15 ms·
Youth and what happens when it's gone
- y-curious 2y ago"The years that pass eat up your margin for error until there is no margin left. The mistakes you make are no longer flaws of inexperience, they are flaws of character. To be young is to be constantly on the precipice of perfection – just a little further and you’ll get there – but you never get there, and suddenly you’re old, and find yourself in a permanent state of imperfection, which you must reckon with." What a powerful observation.
- encoderer 2y agoCounterpoint: I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y agoI am also the master of my fate. That doesn't help one bit in trying to figure out where it lies.
- encoderer 2y agoI can’t imagine feeling like I need to “reckon with my own imperfection”. Always keep climbing.
- joshuamcginnis 2y agoIt's powerful if you agree with that perspective, but I don't. We are all imperfect by nature. Said another way, we are all sinners. I don't believe that time shrinks your margin for error, as much as it grows your capacity to learn. I don't think mistakes are always character flaws. Youth chases a fading ideal of perfection but age reveals a richer self-awareness. Life's worth lies not in perfection, but in acceptance, gratitude and love.
- tgv 2y agoAnd one man's vice is another man's virtue. Just look at international politics.
- otreblatercero 2y agoYou must be younger than 45, not to be patronizing but, otherwise, you'd get it.
- dangus 2y agoSorry, not everyone over 45 is painfully self-critical. Example: the fact that I don’t have the DNA to be an NBA player is not a flaw of character. The fact that I don’t have an eye for painting or the brain for quantum physics isn’t a flaw of character. This article basically encourages us to punish ourselves for happily existing.
- otreblatercero 2y agoNot being self-critical does not mean things don't happen. Suppose you love drinking, for example. At 20 it will be just a hangover, but at 40 it could even kill you. If at 40 you get drunk knowing you no longer process alcohol like you used to, that's a flaw of character. It doesn't have anything to do with DNA(supposing you're not an alcoholic). Mistakes have much more weight the older one gets. It's a fact, not a way of seeing things.
- dangus 2y agoI would say that the ability to recognize a past mistake and avoid it is completely detached from age. The drinking analogy is not a great one because that’s an obviously detrimental activity. A lot of activities are positive. E.g., trying to publish a book when you’re 65 after failing when you were 25 is not a character flaw.
- stickfigure 2y agoI'm with you about being an NBA player but I suspect most people, if they devoted themselves to it, could learn to paint competently or understand quantum physics at a phd level. It would "just" take years of study and practice. We only live so long so we have to pick and choose. Especially as the years remaining clock down.
- cj 2y agoIt's an overly harsh characterization of youth - as is much of the article. No need to say you have a character flaw just because you're 30 years old and didn't publish a book in your 20's. But I agree with the gist. When you're young, you don't know what you don't know, and usually you have much less to lose by taking risks. As you get older, risks become more costly. Maybe one way to think about youth in a way that's not self-defeating could be to sit down and think about what youth means to you in the next 1-3 years, and make sure the definition is within reach. The worst thing you can do if you're feeling old is to lean into the feeling. But it's hard not to, because media, TV, etc tries to define youth for the whole of society when really it should be individualized and defined in a way that motivates the person to keep on feeling youthful as far into old age as possible.
- ronbenton 2y ago>To be young is to be constantly on the precipice of perfection – just a little further and you’ll get there This is an attitude that needs to be excised. Perfection-seeking is a curse.
- kevinsync 2y agoPerfection-seeking as an activity is fine (and to be lauded!), but perfection-seeking as an identity needs to be excised. Endless effort spent to realize excellence in this world is a beautiful thing, but it truly is a curse to become so self-critical, so self-loathing that if you haven't achieved it yet means (to you) that you are a failure. You've only ever failed when you quit trying, otherwise you're simply on the journey of discovery, trial, tribulation and hopefully, eventually, triumph. And don't forget, success is inextricably linked to a moment in time; it will fade, and you will remain, so hopefully a person has been kind enough to and accepting enough of themselves that when the accolades become meaningless, the person left behind is whole, happy and content. There's always another challenge on the horizon, always more perfection to be sought.
- robocat 2y agoSeeking improvement is a good thing. Is the definition of seeking perfection different? Maybe these words are poor for the distinction between direction and target. CertainlyI wouldn't want to be an unhappy perfectionist. But slowly perfecting/improving something is a happy thing. That said, I struggle with the internal dialogue of some people that are never happy with what they do.
- dangus 2y agoMeh, I just find it to be unnecessarily punishing and bleak. It’s just written to make us sad for no reason. I think the article is just existing to be negative and inject punishing thoughts about age, to make sure we all have these anxieties even if we don’t have them naturally. The funny part about the young author example, how older authors are not exciting to discover? Yeah the richest and most successful author of all time was discovered when she was 32. J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit at age 45. Little House on the Prairie? Published when Laura Ingalls Wilder was 65. I just don’t understand the point of this article other than to transmit bad vibes.
- alabastervlog 2y agoI don’t know how people aren’t reading an implied critique in this piece. Is it a kind of writing that many HNers are unfamiliar with, or something?
- card_zero 2y agoOr isn't there one really? For instance: > 45-year-olds aren’t discovered, they’re uncovered, like toxic waste, or a political scandal, or the murderer at the end of an Agatha Christie book. My god, that 45-year-old was lurking among us this entire time! One way to read that is as criticism of people who think that way. It certainly seems like a complaint: the author is complaining this attitude is unfair. But whose attitude is it? Is this really the prevailing way of thinking about 45-year-olds? Or is the author just pushing paranoia to the readers?
- dangus 2y agoI think you captured exactly my distaste for this article. I understand it’s about coming to terms with these feelings and uses these specific examples. But the examples used in the article seem unrealistic to begin with, as if the article insists that a plurality of people feel this way about youth and aging. I just don’t think that’s really the case.
