Youth and what happens when it's gone | Hacker News Reader

Youth and what happens when it's gone

tolstoyan.substack.com

339 pointsmattgreenrocks229 comments

"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.

Something 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.

To provide a little grounding for the author's writing, most novelists don't publish until their 40s or later. Most young novelists who publish don't publish anything that sells until their 40s, too.

Which isn't to discount the author's point. Their writing is introspective. But our perceptions are not always right, and it screws with our self-perceptions, especially of what success means and looks like. We are drawn to exceptions and anchor our expectations for ourselves within their stories.

I see your point, but the examples I notice across fields including writing, demonstrate a strong preference towards [relative] youth.

  - Neal Stephenson (My favorite fiction writer) published his first book in his early 30s
  - Hemingway published great works in his early 20s
  - Almost all of the most notable scientific breakthroughs in the 20th century were from individuals in their 20s. Schrodinger was the Old Man at 37!
  - Most famous musicans started releasing their first, and often best, albums in their early 20s-early 30s. When they tour into old age, they're mostly playing their hits of youth.

I think, perhaps, the trend is even more pronounced in scientists than writers. Skews early-20s.

You can find exceptions, but the exceptions are often not that old, and in the anecdotes I think of (Favorite authors, writers, musicians etc), it's hard not to notice the trend of youth. I want to find this trend to be untrue because it can be depressing, but can't. (This is at the core of the article)

Possibly you could look at Newton's example. Yes, his best scientific contributions happen when he was young, and they are what he is known for. But in his late 40's he gave that away. Perhaps as you say it got too hard.

Instead he took up a job at the mint. The job had some technical bits to it like designing coins that were harder to counterfeit, but is was mostly a managing people and society job. The coin clippers were literally debasing the currency to near worthlessness. Had they continued they would have been the internal cancer that took down the empire, as the state could no longer afford to pay for the ships and men needed to create and maintain it. Newton almost single handedly turned that around. It's not an exaggeration to say he saved the empire.

You say the older Newton could not do what the younger Newton did, and that's probably true. But it's also true the younger Newton could not have done what the older one did. He needed the experience and understanding of how men and society work that only decades of live could give him. So yes some abilities dim as you age. But other abilities grow stronger.

Fluid intelligence is higher when younger.

Crystallised intelligence increases with age.

Your comparative advantage changes.

I don't think it's reasonable to include (pop) musicians. Pop music fans, who decide what's a hit, skew young, and are influenced partly by how much the star prancing on stage attracts them as an imaginary sexual partner (or role model). Stardom involves a lot of intuition, charisma, and personality, all things a young person might have by accident. There's also a "voice of the [...] generation" trope that's more plausible if you are one of that generation. So yes, many albums are released by youthful stars and gain attention due to their youthful relevance, sex appeal, and physical fitness (non-rusty voices, nimble fingers, jumping about): and if coincidentally also good music, they're likely to overshadow later albums that are only good music but connect with less visceral urgency to their audience. With, as you say, many exceptions (Wilburys).

It is quite interesting to compare these ages to all the people you know.

There are probably roughly zero 20-somethings that are more interesting than the most boring 50-year old you know.

Is it maybe the case that 20-somethings have nothing to do so they futz around with science and writing and can do that. As they grow older they find better things to do?

It is difficult IMO to be a great writer until you are at least somewhere around mid life and have lived quite a bit of life and been in enough situations to pull inspiration from.

Young people are good at developing talents involving physical skills, but rarely do you find young writers who produce any great literature. And of those young people who happen to be amazing writers, their skill only improves as they get older and wiser, they don’t really hit a peak until they have mental decline in old age.

So if you hit 40 and you’re not good at anything in particular in life, you might still find there’s time to be a great writer, the journey has just begun!

I agree with this. One of the reasons I think writing on TV and in movies is so poor these days is because it's a lot of young people whose only experience of the world is their city bubble, and Twitter. They have only ever seen a narrow slice of life, and their writing reflects that. Very much unlike great authors of years gone by, who had gone out and lived a wide swath of life (including hardship and death) before they wrote their great works.

In the "old days", it was poor taste for the young to opine too much about things. You wouldn't publish your magnum opus until later in life.

The point is, of course, that age is a necessary, but insufficient condition for wisdom. I know of philosophers who claimed to only grasp their subject matter in their 50s.

The 21 year old founder/CEO is largely a myth too. Not that they don't exist, but they usually aren't very good at their job.

