Immortality Begins at Forty
ribbonfarm.com
ribbonfarm.com
What does society think of me? I couldn't give less of a fuck. How about asking what the people around you think of you?
Where are their minds...?
Fight Club people, come on
The majority of people over 40 are not out there "making meaning" (the author's terminology for "influencing pop culture"), and that's just fine.
For one, whether "you give a fuck for what society thinks of [you]" or not, what society thinks of you has implications for you and your role in life. To put it jokingly, "it's not all about you".
Not to mention that far from "narrow-minded pop-culturist bullshit" the whole post drives endlessly the inverse notion.
"what society thinks of you" is what (according to the post) ends at forty: society doesn't think anything of you, -- it could not give less fucks, to use your wording. And part of the idea is that you should care even less, and instead (cynically or not) become a culture-maker yourself, selling truth to the younger generations.
It doesn't apply to everybody. In fact people content with work, family life, and 3 hours of TV/browsing everyday until they die at 80 won't even understand the thing.
Well, this is Hacker News. Ever read a PG essay? Besides, 90% of us think very highly of our own cleverness anyway.
The author just doesn't assume readers need his post feed to them, and goes on as if talking to his peers.
>The actual point was not really clear.
Don't know, it was quite clear to me -- even though it's the first time I've chanced on the guy, and he seems to have a specific set of references, inside jokes and prior posts on similar issues...
If you're living in the middle of a sea of what you recognize as cultural signifiers, and it slowly dawns on you that those cultural signifiers swarm and bubble around a particular age cohort, I guess the experience of drifting out of that age cohort can be disorientating.
But I don't even agree with what this chap seems to recognize as culture - it's mostly froth, mostly commercial pablum - and it never gripped me much. But I can only guess at this, because he isn't precise enough to define his terms.
The search for meaning in my life came to me in my late teens, and was over by the time I was 25. The meaning I found was not derived from the attention or efforts of other people. I don't expect a decline in marketing of cultural objects towards me, because I've never been much of a target for cultural object marketing that was targeted to the 15-40 age cohort.
I don't watch much TV, I don't watch many movies, I don't go to music events, I don't visit the gym, and I generally feel quite comfortable in life. I don't feel pressure to try and appear young. I've never got much dating advice because I never spent much time dating. The world this chap seems to have been living in (as near as I can tell) is almost unrecognizable to me.
As near as I can tell, the chap has just discovered existential angst. Welcome to late adolesence, is all I can say.
To change this logic, I think we need to change mass culture. Simply being more mature in the way you talk about, is nice, but it also means you can't participate on an even playing ground (again, en masse)
I think the only dirty secret when it comes to passing 40 as a software developer is that you become more and more in the minority and notice that there is a greater percentage of older people looking for work. So- it's a little scary.
Younger people I've known are typically headstrong in the ignorant way of youth - they can't help it, they don't know what they don't know. I haven't seen young people pay particular attention to what older people say.
But young people aren't usually very interesting, so not being culturally relevant to them doesn't really affect me in any way.
He didn't provide any empirical evidence with this article. He's just proselytizing about... whatever.
This article sucks. I guess he must be a has-been now. Does that count as empirical evidence? Studies with a sample size of N=1 don't really count.
Oh well, can't win 'em all.
It's as if to comprehend this essay, your definition of "culture" must be constrained to "pop music." If he doesn't believe that people >=40 have meanings manufactured for them, just pick up the NYT for example... The same with sports cars, fancy homes. Perhaps he's simply out of touch with "stuff people over 40 like." The entirety of child-raising, college-funding etc. is all part of culture...
Granted it's a young crowd and the young are a noisy bunch, so you expect the comments to skew towards the dissenting view.
Really fantastic result, and article. Thanks. I found it eminensly helpful.
Add a few outliers who never cared for culture or meaning much, even when young, and don't understand what the whole thing is about anyway (those won't even have midlife crises).
If you find yourself disagreeing with this article, or depressed by what seems like a cynical outlook consider this example.
If you are a child who believes in Santa. Would you not rave against a world in which Santa no longer exists?
