Empirically people don’t really seem to grow much after 40. Maybe 1 in 10 will adopt a truly different mindset. Maybe 1 in 100 will develop a new life-shaping ability (not a hobby). Maybe 1 in 1000 will take on a fundamentally leveled-up Act 2 that will top Act 1.
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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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When I read your original tweet this was my main objection. My anecdata suggest that dark growth is more prevalent - dad bands, coaching kids sports, volunteering on a crisis line - all of these can be legit iceberg transformations...
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I think all that is fulfillment not dark growth
Growth to me has a distinctive signature of traumatic learning, and that you’re advancing the art of life just a little bit further. Some aspects of parenting and grand parenting and teaching have that but it is kinda narrow.