- 2y ago
- jayd16 2y agoLook at it the other way. You're old as soon as you see imperfections as permanent and decide to be stuck in your ways. You can always grow if you care to do so. It's true you can't be a _young_ genius forever but the rest of its not so bleak.
- mattgreenrocks 2y agoThis is wisdom. Pursuing one's own individual path confers a perspective shift that counters some of the cynicism that seems to come with old age.
- stvltvs 2y agoThere might be aspects of ourselves that cannot be changed even if we desire to change them. I am a firm believer in the growth mindset, but as I get older, I see there might be limits to it because of time, energy, money, etc. constraints.
- testfoobar 2y agoYes and no. There are encumbrances and liabilities that emerge that cannot be removed. Diseases, children, aging parents, accidents are all things that happen and can sometimes eat up all available resources.
- inanutshellus 2y agoI don't see this as a contradiction to the parent. Those things you listed to prove your point can all happen to any of us at age 12, and all of the rest save child-bearing can happen at any age. All of them are external things that change our situation, sure, but your choice to be "old" or not based on them is still a choice, which was the parent's point.
- Arisaka1 2y agoAll more probable to happen over time, but not less probable to happen due to youth.
- munificent 2y ago
- cnity 2y agoSomething that strikes me about the tone of both the article and comments here is how hard on ourselves we can be. The folks here are of a particular variety too -- pulled in by grand stories of "achievement". The imperfection and the manner in which we reckon with it can be incredibly beautiful. Indeed it is probably the only thing we have, and the only thing we can really use to truly connect with others. It's all really beautiful if you let it be. On the other side, it can be torturous if you don't.
- 2-3-7-43-1807 2y agoaccept, let go and surrender.
- FredPret 2y agoIt's tough to be wired as an optimizer
- pants2 2y agoI'm really hard on myself even for small things like missing a turn that takes me 5 minutes out of the way. Or making a minor mistake in my morning breakfast routine that I've been optimizing for 3 years. It's just how I'm wired.
- ge96 2y agoFor me work stuff bothers me like making a mistake/looking dumb. But also when other people make mistakes I don't judge them that harshly/don't obsess over it as opposed to myself.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- abakker 2y agoI think the antidote is to intentionally avoid routines to optimize. Cultivating an objective of variety helps break out of the mundanity-loop. (caveat: everything in moderation, including moderation)
- tromp 2y agoBy an author who will forever be Young (Jared Young that is).
- hattmall 2y agoThe Michael Scott quote really sums it up for me pretty well: "I'm not a millionaire. I thought I would be by the time I was 30, but I wasn't even close. And then I thought maybe by the time I was 40. But by 40, I had less money than when I was 30."
- chasd00 2y agoI think as you get older (i'm 48) the consequences of bad decisions become more and more damaging. Just thinking about careers, a major change in career at 27 isn't as consequential as a career change at 50 because you have time to try again. Make a career change mistake at 50 and there isn't much time to right the ship and get back to at least where you were. My wife and I were talking about making considerable life changes (career and living) in about 6 years as both my boys will be through HS then and out of the house. So these changes, whatever shape they take, will happen in my mid-50s. That's 10 years from my planned retirement (I'm in the US). Any mistake made in those decisions has dire consequences to the rest of my life (and my wife's life for that matter). As for dealing with imperfections, I've told my therapist "i am who i'm going to be. If that's not good enough for you or society then you all are just going to have to deal with it."
- whiplash451 2y agoI see things differently. As you get older, the opportunity cost of not taking risks increases significantly, pushing you to take more (calculated) risks. And it turns out that you get better at calculating these risks, so...
- supriyo-biswas 2y agoThe prevalence of such statements almost makes me want to believe there's a small cottage industry of sorts that wants to make people feel bad about themselves especially wrt aging. However, with self-reflection, people can always fix themselves, even when they're at an advanced age. Most recently, a significant life event happened, that drew my attention to a pattern of mistakes I've been making for the past couple of years. I've made it a point to reflect upon each incident and take copious notes of what I could have done differently in those situations; and hopefully I'll do better for the next event. While I'm currently at an age where I'd neither be considered "young" nor "old", I don't think any of this can't be applied to someone who'd be 10 or 20 years older than me, for example.
- fluoridation 2y agoBut we must also contend with the fact that most people -- ourselves included -- won't fix most of their flaws. Besides, your anecdote does not even further your point. You're talking about having the intention to try to improve yourself. That says nothing about whether you'll actually follow through, let alone succeed.
- supriyo-biswas 2y agoI feel this way of viewing the world is assuming that there is no room for personal growth -- a fixed mindset so to speak. And there's no guarantee that any of us can change anything, we can only try our best.
- purple-leafy 2y agoBut who says they are flaws? I only believe in fixing self-accepted flaws. Eg if someone can’t handle alcohol -> don’t drink Fat? Eat less and exercise ADHD? Get medicated and embrace the condition and understand it I think you can pick and choose to work on your flaws. I certainly am after a life event, but sometimes it requires an external strong force to make you realise you want to change for the better
- nemomarx 2y agoIt is kinda marketing staple to make people feel bad about themselves or exaggerate problems so they desire your solution. You see it everywhere in different forms.
- falcrist 2y agoIt reads a bit like a verse from the song Time by Pink Floyd, which perfectly encapsulates the sense of existential dread that so many of us feel more and more often as we get older.
- whiplash451 2y agoThat's a fairly narrow and pessimistic view of people's character and evolution over time. Some people are wired differently and take calculated risks their whole life. Read the life of Louis Pasteur if you need an example.