If you were a child who just learned or is starting to suspect that Santa does not exist would you not be depressed about that? Would you not think parents so cynical to fake all of these stores?
But if you are the parent who already knows these things, it's neither good or bad, it's just a nice story to tell the kids, and see their eyes light up with images of elves and winter wonder lands.
This article isn't depressing or cynical. In fact it might be quite the clever meaning game for the over 40 set, just like Santa Claus is for parents.
... And what is Santa Claus if not a cultural construct of meaning. As the author says, this isn't a bad thing.
While that normally would disprove your observation, it's probably just the dubious honor of falling within one of the article's "well-known fucked-up life scripts" (I'm going with 40 < 40).
You're right though, there is a lot of negative sentiment towards the article—some of it bordering on pure vitriol. Those people would do well to not take it so seriously. It's basically gallows humor, as you said.
Mortality sucks, and meaning is a personal journey. I appreciate the urge to share meaning and truth but anyone who's truly long in the tooth will know well that the only way to know the path is to walk it.
And that doesn't change whether the journey is personal or collective.
At best one can kid themselves.
Some find meaning, some don't. Some need meaning, some don't.
Some go on the Internet and preach, some don't.
It is the changes in life that make it lively, and so to live I should strive to maintain some rate of change in myself, so that I never die while still alive.
For a 30 year old.
(I'm kidding! I actually rather liked your comment.)
Though I bet the author would disagree (as this piece seems a lot like an attempt at Explaining Everything -- therefore, how can you refute it?), I think this kind of thinking is largely driven by unprecedented inequality and the apparent reality that we are on the brink of destroying the planet.
Maybe I can look forward to enjoying it more after 40.
Seriously this train needs to slow down. I know people tend to be happiest in their 60s, 70s, and 80s, but unlike many people, I do live with some regrets surrounding my 20s, and would like a bit more time in Youngeville. Doubt I can make up for it all, life is what it has become in many ways, grass is greener and so on, but yeah... Wish I could be as content as some of the commenters here.
Update: Changed wording once I realized you weren't disagreeing with me.
What people are you talking to that don't have regrets from that age? Accumulating regret is a part of life. I wish that I had been more patient with others, spent more time with my brother, kissed that girl I met in Berlin, not worried so much about what others thought...the list is endless, and I'm still in my late twenties.
Deliciously dark.
There really is very little to understanding life's meaning, regardless of age, despite all the philosophers and theologians still trying to figure out the details. It comes down to this:
Life is first and foremost about loving everything and everyone. I don't mean that you have to be happy, but if you show your love through your actions, and they are not selfish, but you still take care of yourself, then you will have done all that you can. If you've not been given the ability to interact with the outside world, that's ok too- you just do the best that you can.
If you have been given the ability to do something that is better than your other abilities, you should try hard to use that if it shows your love. Your love may be playing triangle in a death metal band, and that's ok. You may not always have that ability, and if more people did what they did best for the benefit of their craft and others, the world could be much more interesting. You often don't have to quit your job to do it, though quitting is fine also.
If you get to the point where you become less able to do something, don't dwell on that. Just do the best you can do with what you have. You might fail, miserably. It's not a guarantee of success, but if you do your best and keep doing your best, then you'll have few regrets. You may have wasted many years- it doesn't matter. You may do incredible things through small interactions with people that no one may ever learn of, because all of us see only a small fraction of what's really going on. Whatever you do, just don't give up.
For you. The real truth is life has no meaning other than the ones we each assign ourselves; meaning is entirely subjective and as such there is no one answer, there's billions of answers.
For those seeking a reason to why we exist, there is no better reason than to love. Trying to get us off of the planet and explore the universe is love. Taking care of the homeless and hungry is love. Saving some animal species is love. Having dinner with a neighbor and listening to them tell their stories is love. Doing your best at your job to help others grow is love. Calling a family member or friend to see how they are doing is love.
Personally, I believe in loving others and loving my God and trying to do the best I can with what I have. That's my meaning and that's the real truth for me, and it could be for a number of people.
