what 40+ life can feel like except that a) most people don’t even notice that there IS a different life stage b) a lot of people actually get confused and start thinking they should be actually taking tests and worrying about grades like they’re still in school
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For the record, with “dark growth” I’m not talking about traditional later life foci like parenting and grand parenting and community service. That’s fulfillment rather than dark growth. Nice if that’s what you want and get, but if that’s were it, later life would frankly be hell
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I’d love this! I still need to finish Being Mortal, but the state of geriatrics / respecting the elderly in the US still makes me a little nauseous. My grandparents were all awesome people and I’m sad about how little I know about their lives.
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As expected you’re extracting the 180 degree opposed idea from what I intend
Disrespecting elders is about the only thing American elderculture gets right. I think trad elderculture is way worse than modern. It actively inhibits dark growth by reducing oldies to grandparents. - 5 more replies
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