... but by being allowed to be bad at their job at 21, they are more likely to find success later.

This is not just true of CEOs. As a precocious chief sysadmin of a small local ISP at age 19, I was allowed to fully administer things no sane company would allow a 19 year-old to touch: sophisticated ADSL aggregation equipment, BGP-speaking border routers, mission-critical core routers, ATM equipment, and so much more.

Not everything I did with this power was smart. A lot of my understanding of what that stuff is was learned "improvisationally", and major local customers, including the county government, paid the price. But what I did do was very successfully parlay this experience into a big-kid job (and a mega pay rise) in the big city, which then begat more such jobs. I doubt I could have rocketed that high, that quickly, if the small-town ISP weren't willing to let ambitious but inexperienced people like me screw up, in exchange for paying them semi-student wages.

The purpose of a startup is not to supercharge the career of its founders.

It's not usually the purpose.

A huge part of that has to be that in modern day society we're constantly bombarded with those one-in-a-million stories that are presented as if they're the norm. And don't get me started on things like sports stars with insanely rare genetic gifts who then write books that say "And I knew it would just take hard work to make my dreams would come true" - sure, you worked hard, but so did a bajillion other folks who didn't win the genetic lottery that you've never heard of. And in many places, like the US, it's also widely preached and believed that the US is a meritocracy, and that anyone can achieve greatness if they work hard enough. I don't really want to get into the "meritocracy" debate but I hope everyone can at least acknowledge that luck is a huge component of any exceptional success.

Before global media, for the most part if you were comparing yourself to other people it was largely comparing against your friends, family and community. Sure, there may have been that one outsized success, but it still wasn't presented as the norm - you knew all the other friends and family that just had average lives. And for most of human history where social ranking was explicitly classed based, it's not like if you were a peasant you would think "Darn, if I only worked harder I could be a noble".

If you want to feel "less hard on yourself", I highly recommend disconnecting from digital media. It's hard for our human brains to deal with the constant onslaught of stars/celebrities/moguls/exceptions and understand how rare those examples truly are.

Think about all the hours you've spent doing what we all do on this site which is, ultimately, nothing.

Imagine if you had directed those hours towards learning or training some sort of skill. You would, almost certainly, be in the top percents of humanity by now at that skill.

It's not just about innate inability but about dedicating yourself to something of value. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of people choose not to do that.

But the point I would emphasize is that this is a choice.

It's actually quite the issue as well, because it's so enticing to choose to do nothing. Would Einstein in an era of endless entertainment, banter, porn, and so on have nonetheless chosen to spend his days wandering about pondering the mysteries and paradoxes with the speed of light?

I mean maybe...? But there's a strong argument to be made that we haven't done away with meritocracy but rather made it fabulously enjoyable to do things of no real merit.

While i agree somewhat and i have the exact same sensation about many things in my life (which has led me to adopt a relentless learning attitude for many things), I'll say that some random online conversations are worth it. These talks help me stay up to date on current events, they help me understand the way others around me are thinking about the world, and occasionally they give me deep insights that i may have neve come upon myself. A movie might finally click for you why someone is upset, helping you improve your personal relationships. I'm in a physics PhD right now and there are people who obviously have done nothing but study their entire lives. But they cannot participate in political discussions or really even small talk. And they seem to be having outsized difficulties with things i consider essential like, talking with women in a way that you might one day start a family and have kids, engender trust and friendship in a wide selection so that job networks and political clout might allow you to materially improve circumstances for yourself and those you love.

There is something to be said about solitary (socially and intellectually) activities being bad, but i would not be anywhere near the whole person i am without my online experiences.

It's tough to be wired as an optimizer

Through the first half of 2024 I tried learning to drive, and my instructor drilled this mindset into me through how he spoke and reacted to errors. It’s taken me a long time to untangle that attitude out of my head, where I can think clearly, judging myself on my own standards for acceptable errors, and not the hypothetical standards of voices that don’t care about me. Being unable to do anything without doubting or questioning myself was soul destroying.

People like him are horrid traps for optimisers. They’re pointing out errors, and being so desperate to improve you’re encouraged to keep listening and value them greater instead of tuning their overeagerness out.

There’s an irony that actually getting hung up on minor comments and suggestions is in itself poor optimisation since the error becomes a distraction instead of a learning point.

I'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.

Thing is, over-optimizing is not optimizing. "No plan survives contact with reality", as it is said. Optimal strategies in games, for instance, include lots of adaptive branches to deal with the suboptimal reality of what actually happens - otherwise the plan is really fragile.