Again, for YOU. Don't project your desires and need for purpose onto others and presume we're all like you. YOU think there is no better reason than love, that doesn't make it true for everyone. YOU have a need to understand why, some of us have no such need because we recognize the question is invalid, there is no WHY because that presumes purpose which doesn't exist objectively, only subjectively. The meaning is always subjective, your reasons are not my reasons and you're speaking as if it is, as if all people need such things and that's simply not the case.
My point is, don't tell people what the meaning of life is because you're going to be wrong; that's YOUR meaning for YOUR life and that's it.
To provide a concrete example: on one hand there is the motivated engineer willing to do the best she can, ultimately, for the profits of her employer (this is her playing the meaning-game by fulfilling her desires) ... and on the other hand there is the manager of that engineer whose job essentially is to keep her motivated so that she remains productive (this is him playing the meaning-game of creating/ maintaining desires).
That concrete example can be extended to many other memes of culture.
A cynical part of me (though it cannot match the article's author's cynicism, in the slightest) speculates that the reason culture is geared towards the under-40 crowd is simply that people above that age have usually had children, and therefore don't really do much worth telling stories about- and, further, are focused on individuals below 40 rather than themselves. Perhaps we'll reach the point that we've raised the concept of youth to such a height that people will forego even childrearing to hang on to it, and then we'll have some culture for these emancipated older crowds. It would be nice, I think.
You're not cynical enough. The reason culture is geared toward those at the earlier end of a life's average parenting period is that they have more disposable income and they aren't as experienced in spending it. People in their 40s (or, should I say, with a certain level of life experience) are not as susceptible to advertising, both because they have kids and mortages and therefore disposable income is a lot more locked down, and because they often see the advertising coming from a mile away.
Money and manipulation, the one-two punch of commercial fascination.
I do the things I do because I like them and others find at least some of them valuable, and there's probably a significant chunk of biological determination behind my enjoyment of those things. And that biological determination is enough intrinsic value in my "meaning games" to satisfy my existential angst. I went on this whole meaning search in my early 20s which I'm just completing and came to similar conclusions, but apparently on a lighter note after going through my Debbie Downer bouts.
(1) Sunlight and exercise. (2) Friends and good conversation. (3) Women. (4) Pursuit of goals. (5) Altruism.
Rinse and repeat. Good enough for me. When I'm feeling down, it can be at least partially attributed to not checking one of the above boxes.
You think that's easy? LOL.
No, you begin to experience immortality the first time
you recognize the transience of experiences you thought
were permanent, and more subtly, the permanence of
experiences you hoped were transient.
Being 41, my answer is to engage younger folks in search of naive energy and older folks in search for stories of experiences. I've found optimism in both.
'Tricking' people into playing games could provide structure to their lives, and/or orient their potential towards something constructive for society.
The > 40 folks spend most of their time crafting the illusion of a pursuit of meaning ("Hey, why don't you try my product or my religion or my self-help book or my investment plan or why don't you sit down and listen to what I have to say?") The < 40 folks spend most of their time experimenting with or purchasing or rejecting all the ideas/products that the > 40 folks create.
The author calls them "meaning games" because he asserts that meaning is not universal truth but more of a cultural trend. So it's a game because you never actually achieve meaning. You just play the game and constantly think you're about to achieve meaning. That creates a kind of enthalpy that perpetuates society.
Your last paragraph captures it best, and his assertion does not seem to have any obvious contradictions in reality.
In the negative: whatever outrages and makes you say "this must change for us to move forward!".
Basically anything that charges you with emotion that feels "big".
I think the author would agree that Elon Musk, Donald Trump and Steve Jobs are some of the biggest recent makers of meaning games.
It's shouldn't be that difficult to understand, considering we spend all day every day interacting with these institutions, so it's disappointing to see so many otherwise intelligent people here who don't seem to grok what he's talking about.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language-game_(philosophy)
" Almost all culture, old or new, is designed for consumption by people under 40"
== people over 40 are free pressures of culture == immortality
Rest of the article is filled with smart sounding incoherent fluff like this
> culture is built around the game of a meaningful search for eternal truths, timeless values and changeless habits of prowess.
No. culture is built to improve biological fitness of the population.