- bongoman42 2y ago“Ten years later, as a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford in 1976, I experienced a minor epiphany about ambition’s degradation. At age 16 or 17, I had wanted to be another Einstein; at 21, I would have been happy to be another Feynman; at 24, a future T. D. Lee would have sufficed. By 1976, sharing an office with other postdoctoral researchers at Oxford, I realized that I had reached the point where I merely envied the postdoc in the office next door because he had been invited to give a seminar in France. In much the same way, by a process options theorists call time decay, financial stock options lose their potential as they approach their own expiration.”, Emanuel Derman, My life as a Quant
- getnormality 2y agoI think something in this ballpark has been a driving force behind some mood issues that have been with me for the last 5 months or so, that have just recently been improving. Realistically, though, I've experienced falling short of all sorts of internal and external expectations for many years now, so I don't know what's special about this time.
- wcfrobert 2y agoWhile I absolutely loved the writing, I want to challenge that last part and the dichotomy created. Perfection is an ideal. You can strive towards it at 25 or 45. It's too deterministic to say as soon as you're in your forties, it's game over. Permanent imperfection. Pure facticity. No transcendence. "[to be human] is to be constantly on the precipice of perfection – just a little further and you’ll get there – but you never get there."
- idontwantthis 2y agoI’m not old yet, but this sounds really lame. You’re never too old to stop being a piece of shit, it just takes more effort.
- svat 2y agoRelated, written as humour but exemplifies this effectively: “I Thought I Would Have Accomplished a Lot More Today and Also by the Time I Was Thirty-Five” (by Alex Baia): https://web.archive.org/web/20200826002046/https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/i-thought-i-would-have-accomplished-a-lot-more-today-and-also-by-the-time-i-was-thirty-five https://web.archive.org/web/20200826002046/https://www.newyo...
- Nition 2y agoThat reminds me of a specific line from A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin. > The truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing but does only and wholly what he must do.
- getnormality 2y agoI've often heard that this is a reason we sometimes don't want to try hard things. We don't want to try our best and find out that we can't do it because our best is not good enough. We prefer the ego-sustaining state of ambiguity and unexplored possibility.
- tijl 2y agoThis reminds me of a Dutch song that was fairly popular in the '90s (loosely translated): And a child prodigy at forty, That is a sorry case. Who could have been so much, yet Will never leave a trace. (The song is based on the life of the poet Halbo C. Kool. Dutch lyrics here: https://genius.com/Boudewijn-de-groot-een-wonderkind-van-50-lyrics https://genius.com/Boudewijn-de-groot-een-wonderkind-van-50-... )
- K0balt 2y agoThe thirst for perfection is replaced by the satiation of shame. I take great pride and pleasure in being embarrassed in my work of years past, as it means that I am growing, still on the path that leads to only itself. Understanding that the path of refinement and growth does not lead, even eventually, to perfection frees a person to do better, to be better, fearlessly. Perfection is a cardinal direction. It is not a destination.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- PaulHoule 2y agoI spent my 20s on a career that wasn't in the cards and had successes and struggles as a software developer afterwards, so far my 50s have been time of growth and creativity for me. Last week I saw some photographs of the campus in The Cornell Daily Sun that I thought were just atrocious, like, I wouldn't post photos that bad to social media where there are no gatekeepers, no prestige, nothing. [1] I've been taking photographs as a hobby for 20+ years, though in some of that time I was carrying a camera around everywhere but not taking any pictures. It was just last summer that I developed a style for landscape photography that really feels distinctive and branded https://mastodon.social/@UP8/113365041910591036 https://mastodon.social/@UP8/113365041910591036 and I feel like I've just "cracked the code" for sports photography after about two years of going to games. This weekend I participated in a Hackathon run by a student game development club, no way was I going to do it myself, the whole point was I wanted to be in a team. We won the "Player's Choice" award: we didn't have the best game, but we had the best game demo. In everyday life I'm the kind of developer who takes the time to get to the bottom of things and ties things up in a bow so other people can maintain them afterwards. But my adventures in startup land have taught me to make the most of whatever preparation I've got. The artist I worked with was great and the other developer was much more experienced in Unity than I was, but I had a good sense of "the definition of done" (what a good demo looks like) and stayed cool under pressure, so we had two levels that looked awesome and fun. We had five minutes to present but used only three which was fine because we had people's attention and didn't call people's attention to anything that was missing or broken. So the value I brought wasn't my technical experience but really the startup attitude that I've been cultivating ever since I was a teen. [1] My wife says I shouldn't expect much from The Cornell Daily Sun since young people don't have much perspective or much to say.
- p_ing 2y agoLove the roses, very nice!
- PaulHoule 2y agoThe path that got to that was funny. One day I went out to take pictures in the Monkey Run Natural area and was planning to take my Zeiss wide angle lens but instead I packed the kit lens from my camera which has a nice range of focal lengths but has really ugly bokeh. I developed a style that involves a very small aperture for wide depth of field (f/22 if I can get away with it) that uses DxO's noise reduction if that means cranking the ISO too high (got DxO at the recommendation of other photogs because I was having trouble shooting volleyball indoors) and boosting microcontrast to make up for the small aperture softness and using color grading to brand the image. 'Ugly' turns into 'opinionated' and even though it is digital end-to-end it comes across like a picture you'd find in an old book that was taken with a huge view camera and a long exposure.