(Having said that, restarting a game over and over in order to force your one perfect linear optimal plan to eventually work out can be lots of fun. But this is not an option in real life.)

While I'm on the cheesy aphorisms, I'll throw in "life is what happens while you're busy making other plans". But that one's too pragmatic, I think. It's not as if we have zero control. Maybe a more accurate statement would be "life is what happens while you're busy making loosely similar plans".

I 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)

You can think of it as "just how I'm wired" if that helps, but these things are tendencies not absolutes. I've been similarly harsh with myself in the past and now I do that less frequently with lower harshness even though I know it's a natural tendency.

It is possible to lessen the effect of these things if you put effort into it.

OK, now I'm being harsh with myself about how I'm failing to get better at not being harsh with myself.

For 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.

What if you were to optimize for happiness, resilience, and peace of mind?

Good reminder that it's everyone's first time doing this.

I believe in re-incarnation, so I've failed at this thousands of times.

And what have you learned?

accept, let go and surrender.

It'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.

I'm starting to understand aging as more a process of becoming who we are meant to be instead of a loss of potentiality. It is a profoundly counter-cultural idea.

I have all-too-brief moments where I experience a visceral sense of literally meeting myself, and the joy therein. I believe that is the work I am to do at the moment, and those small epiphanies are the guideposts.

> I have all-too-brief moments where I experience a visceral sense of literally meeting myself, and the joy therein.

or the moments where I experience a visceral sense of literally meeting myself and feeling aversion because I realize I'm not the person I thought I was and I need to do and be better.

> I'm starting to understand aging as more a process of becoming who we are meant to be instead of a loss of potentiality.

That may be true up to a point. Once you start getting dementia or slip on ice and break your hip, maybe it won't feel like that so much any more.

I don’t read the piece as trying to convince anyone that the perspective presented in it is correct or true, and am kind of surprised that multiple posters here read it that way.

You must be younger than 45, not to be patronizing but, otherwise, you'd get it.

I'm retirement age. I don't get it, and found the piece to be overly-pessimistic. I'm with joshuamcginnis. OTOH, one could argue that I've just stumbled through life, and succeeded (for however one might define that) through mostly luck. I'm fine with that.

> one could argue that I've just stumbled through life, and succeeded (for however one might define that) through mostly luck. I'm fine with that

This resonates. I'm also at retirement age. And when I look back over my career I realize that it was mostly luck. I was so anxious much of the time (afraid I might make a mistake or make the wrong decision) and I wonder if I would've been more relaxed knowing what I know now? And if as a result of being more relaxed I would've actually performed better. I'm pretty sure I would've felt a lot more at peace.

You really expect everyone at 45 suddenly turns around this switch and comes to your conclusion? Now not to be patronizing but that seems really naive.

It's not a sudden realization, it's just realizing that the body is just not the same, and time is more precious, not much margin of error.

I think somewhere around that age is when a lot of folks start noticing how many “last times” for various experiences are piling up, and that a ton of their remaining experiences are also going to be “last times”. It’s when you realize you’re in a slow-motion process of saying goodbye to life.

Here is the thing - the last times were always true. It's just that during youth it doesn't feel that way. Life seems endless. It never was.

I'm not an example of anything, but it happens that I was concerned about mortality from about age 7 - not frightened of it, but indignant. This should obviously be the most urgent concern for everybody, yet we do nothing about it, I thought. Before I decide what I'm going to do with my life, I'm going to fix the problem of it ending way too soon. But as it turned out, I would rather die than study molecular biology, so now I just vaguely hope somebody else will fix the problem.

Humanity's earliest surviving major work of fiction, Gilgamesh, is largely concerned with this. Ancient Egyptian literature is obviously full of these concerns, and you can keep on going down the list of ancient civilizations with surviving literature, it's always there. Worrying about this, wishing to find a solution to this problem, and even working at it (and, always, failing) is about as human as anything can be.

The good news is that we are probably a few decades away from robust rejuvenation, that will allow us to live more or less indefinitely absent catching a disease or meeting with a horrible accident or something. In the next 20 years or so we have a very good shot at a first wave of treatments that will extend our quality lifespan to where we will see the next wave, so-called "longevity escape velocity".