This seems to be written by someone who harbored strange and misguided misconceptions about life, truth, reality and culture and is now realizing all that he believed in has no value at all.
If the statement "culture is built around the game of a meaningful search for eternal truths, timeless values and changeless habits of prowess" is incoherent, how are you able to give a definitive, confident reply?
To paraphrase Wittgenstein, something incoherent can't be either true or false. Personally, I find both of your perspectives on what culture is built around to be interesting but vague.
I think my truth is superior because,
Its based on observed reality, eg: cultural taboo's against incest
Has practical applications in the form Evolutionary psychology.
Is internally consistent.
Most importantly doesn't take grim view of culture as something that we are slaves to, something that can chew us and spit us out after it has no use for us, something separate from me. The stance that author seems to have taken.
1 - blanking on where I got that from.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhicitta [2] http://youtu.be/LGdyVnW86SY
> This seems to be written by someone who harbored strange and misguided misconceptions about life, truth, reality and culture
This seems to be written by someone who harbors strange and misguided misconceptions about life, truth, reality and culture.
Are we really sure about that? What about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisherian_runaway
The whole thing was insultingly naive when making statements, and completely without any foundation when trying to make bold claims.
Isn't it all, from religion to the vague algebra in TFA, just a riff on the only real question?
...not that I'm above it, either. As a 35-give-or-take person, existential angst is hitting me more and more frequently. Just seems to be the way things are.
You don't have time to philosophize if your house is burning. If you zoom out and speed up time, humans are burning the Earth. So the overwhelming question is this: can we stop ourselves. A related question is this: can we spread life beyond Earth?
When humans are spread throughout the solar system and under the oceans and (hopefully) around other solar systems, then let us kick our feet up and ask these questions (or rather, our descendants). It is a bad decision to entertain this kind of nihilism - and although I think it's unlikely any nihilist will have an "aha!" moment reading my words, but it's worth a shot.
I spent most of my life learning to draw and tell stories.
My current project is a TV cartoon pitch. In my wildest dreams, it is the seed for a long-running SF franchise like Star Trek or Star Wars, that will affect and inspire people in ways I can't even begin to imagine. In less wild dreams, where it simply makes it to the screen for a season or three without me having to compromise the values I'm slipping into it, and it slides a bunch of my liberal humanist queer values under the radar of a bunch of kids who just want some cool space adventure.
So yeah. I'm hunting for a certain kind of immortality here.
That 40 is a real delineator, which is what it feels like to me (though ask me in five years, and I may feel different).
That the focus of the elders is to provide places/ways for the young to find meaning.
That you can really screw up your life by trying to be/act like a phase different than your age.
Nothing truly relevatory, but just a nice, quirky way of delivering these concepts.
Hope this helps.
That's not to sound dark and gloomy - quite the opposite - and I think that's what many of the younger crowd are missing here.
If you're over 40 and you want the world to pay attention, you need to offer some greater truth to the under 40s crowd.
I think the core idea that's resonating is that around 40 you're slowly starting to drift up out of the fray, and having previously been an the center of the universe, that's an interesting feeling.
If anything I think things seen by younger people as "unreadably dense" often unfold once you become older and have life-experience.
If at 40 you haven't found a single piece of music, literature, film, or art created in the twentieth century which has depth and value to you, then you haven't really tried.
So working is literally worse than death?
http://www.amazon.com/Early-Retirement-Extreme-Philosophical...
I don't think culture is produced only for under 40s, a lot of it targets families, frightened grannies, and so on. He's right that people tend to fade out of the public eye as they get older--everyone stops giving a shit about you unless they have a specific reason to.
I didn't understand the snarky/cynical undertone. When you're young you think a lot of dumb stuff matters. You eventually realize it doesn't and start to chill out a bit. Thank god for that, it feels good!
Immortality comes with a cost like losing teeth, gray hair, wrinkles, you don't look as good as when you were younger. You might need plastic surgery, hair dye, or even Sens if it is available to prevent aging.
Businesses want to hire recent college graduates and not 40 or older people because 20 somethings are strong enough to work extra hours, don't get married and have kids yet, and can work for less money.