- jp57 2y agoAt 56, much of this piece resonates with me, but this passage seems to have been taken from my own thoughts: In his youth, he vacationed differently. Everywhere he went was a place he could live, a potential future life. He could live here, he’d tell himself. Or he could meet a woman there, and start a family there, and become a citizen of that place. Mexico, Hong Kong, France, Italy, Western Indiana, etc. Eventually, he met a woman and chose a place – the best woman and the best place – and his future was fixed. The world was good, but the world was no longer full of all these possibilities. What, then, fills the void where possibility once lived? Much of middle age (and beyond) is a struggle to find meaning in the face of the realization of the finiteness of your remaining days. I think that, by and large, I'm doing a fair job at that, but I still struggle a bit with travel, for the very reason above. I used to imagine myself living in whatever place I visited, and those imaginings were plausibly something more than fantasy. Now, not so much. It would be a huge undertaking for my wife and me to uproot our lives and move to someplace exotic and different, but even if we were to do so, we couldn't move to everywhere exotic and different. And anyway, we wouldn't be "starting a new life" there in the same way that a young person would.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nicbou 2y agoEvery long trip is a reminder of all the things I am grateful for at home. Friends, family, a home, plans. I used to go on these long adventurous trips, but every year they get shorter, because I feel like I'm sacrificing something at home by not being there.
- haswell 2y agoHaving the exact opposite experience is how I realized that a major relocation is in my relatively near future. The longer the adventure, the more disconnected and odd home would feel upon return. My family/friend situation is most likely a bit different though, for reasons that would make this comment far too long. It's time for a reset (~40ish).
- 2y ago
- kapitanjakc 2y agoI am 30 :(
- dangus 2y agoTwo years younger than JK Rowling when she published Harry Potter. 15 years younger than when JRR Tolkien before he published The Hobbit. Martha Stewart founded her company at 56. The founder of HTC was almost 40. This article is just a downer for no reason.
- dr-detroit 2y agomy life started around 30
- layer8 2y agoDon’t worry, the worst is still before you. ;)
- stavros 2y agoI was going to say I don't understand this mindset, but I guess I do. I can't really agree with it, though. How debilitating it must be to live with this pressure, to achieve something that maybe one in a million achieves, instead of aiming to make every day a happy one. It doesn't even seem like these people live for others, they live because they imagine how great it would feel to be acknowledged. In chasing that ultimate pleasure, they forget to just make each day good.
- rikroots 2y ago> I was going to say I don't understand this mindset, but I guess I do. I can't really agree with it, though. Agree. I can sympathise with the mindset, because I watch so many others approach their lives with a "Grand Plan" - but it's not something I've ever set out to do so I can't claim to understand it. I do daydream of successes - Olympic gold medals, pop band hero, etc - but that's all they are to me: daydreams. I was brought up to approach life with a "you've gotta laugh, innit!" attitude and, for the most part, it's worked out well for me. I never made it to the Olympics but I won a few races back in the day. I never got any of my novels published, but they're written and available for people to discover thanks to the wonders of modern technology. I've also been blessed with bucketloads of serendipity, taking me to successes I could never have guessed were possibilities for me when I was sub-30. I ain't ancient, but I do know this: the keys to a Good Life are ... Good Friends!
- asdfman123 2y agoThat's my biggest complaint with this kind of mindset. Nearly all of the problems the author grapples with seem to be related to their belief in their own greatness. We're all going to die, and we're all going to be forgotten eventually.
- markus_zhang 2y agoHappiness means different things for different people. I'm kinda aligned with the author in this mindset but I understand other people have other ways of interpreting life. Sometimes it has nothing to do with being acknowledged, and sometimes do.
- airstrike 2y agoReads needlessly melancholic, depressive, bleak. Significance is just one of several human needs. Not everyone is driven by that particular need. Then there's this bit: > Eventually, he met a woman and chose a place – the best woman and the best place – and his future was fixed. The world was good, but the world was no longer full of all these possibilities. What, then, fills the void where possibility once lived? One's failure to find other ways to sate the desire for growth, contribution, and variety (other fundamental human needs) should not be mistaken as an inherent impossibility to find growth, contribution, and variety in one's middle age. I wouldn't call a piece that confirms prior biases particularly powerful. As I've grown older, I've learned to differentiate depressive from powerful. I'd rather reserve the latter for labeling that which actually gives me power, rather than take it away.
- breadsniffer 2y agoI like this. It seems that those who value agency don’t align with the post. It validates letting time go by without doing anything to change yourself or the situation.
- h2zizzle 2y agoIn college, I remember writing and posting to Facebook a poem about my frustrations with my own impotence in the face of Big Issues Facing the World, and ending it with something along the lines of glancing at a sunny window and watching, out of the corner of my eye, "my youth jump out it." That was half a lifetime ago. My depression seemed to have a better grasp of "what it all be" than my ambition. Depending on how my health holds up and what my generation's asbestos turns out to be, I'm either over-the-hill or shortly on my way there. I never had exceptional strength or stamina, but I notice it yet diminishing. First gray hairs in my whiskers this year. And people look at me like a weird little old man, especially at nerd conventions and on public transportation. Still, I can't shake the idea that I might claw my way to a Leslie Jones moment. I'm trying to abide by the Shonda Rhimes Doctrine, and build, rather than placate myself with thoughts that the real me is still asleep. But the balance between teenage dreams and adult realities is hard to maintain; and giving oneself wholly to either - to become a defenseless blob or a hollowed out husk - is out of the question. I appreciate this meditation. Oh, one last thought: reaching the age I can remember my parents being when I was in grade school has been especially sobering. Right about now, I would be preparing myself (and my siblings, one unborn) for a life-altering 700-mile move, and I just cannot imagine it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pier25 2y ago> But this silly desire to be an exceptional young writer wasn’t egoistic craving. It was a biological obligation. I experienced the same when I was in my 20s. I do think it fades away as you get older. I also suspect it's greatly motivated by biology. Doing something exceptional to be perceived as a good mating partner? Also possibly to personal trauma (low self esteem etc).