And yes, this is an ancient, ancient dream of mankind, one replete with cautionary tales about the Bad Things that will befall you if you attempt to actually solve it. (One such tale, The Substance, was nominated for a few oscars.) But so was human flight. We yearned for it, and our elders told us what fools we would be for even trying with things like the tale of Icarus... and then one day on a hill in Kitty Hawk, NC...

tales against flying? you forget daedalus who made it out just fine sans a son. icarus’s problem was that he overstepped his limits, not that he dared to fly.

from what I’ve seen tales against a search for immortality are in regards to enjoy life while you have it, make relations, laugh, love, mourn, and remember, rather than have your entire life consumed in a desperate attempt to postpone the end, sucking all the joy out of it. we still have a long ways to go to avoiding death entirely, so I’d figure the best course of action is to enjoy life rather than to waste it in hopes of getting some extra time.

Sure, that is more or less what I meant by expressing an aversion to molecular biology: I have some living to do, so I can't invest effort in avoiding death. It is however true that there's a tiresome trope in fiction, the villain whose badness is centered on the search for eternal life. I remember more than one Doctor Who baddie with this quest. It's like a signifier of an evil character, like desiring unusually long life is a sin against destiny, or somehow unfair, and this trope gives life extension a bad rep. This probably stems from witch hunts in the 1500s, and fairy tales.

ah, fair enough

and yeah bringing up what you've brought up, I see your point. it does seem like the trope has been distilled down to "searching for eternal life is bad" instead of "don't waste everything in the hopes of eternal life".

Voldemort is another example; his name literally means "fleeing from death".

Of course! It's a perspective shift, not a change in reality.

Of course the body is not the same. Time is more precious. But that really doesn't mean your margin of error is smaller. When I was in my twenties I had a lot less margin for error. Failing a test could mean the end of my degree. Not finding a job meant I could not pay rent. This is even worse for some other people. Imagine not getting accepted into Harvard because your letter just not being good enough slightly. If I fuck up my job now, the worst that can happen is that I get fired. I have enough financial means to support myself and find a new job. There is a ton of risk I could never take as a younger person. Precisely because now my margin of error is much larger.

There are, of course, also examples where the converse holds true. Finding a long term partner who you want to create a family with for example. But all in all the balance strongly favors that the error margin becomes smaller.

I'm sixty and can see both points.

Sorry, 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.

I'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.

Part of learning is that if you hate doing something enough your pre-existing deficiencies are amplified.

Is it a literal truth that I can’t learn to paint? No. Have I done enough of it to know my progress is extremely slow to the point of not wanting to study it formally? Absolutely.

I’ll do a paint and sip but I’ll never get much better than that even if I put in the hours.

I disagree. It is my observation that I also saw confirmed by bits of research that certain things as "simple" as programming or quantum physics are simply beyond the levels of abstraction attainable by majority of people.

Cool.

Abstraction is one skill. It's quite useful, especially in an age of computation. But it's just one skill.

There are many other human skills too. They all have their own value (which may vary across time and space).

Few people are really good at more than one or two of them.

Not 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.

I 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.

I'm 42

And one man's vice is another man's virtue. Just look at international politics.

Look 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.

> You're old as soon as you see imperfections as permanent

Conversely, you're young as long as you believe you have control over imperfections.

Last year, I slipped in a puddle on my bike. Last week, my orthopedic surgeon told me I can never be a runner again. There is too little cartilage left in my ankle.

Yesterday, Strava told me I logged my 250th entry. Scrolling down my activity stream past the walks I logged recovering from my ankle injury, I saw the hundreds of runs I went on when I took jogging seriously. One of those runs is now the best run I'll ever do.

Not being able to run is an imperfection that is "permanent" and that I will never "grow" past regardless of how much I care to do so. That's what getting old feels like.

Hopefully my story will help you with your situation, I know how it feels. I’m 30, need double hip replacements as I’ve got no cartilage anymore, tumours in my bone etc etc.

I couldn’t run, I sometimes couldn’t walk. People used to think I was a personal trainer because I was so fit. Diagnosis was 5 years ago.

Went through grief/trauma getting diagnosed with arthritis.

Now 5 years later, from just walking shorter distances more often and processing the grief, I’m back at the gym and started soccer and ran for the first time in ages. Felt very weird but I just work within my limits. I also cycle at least 30 minutes of intense cycling 6 days a week.

You’ll learn to adapt and adjust, it does get better, you just have to become a child again and approach it differently.

I ultimately will still need joint replacements at some point in the next few years, but I’ve had a complete mindset shift. My current goal is to become even fitter than my previous state.

This does help, thank you.

I agree, there is a big mindset shift needed to make peace with our body not being entirely under our control. To me, that mindset change is a big part of what it feels like to not be young.

