Conversation

Replying to
#2: Largely lost interest in cultural/intellectual traditions as things to be part of. Take easily discovered stuff that saves me time/effort but don’t bother situating anything I do in them unless necessary to make money.
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Happy being an unnecessarily inaccessible/not-worth-accessing non sequitur producer engaged in 90% mediocre reinventing of well-known wheels. It’s hard enough making sense of life. Deciphering breadcrumbs of those who came before and leaving my own is too much work.
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Autocorrect typo above: siem = down Will add more as I get a better sense of this developing Big Mood. Probably caused by liminal passage coming up in a few months: around April end, I’ll have spent as many years in the US as India (~22.75 in each, summing to 45.5)
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Another 22y and I’ll be 67, official age for collecting full social security, and 22 more brings me up to about 90, which is probably a good life expectancy planning number. So this is also a good halftime show point. 2Q left to go.
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I do wonder. How much of collective civilizational experience is not so much lost as never preserved in the first place, because the people experiencing them are checking out and not checking in their experiences or doing pull requests to civ repo so to speak.
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I don’t even mean people like me, who write in public and set up expectations that we’ll be logging it all into the commons. I mean private people with no public life, but who don’t even bother checking in their new code to friends/family.
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Interesting that so many people resist and fight aging so hard and so successfully (in many significant ways you can avoid aging if you try hard enough, even though physically you will decline and die) Aging is quite an interesting experience. I’m not all inclined to fight it.
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Replying to
I find myself thinking that aging well psychologically/socially is tied up in being a good oral historian. the two failure modes on this tightrope seem to be either "try to forget the past and be young", or "get stuck mumbling old stories like an annoying uncle"
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Replying to
Interesting that your natural inclination is to define aging in terms of social role rather than individual experience. East or west I suspect the latter dominates. Research shows people get more alone (and lonely) with age.
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mmm yes and– doesn't it apply internally too? I think I like to think that the big advantage I have over my 17 year old self is my personal sense of history. I might not have wild crazy experiences as often or as much, but each new experience fits into a more interesting tapestry
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