- mjklin 2y ago“The passionate state of mind is often indicative of a lack of skill, talent or power. Moreover, passionate intensity can serve as a substitute for the confidence born of proficiency and the possession of power. A workingman sure of his skill goes leisurely about his job, and accomplishes much though he works as if at play. On the other hand, the workingman who is without confidence attacks his work as if he were saving the world, and he must do so if he is to get anything done. The same is true of the soldier. A well-trained and well-equipped soldier will fight well even when not stirred by strong feeling. But the untrained soldier will give a good account of himself only when animated by enthusiasm and fervor.” - Eric Hoffer
- pier25 2y agoI don't know. Maybe some there's some truth to it but I've seen tons of super skilled musicians that are still very passionate.
- tayo42 2y agoWhy cant you write for the enjoyment of writing? Why do you need to write the best novel ever. I guess that's where I'm at in life. Whats the point of being great or the best at something? Do things because they're enjoyable, "the journey", trying to be the best will inevitably lead to burn out and not necessarily happiness. Ive frequently seen world champions say they didn't know what is next. If you write this world wide acclaimed novel, what now? I don't relate to the travel stuff, travel imo isn't shopping around for a place to live. Its opportunities to learn about the world and enrich my life with experiences and learn about cultures and people. You can still meet people you idolize, they're probably highly skilled in an area your interested in. Meeting idols is a chance to learn from them, thats exciting. Aging sucks though, What i struggle with is being slower, more tired, weaker, maybe even less creative. it takes the day to day joy out of doing things. There less opportunities to reach personal goals
- dredmorbius 2y agoYou might enjoy Shopenhauer's "On Authorship": <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11945/11945-h/11945-h.htm#link2H_4_0004 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11945/11945-h/11945-h.htm#li...>
- lisper 2y agoI call shenanigans on the whole idea of publication as a success metric. I say this as someone who made a very successful career out of publishing for fifteen years. I was publishing non-fiction (scientific papers) rather than novels but I think the underlying social dynamic is the same: there is a small group of gatekeepers (peers in my case, publishers in the other) who decide your fate, and their decisions are not necessarily based on any kind of objective merit. In fact the whole idea of objective merit in fiction is highly questionable IMHO. Personally, I find most fiction to be unreadable, and "literary fiction" especially so. It's pretentious, designed more to be a virtue signal than anything else. You put the book on your shelf to make people think you've read it rather than actually gaining any value from reading it, just as you cite the paper not because you think it has merit but because the author of the paper you're citing is on the review committee. It's not all politics, but it's a hell of a lot of politics. At best the literary emperor is wearing a thong.
- chubot 2y agoI also felt it odd to hold up Silence of the Lambs as some kind of a paragon of achievement. I saw it when I was a kid once, and I recognize the memes/lines from it, and I know it occupies a certain place in culture ... but otherwise I don't think about that movie, especially not 2 or 3 decades later. For me personally, it would be OK if it didn't exist. I don't plan to watch it again, ever I'm very sure the author would say the same thing about what I'm doing -- i.e. "Who cares? It's OK if it doesn't exist" I think the lesson is: don't take yourself too seriously, and don't take your own personal perspective too seriously. I get where the author is coming from, and there are some very well-written sentences in this blog post. But I also think that to adopt this world view is a recipe for misery. It's one view of things, not absolute truth
- stnmtn 2y agoI don't think it was Silence of The Lambs specifically - it was the experience this author had of watching that movie at 14 years old. Do you have a movie you watched at a young age, and through it you saw a window into adult life you were certain you would step into? Silence of the Lambs is just this author's version of that. Mine is a different movie - but the way the author talked about silence of the lambs resonated deeply with me about how I feel watching "my" movie at an older age, and comparing it to how I thought when I watched it at 14.
- abalashov 2y agoVery relatable, at 39. I was one of those with a very precocious career path; chief sysadmin of an ISP at 19, senior software engineer making as much as my dad (a full professor) at 21. It seemed like I practically doubled my income with every job-hop, of which there were half a dozen or so within 3.5 years, between the ages of 18 and 22 (in the 2000s, long before that was cool, or even particularly acceptable). While this is not the stuff of world-class legend, in terms of the range of sensations of overall grandiosity, pomp and circumstance I had felt in my own life prior to that point, this was all, at the time, very electric; my "meteorically ascendant" tech career was intoxicating. Two realisations, only with the benefit of hindsight, were humbling: 1) At 30+, I was taken more seriously, but at the cost of shedding the social capital of a wunderkind. By this point, nobody was really shocked that I had deep domain expertise in some area, nor marketable skills. It was just table stakes now, and has been ever since. This means that peers who had also advanced in their career were now catching up, and the cachet of being that far ahead of the pack was long gone. In purely relative terms, this can feel like stagnation or even backsliding, if your ego is calibrated to the presumption of always running circles around your peers. Tragic, I know, but I built a big part of my ego-protection forcefield around the idea that I was gainfully doing recondite things nobody understands while everyone else is flipping burgers and getting plastered--revenge of the nerds and all that. Everyone needs a healthy ego, but when the snooty argument underpinning yours evaporates, it can force a tumultuous confrontation with the fact that you're not, actually, all that special. 