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I think there is a kind of grief associated with growing up that people don’t talk about. When you are young and inspired it seems like life is long and you can
by dexwiz 3y ago
I think there is a kind of grief associated with growing up that people don’t talk about. When you are young and inspired it seems like life is long and you can do anything, branching paths with unlimited doors. Once you're an adult, your past choices narrow down your future paths, and your sense of age starts to set in. In some way you mourn the paths not taken. This is called mortality, and can be a nasty combo with other depressive factors.
As you get older, you realize some doors not yet stepped through are now closed, and less doors are opened by others for you. Life can start to feel like a hallway with the investable at the end. While less doors are open now, life is still very free. You may now be able to see decades into your past, but you still cannot see into your future. There are many open doors still hidden, they just take a bit more searching. Good news, you are an adult with years of life experience, you can go find them.
- tnecniv 3y agoCoincidentally, I was rewatching the first season of True Detective last night and they were talking about this in the show. I almost turned it off because it was too real for me at the moment.
- weakfish 3y agoI just wanted to say thank you for this comment, it helped a lot of with some general anxieties plaguing me lately.
- wnolens 3y agoI need a support group for this idea. Can't seem to accept it and walk through some doors, abandoning the other paths. It's sparked a major depression in me.
- marssaxman 3y agoAs I have grown older I have come to see a similar effect not just in my own life but in the shape of the world around us; humanity has closed the doors to certain kinds of futures I once hoped and worked for, and "mourning" is a good term for those feelings. There are many open doors remaining in humanity's future, to be sure, but the scope of change seems narrower than it once did, since the bright new possibilities of the future always seem to get swallowed up by the ugly messes left over from the past.
- sirpilade 3y agoI totally agree with your comment. I should add that, as the Romans used to say quite some time ago, 'Audentes fortuna juvat' (fortune favors the bold). With this I mean to say that some more optimistic and unmindful attitude usually helps in finding those doors, or at least in forgetting the ones that did not eventually open.
- weakfish 3y agoHmm, I’m curious what you mean by unmindful. I feel that a mindful (as in meditation mindfulness) and grounding oneself in the present would _help_ find doors, rather than being unmindful (I.e. wrapped up in future or past thinking)
- sirpilade 3y agowell, I meant unmindful as in trying to forget that to get to the point where you stand today you had to pass past some doors that you decided not to open. A child-like attitude towards discovery, free from preconceptions. Then, after discovery, we should ground ourselves and leverage from our adult experience. My own experience with great thinkers I knew (some Nobel-prize level) is that we need to go from moments of imagination to moments of reality check many times. Kind of the same line as Feynman’s experience
- bgnn 3y agoThis is free will in essence. Making a choice is also choosing to not to do the alternatives. A person has to make peace with this to live without anxiety over life decisions. We are free at the end. We can completely change track if we really want. This isn't meaning to be streched out of physical reality if course. One cannot be an olympic athlete after a certain age, but can start training to be a good athlete at any age if that is the desire. Financial security is often a big limitation unfortunately.