Brutal and depressing. Might as well just end it all at 50. None of the spiritual mumbo jumbo resonated with me at all. What's the point of going on if you can't contribute?
> We're on a rock flying through space.
I have never understood this phrase as anything more than a platitude to make people feel better. Anyway, don't mind me. It has been raining all week and I think it's affecting my mood.
> I have never understood this phrase as anything more than a platitude to make people feel better.
It's more than a platitude. Check out this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoW8Tf7hTGA
Still, nothing better than a rainy day on earth.
Right. This just happens to coincide with a shift in my life, where all the old contexts from my youth are meaningless, and I need to find new contexts.
So if there is no such thing as contributing, then the contributing you used to do only mattered because of a context you (or I) constructed to find important.
I don't think the right answer is to say, "Nothing is important." I think the right answer is to relentlessly seek for a new context to find important, to give meaning to our own life.
Because "peak" isn't required to contribute.
I strongly suspect I can't program like I can when I was 25 when I could hold a gazillion details in my head simultaneously--now I simply find a task that requires that to be distasteful.
I am, however, MUCH better at architecture and organization so that I don't have to hold a zillion details in my head. That also means that my programs are far easier for others to understand than the ones I wrote when I was 25.
Which one is the better "contribution"?
But even if rejuvenation drugs are not ready in time for you it is not a reason to want to die sooner. The things you want to do now are mostly determined by your intellectual abilities, and if there was a way to enhance them you may find the things that interest you now boring, and yet that is not a reason for you to die now.
Also a great way to want to teach, is having grandchildren. There is a theory that evolutionary reason for humans and some other animals to stay alive after reaching the end of reproductive age is to take care of grandchildren.
If you don't work it out, then you will find yourself sitting on a plane wishing you could just die with your wife asking you to stop saying that.
I'm in a similar position - bounced around careers, approaching 50, and currently lost in the woods and pissing my wife off.