2) With how much I got patted on the head and told I was so, so brilliant in my late teens and early 20s, it was easy to overdraw this praise and improperly extrapolate it to other areas of life, and to believe oneself to be precociously brilliant in everything else, too. I bought a condo at age 21 (which ultimately contributed to financial ruin later in life, as it never came close to recovering its bubble-era valuation) because I was a savvy investor and a clever Economic Man, and I was absolutely sure I knew where I wanted to live and what I wanted from my life (and from my partner of the time), because I knew everything. Nope, outside of my "wunderkind" sphere, I was mostly just an early-20s dumbass like the others--though I would have been aghast at the suggestion. I made some terrible financial and life decisions from time to time, as you might expect from someone whose prefrontal cortex hadn't fully baked. The difference is that most early-20s dumbasses are somehow means-limited from digging themselves too deep a hole, whereas I was a very well-paid kidult, and did not face this constraint. Some of the consequences linger to this day. This never seemed a problem at the time; I was young, and in some stratum of my unconscious, sure I had time to clean up my act, get straight with Jesus, etc. But one day, you wake up, and the accumulated weight finally tips over some limit and crashes down on you like a ton of bricks, suddenly and all at once. Among other brilliant decisions, a month after I turned 22, I was fired from my last job and became self-employed, at the bottom of the recession, and took on my ex-employer as my first customer (and 17 years later, they remain). I thought I was a pretty big deal, having graduated beyond mere, pedestrian employment. Hell, even the guys who just fired me wanted to do business. It would take years to realise that, while I had opened up a lot of flexibility and opportunities for myself in some areas, I had fatefully painted myself into a grim corner in others, and on balance, it's all a bit of a wash at best. Notwithstanding all this, the bit about the shrinking margin for error resonates strongly. I've got myself killed eight times and I'm all out of lives. I've got a partner, a child, and serious economic burdens which cannot be waved away or whimsically discarded, while I've simultaneously got less energy, unavoidably less flexibility as one gets more set in his ways with age, and am just objectively more tired and can't pull heroics like I used to. To those who balk at the cocktail of gloom of gloom in the article, I don't read it that way. The maturity and wisdom of getting older is, in my experience, to a very large extent understanding limits, that not everything is possible, that not all problems have solutions, and there's no time to do all the things. This may curtail the energy of youthful naiveté that occasionally gets things done that were hitherto deemed impossible and fantastical, but 19 times out of 20, the acute awareness of trade-offs leads to more realistic and achievable goals. There's something to be said for achievable goals.
- dfxm12 2y agoYouth is defined by growth and curiosity. We don't lose this to time, we lose this to the assumption that we know better. It is not a passive process, as the article suggests ...he was slowly stripped of his Youth, but an active one that we are in control of. I know this doesn't help if you had time-bound goals for your life, but I have to stress, people actually don't care. Raymond Chandler was not "uncovered, like toxic waste" when he published The Big Sleep, his first novel, at 42, but celebrated as anyone else.
- Min0taur 2y agoI appreciated OP sharing their thoughts. But this piece didn't land for me. I think it's a question of conflating aging with ossification. I know I will die, leaving things undone, unmade, unsaid. My body is falling apart in a lot of dreadful ways. Yet I can still grow, still learn. I intend to gather, change, be protean, until life draws the curtain closed. What a thrill! As I age, I come to see the vistas I imagined when younger as shallow, half-baked. I wanted shallow things, having nothing to compare my desires to, no context for the myths and narratives of my own life aside from the media and socialization I was exposed to early on. How could I -really- picture the world beyond, the richness and pains I would stumble into, almost entirely on accident? How could I imagine anything true or close to the source, having lived for such a short time, tasted so little of the complexity of our substrate? Which brings me back to the OP's lament: of course they failed to make good art: they were not guided by an interest in touching the true thing, only in being recognized as someone that can touch the true thing. Trading the vulnerability of unfiltered experience for the rigid belief in their deserved/desired social status. What good fortune they yet live, can yet grow and change and make art! I am reminded of Tarkovsky's Stalker, and the Stalker's Prayer: "Weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being! Because what has hardened will never win."
- breadsniffer 2y agoI love this mindset. I don’t buy the other perspectives. When you fall in love with the craft… time, perception, age, etc matter much less. You care more about adapting yourself no matter how old to perfect the craft.
- Min0taur 2y agoYour comment (re: "no matter how old") made me think of a beautiful bit from Hokusai, who did The Great Wave Off Kanagawa At 74 (he painted the great wave a little before this iirc): "From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs. But all I have done before the the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy five I'll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At a hundred I shall be a marvelous artist. At a hundred and ten everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokusai, but today I sign my self 'The Old Man Mad About Drawing.'"
- mmaunder 2y agoSet the bar low, your sights high, and work your ass off, and you'll achieve much and have a blast getting there.
- dakiol 2y agoI think as humans live longer and longer, the youth years should expand correspondingly. I think nowadays one can easily live until 100 years old (at least I know plenty of oldies in their late 90s around here in western europe). The 40s are the new 30s.
- sircastor 2y agoI wanted some amount of notoriety when I was younger. I wanted to do something important. Accomplish something that helped people. It was mostly notions of having done some really cool project that people would talk about. I'm in my mid-40s and I appreciate now what I couldn't then: Any kind of attention, greatness, notoriety, etc is entirely fleeting. You will have 15 minutes of attention and unless you do another great thing the best you'll get is "what have you done lately?" It sounds glib, but really you do need to become comfortable with yourself where you are. I don't even know if that's possible in youth, and I don't want to discourage people from chasing their dreams, but you set yourself up for a lot of self-inflicted misery otherwise.
- nancyminusone 2y agoThe best lesson I learned growing up is that there really aren't any adults, there are only older young people. This is either extremely comforting or extremely terrifying depending on your perspective, but as the years go by I've found it to be no less true.
- dredmorbius 2y agoFrom my own experiences: children aren't small adults, adults are large children.
- danhodgins 2y agoSo far in my early forties I have: * Learned to pan for gold on creeks and use sluice boxes * Learned QGIS from scratch to play with mapping, data viz, gov't data sets and API's, etc * Learned to DJ, DJ'd 3 weddings as a wedding gift for others, and experienced profound joy in making mashups and remixes on the fly * Acquired power tools and started to learn metal working and wood working in my garage shop * Decided to learn to weld, so I bought a welder for 50 bucks on FB marketplace and learned with no in-person classes or courses, only YouTube university. Now I can weld, and a whole new world of possibilities has opened up as being able to create and make things is like a superpower. * Rediscovered skiing and snowboarding after being away from both for 20+ years In terms of learning new things and acquiring new skills, my early forties have been a period of creativity and discovery, not to mention doing my best to be a good parent to our kid and a good husband. I'm quite proud of these accomplishments, and none of them have anything to do with career or making money.