He gets to 'I think I'm full of shit', but then bounces right back into explaining the universe in the most convoluted, wrong, pretentious way.
There is no magic at 40, it is simply that most people have kids by the time they're 40, and their interests are in seeing their kids succeed - not much else.
So there's not much left to sell to someone who's 40+ - except better health, as the author correctly points out.
As for immortality etc - just a bunch of pompous nonsense.
This text is utterly self-indulgent bullshit.
> When you’re ready to play god for your own amusement.
What did this guy smoke
... and why is this in the top 50% of HN?
Winning before making. This is survival.
Making before beauty. This is perpetuation.
Beauty before virtue. This is leadership.
Virtue before truth. This is realism.
Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there is ritual.
Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty,
the beginning of confusion.
Knowledge of the future is only a
flowery trapping of the Tao.
It is the beginning of folly.
Therefore the truly great man dwells on what is real
and not what is on the surface,
On the fruit and not the flower,
Therefore accept the one and reject the other.
To make your creations endure,
so they don’t go away when you stop
believing in them, you may need to do beautiful,
vicious, and false things.
His sense of value is from the attention society gives him before he is 40, and when that attention runs out, from the money society gives him after 40:
you have enough value that society does culture to you
You might conclude from this that if you seek meaning, you will also make money. This is exactly wrong. You have to make meaning games, which is exactly the opposite sort of activity.
He thinks because there's no permanence in this world, nothing is of meaning, and therefore he should invest in creating and consuming imageries, because only then will society gives him value:
You’ve seen too many business cycles, too many political cycles, too many cultural cycles, too many saints and sinners trading places, to believe that this time a source of meaning will endure.
But he doesn't realise, it's because everything is transient, everything is always transforming from one to another, everything is of value. He doesn't realise, economic booms and recession are two sides of the same coin - one creates the other. He doesn't realise for every winner, there is a loser. For every saint, there's a sinner[2]. He doesn't realise, it's all the same thing, changing into one and then another. This is the universe, making itself, and everything is part of that process. And that, is truth.
[1] http://www.wussu.com/laotzu/laotzu38.html
[2] If there were only saints, would there be saints?
I wonder how you would even do that? I mean if I'm writing a book or a movie or such how can I design it to be consumed by 35 year old but not 45 year olds given their behaviour is much the same? There must be some trick I'm missing.
He even says "ALMOST ALL". Most records, most movies, most books, most magazines, etc are for people under 40.
>how can I design it to be consumed by 35 year old but not 45 year olds given their behaviour is much the same
Again, taking it too literally. You picked two nearby points (+- 5 years) for your question as if they present a binary, whereas it's more a continuum. A movie made for 35 year olds will be consumed OK by someone at 40, less ok by someone at 45, much less by someone at 50, etc.
And that's a film made for 35 year olds -- most films are targeted at even younger people, and modern Hollywood does most of its blockbusters to sub-20 -- which is evident even in the ages of the stars (given that stars are typically 10-15 years older than the target audience). That's not even some dark secret, it's common ad demographics.
Yes, but the difference is, this time it's not made for you. E.g. same way I could still watch the teletubbies -- even enjoy it and look forward to the next episode, it doesn't mean it was made with my demographic in mind.
The idea is most movies will show sub-40 people, sub-40 aspirations, sub-40 plots, sub-40 situations, be based on sub-40 concerns, and sub-40 fashion, etc.
Of course with the infantilization of culture that's difficult for a lot of people to fathom, and it even needs to be masked a little (that's what causes the need to have people like Nolan to instill dime-store "darkness" into superhero movies, which supposedly makes it "deeper", while it's still 10 times as shallow as e.g. "The Searchers").
So what the author is effectively saying is that at a certain age one jumps (more or less) from being at the receiving end of meaning-games to being at the transmitting end of it. What the author is reluctant to acknowledge is the fact that his (ever more abstractly phrased) "appetitive for meaning" has not ended (via being satiated, for culture-induced meaning by its nature cannot be satiated), but rather has taken on a new form and position (whilst still remaining an appetite).
The author, as of now, is as bound to the cultural shackles as his teenage self. Indeed now he is helping perpetuate the cycle.