- usednet 2y agoAs somebody still in my early 20s, I am viscerally aware of these advantages provided to me slipping away year by year. I apologize for being vague but I would be interested in hearing advice from those who felt the same what they wish they would have done in their 20s to minimize future regret.
- gf263 2y ago28 year old, turning 29: Spend as little time at home as possible. Travel. Find community. Live in a big city and make a ton of friends and throw lots of parties and bring people together, forming your own community. That's what I did and I feel like my 20s have been fulfilling, and I'm looking forward to what my 30s bring.
- lurk2 2y ago1) Buy a broad market global index fund. Put as much money into this as you reasonably can. Do not time the market, just put your money in every month and forget that it's there until you either want to buy a house or start to think about retirement. If these funds significantly decline, the world economy has tanked and you will have bigger problems to deal with. 2) Travel abroad alone at least once if you haven't already, ideally for a few months. Shorter trips are costly and will interfere with suggestion #1. If you're still living with your parents, this can be a good way to test out living on your own. 3) Do not waste your time. You can be out partying, traveling, working, praying, or studying, but don't be doing nothing waiting for a more opportune time to make something happen.
- immibis 2y agoI, too, participate in the world's biggest and longest-lasting Ponzi scheme. As long as people keep buying in, the value will keep going up. It runs so long that it's likely it will still be running when I die. I strongly recommend everyone to buy as much of this scheme as possible.
- lurk2 2y agoIf you're cynical about global markets, you can always take profits and build a self-sufficient homestead somewhere remote, or buy a cauldron and fill it with gold doubloons and bury it at the end of a rainbow like a leprechaun. Doomerism caused me to miss out on the biggest bull run in history, so I no longer give this advice. Rural property is a hedge, not an investment.
- autonomousErwin 2y agoDon't worry if you're over 30/40/50 - Évariste Galois is judging anyone over the age of 18.
- shinko23 2y agoGreat article! As a society with too much emphasis on accelerationism and productivity, I think we glorified the success and achievements at young age. It could be seen as a bad thing, as it might put a lot of pressure on young people and punishes (unforgivingly sometimes,) the middle aged people culturally and socially, for taking a single mis step in their youth. But I wonder if we normalize the fact that anyone can start their career or other aspects of life from scratch at any age, will it make people to just slack off and postpone things? Will we just keep on postponing things if society is so lenient and uncompetitive? The only possible thing that I could think of is that rather than looking at the achievements of the young age, (whether the writer published a novel within 30), can we just look at how much a person progressed towards their goals, which might eventually lead to achievement at any later point of life. This is bit tangential to the topic. I think we need to devise some kind of incentive centered around progress, rather than, the end results of progress. Because the end results can be gamed with, at some instances. But progress can't be gamed with, as you need to show the consistent effort put into it. Though, I am not sure how to measure and show progress in a different way other than end results, in all cases.
- kiddredd 2y agoMy dude needs to go outside. Also: beware of writers writing about what reaching such-and-such an age is going to “feel” like. They only know a little.
- AIorNot 2y agoYouth is wasted on the young..as they say One good thing about getting old is that you worry less about what people think - these kinds of feelings are powerfully emotive and urgent while young but, given our position in this world just navel-gazing ultimately
- moultano 2y agoI just wrote a novel at 41, and am starting the process of trying to get it published. Almost everything about aging in the article hit home, but something that struck me very differently about writing, is that I'm not trying to be "recognized." I made something I think is beautiful, and I want to share it with people. Hopefully one of the benefits of aging is being less dependent on others' judgement.
- zusammen 2y agoThis is deeply interesting to me. For one thing, I’m in my sixties and I definitely feel like I’m the same person I was, fundamentally, as in my 20s. The world has changed and my body has changed and I make fewer mistakes but I never woke up and realized, “I’m an old man.” I know I am one, but I feel just fine. If anything, on balance I like being old. The fact that people slightly underestimate me now sets up a lot of good jokes. Unrelatedly, I just finished reading the semipublished novel of a member of our community, who I believe is in his late 40s and who could probably never get through today’s traditional publishing because he is clearly autistic. I had low expectations, but it’s shockingly good. As in, if it had the right people behind it, it would easily be one of the top books in a given year. And I think the books written by people of his age are slightly different from those written at mine, and of course both perspectives are radically different from a Gen Z 20-year-old’s. When you read young novelists, you get the first draft of a new generation’s perspective. I barely understand Millennials and Gen Z is still opaque to me because so few authors of real talent have bubbled up. They exist for sure, but nepo kids get exposure first so I have really hard to find the good ones. As they age, writers get better at writing. But writing is not the sole determinant of good fiction and it is even less correlated to relevance. Old writers tend to produce books that are technically fantastic and that critics and career writers recognize as superlative in craft, and often quite creative contrary to stereotype because these people don’t stop learning, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be relevant to any current conversation. Young authors tend to produce work that is more jagged and less technically accomplished, but extremely relevant to the time. Ellis is a prime example: he wrote the quintessential novel of the Reagan Era—it’s shocking and disgusting and not brilliantly written, but well-written enough. That said, “bad sentences” are one of those issues that writers agonize about but the fact is that editors will catch them if they’re truly awful. It also doesn’t have much to do with age, because old writers who understand grammar extremely well also make mistakes, which 95 percent of the time are typos. Either they are removed by the proofreader or they become part of the history.
- bitwize 2y agoAccording to my mom, when you hit 70 or so is when you start "feeling old". So it'll come in a few years.
- j5r5myk 2y agoMoving read, what it does not touch on is having a moment of hype young and never reaching that level of success again. Plenty of people have one visible successful moment young in their career and never have a notable follow up. "You always want to be warm, never want to be hot" as the film director Roger Avary (who directed the film adaption of Bret Easton Ellis' Rules of Attraction) said about a career in the arts. He himself winning his only Oscar at 29 for working on the story for Pulp Fiction. On another note, I just watched Frances Ha and for the first time watching a mid-to-late-20s coming of age story about a young artist trying to make it I found myself just barely on the other side of being older and more stable than the characters in the film. So it goes.
- djeastm 2y agoThe cure for any existential crisis about aging or lost youth is to spend some time with people older than yourself, the older the better. You will feel young again.
- dragonwriter 2y agoI actually feel younger with younger people than with older people.
- athenot 2y agoBoth are needed. You can appreciate the energy you have by being around older people. You can be inspired in energetic ways by being around younger people. Diversity is a good thing to cultivate.
- fungiblecog 2y agoIt's a modern disease to seek "success" rather than mastery of a craft for it's own sake. one can lead to the other but not vice versa.
- shahzaibmushtaq 2y agoYouth is that part of age where you never stop achieving your goals one after another and inspire youth to do the same.
- shermantanktop 2y agoI picked up the term “Joan of Arc syndrome” for this somewhere. By the age of 19 she had done x, y, z, blah blah. The article is written by a writer, so of course it is chock full of pithy statements, emotional frisson, and historical comparisons. But the term that is missing is “growing up.” This just a maturation step, albeit one that apparently takes some people decades to get to.
- akuchling 2y agoTom Lehrer: "It’s people like that who make you realize how little you’ve accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years!"
- PaulHoule 2y agoI think of how many of the 'Forbes 30 under 30' turn out to be rip-off artists. It's bad enough that I'd consider suing them for defamation if they put me on their list.
- bigtimesink 2y ago> In Youth, you fantasize about one day meeting your idols Towards the end of my youth, I got to date a celebrity crush and work at my dream job. Both sucked and left me heartbroken.
- Ken_At_EM 2y agoI fret over this sometimes. I feel a mentality that helps me is, just forget about things like this and focus on building, bigger, better, more value providing products one after the other.
- kristiandupont 2y agoIf you enjoyed this as I did, you might enjoy John Tottenhams Inertia Variations: https://johntottenham.com/category/inertia-variations/ https://johntottenham.com/category/inertia-variations/ I prefer them read by Matt Johnson: https://open.spotify.com/album/67crhBYB2f2xIiZWSDsFvI?si=GLZtXa-ESRKZvSLFsRYWrw https://open.spotify.com/album/67crhBYB2f2xIiZWSDsFvI?si=GLZ...
- formerphotoj 2y agoAmbition, an elixir of youth for me, for so long. Then (of course!), the arc began to flatten, the sandwich (generation) turned out to be more than a foot-long, and, that thing I took for granted forever...health. This is where I think we humans must be connected, committed, and invested in something larger than ourselves to transform ambition into...transformation? I thought I fit my big-boy pants. I see I need to consider a tailor now.
- lo_zamoyski 2y agoThe obsession with possibilities is characteristic of liberal modernity and likely behind the obsession we have with youth. Possibility is construed as freedom, and to the liberal mind, to commit to anything is to become less free, because it necessarily entails the loss of possibility. Thus, we perpetually hover in indecision, itself a decision. We try to maximize some ill-defined "possibility" at all cost, and in doing so, we maximize our stagnation, the foundation for boredom and the true lack of freedom, and freedom is the ability to do the good. It is spreading yourself thin, to weaken resolve, to accomplish nothing, to become nothing, or to become worse. Depression, anxiety, feelings of pointlessness set in. This is the serial divorcee who, having married one woman, now notices that, yes, there are indeed other women in the world! Tormented by unvisited possibility, he leaves his wife to repeat the cycle, never really embarking on the journey of marriage with anyone. This is opportunism. It is childish, a failure to leave behind childish things. It is living in a land of fantasy and infantile false hope.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- HellDunkel 2y agoComplete and utter garbage. This whole idea where you set yoursef the goal to be among the youngest top writers is just silly. How can you hope to write a great book if that is not even a priority? Also, what does it help that you wrote this one great book at a young age? The readers certainly wont care. I get the author sees that but he/she still follows the same thinking.
- anal_reactor 2y agoWhat I noticed is that as I'm getting older I'm getting more and more tired. I'm not even 30 yet, which means I'm still "young", but I'm tired 24/7. I take care of my sleep routine, I exercise, I eat vegetables, I take vitamin supplements, but I feel like I'm living with permanent brain fog. Just this weekend I was on my way to visit a friend and on the bus there were a bunch of 18 year-olds jumping around and being full of energy, and I thought "how much I'd give up just to be like that for one evening"
- joywong 2y ago"To do a thing young is a shortcut to greatness. Everything you do right is evidence of your great potential, and all your mistakes are the mistakes of inexperience, which will be corrected, surely, by the passing of time." --Missing those days... Every mistake I make will be forgiven... The pain as a grow-up grows as I age. Responsibilities never fade.
- thecleaner 2y agoNot the essay for me. I actually lost patience midway. The author lost me at "when we are young we dream of meeting our idols." I never gave a shit. I mean my idols were fictional so that obviously helped.
- scottgurney 2y ago[flagged]
- amriksohata 2y agohttps://asitis.com/11/32.html https://asitis.com/11/32.html Time I am, destroyer of the worlds, and I have come to engage all people.