If think of a lifespan as an arc, it's something like:

1. In early childhood, you are gradually mastering the physicality of your body. Learning to control elimination, getting more coordinated, learning physical skills, etc. I think of it like learning to control a sailboat, harness the wind, operate the sails, etc.

2. When you hit young adulthood, you're at a sort of peak where your body can be an abstraction. You can do what you want in the world without having to worry too much about your body getting in the way. At this point, you are a skilled sailor on the open ocean.

3. Then as you get older and/or unlucky, things outside of your control happen to your body in ways that materially limit your own agency. You may want to do X, but your body means that's off the table. You can still do Y. Now you are navigating shoals. You can still control the sailboat, but there are rocks there and you must navigate around them whether you want to or not. Some places simply can't be reached anymore.

4. I'm not there yet, but assume that as we age, the number of rocks increases and we increasingly focus our attention on the sailing we've already done in the past and make peace with our limited journeys going forward.

That first time you crash into a rock and move from 2 to 3 is hard.

This 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.

There 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.

Yes 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.

I 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.

All more probable to happen over time, but not less probable to happen due to youth.

It'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.

“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

That 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.

The 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.

But 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.

But 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

I 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.

It 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.

>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.

Perfection-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.

Seeking 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.

Related, 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.newyo...

I 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."

I 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...

I 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.

The 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."

I'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.

That'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.

It 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.

This 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-... )

While 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."

The 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.

I’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.

Meh, 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.

I think you miss that a lot of people already have those feelings, so the article isn't pushing bad vibes, it's coming to terms with them. Obviously people are different so not everyone feels this way and of course there are degrees to how much one might relate to the article.

I did understand that particular purpose of the article, but there is something oddly detracting about it to me.

Like a soap opera dramatizes and exaggerates emotions, this article is a little too insistent on itself.

I 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?

Or 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?

I 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.

Of curiosity I just looked up the authors of my favorite book series - they were 43, 42, and 35 when the first book of each series was published. That first author is currently 70 and we're still waiting for the publisher that owns the rights to want another book in the series, she has a plot in mind and had revealed the premise more than a decade ago.

> 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.

Agreed. I felt like this article was grasping for something good, but remark that "45-year-olds aren’t discovered, they’re uncovered, like toxic waste, or a political scandal" is ass-backwards.

Tolkien and Wilder and both great examples of writers who produced landmark works basically as a byproduct of leading full and interesting lives -- not by orbiting the publishing world and champing at the bit to churn out some flashy yet forgettable novel at a record young age. When this happens, the only embarrassment is for the establishment "publishing world" which pretends to represent "literary greatness," not for the author who is "uncovered." Personally, I suspect that "uncovered" authors will endure at a higher rate than the "discovered" ones.

Also I have to add that I rolled my eyes at the "evidence" of Emily Dickenson killed herself. So did Hemmingway, who was first published at 26. What's your point?

Despite all this, the core insight that "suddenly you’re old, and find yourself in a permanent state of imperfection, which you must reckon with" I believe is very true. Even those who succeed in one area of life (being published) have to grapple with it. What options did they leave on the table in order to have that success? What options have been lost due to fame and success (only a fool would believe there are none)?

Becoming a particular (and necessarily, imperfect) person instead of a potential person is a kind of horrifying first taste of death. I think that the healthy way to deal with it is to make peace with the fact that our ability to change ourselves is limited and our ability to change the past is even less. The serenity prayer and AA-adjacent ideas do this.

As a last note, I thought the movie "The Weatherman" did a really good job exploring this.

Counterpoint:

   I am the master of my fate. 
   I am the captain of my soul.

I am also the master of my fate.

That doesn't help one bit in trying to figure out where it lies.

I can’t imagine feeling like I need to “reckon with my own imperfection”.

Always keep climbing.

By an author who will forever be Young (Jared Young that is).

At 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.

"What, then, fills the void where possibility once lived?"

I am 36. This captures my greatest fears. That finding one woman anything less than immediately perfect will cut me off from all the small, lovely moments I have had with women across the world in my life. That if I buy a house in my imperfect city, that that's the ball game. I'm here for a decade or more (even though let's face it, I probably am anyway).

I had a similar interaction with a 31 year old friend who has a beautiful wife, love of his life, and two daughters, a PhD and a position at a startup. He said "What are my goals supposed to be now?" The answer is clearly to be a good father and husband, and I think he knew and was happy with that. But it represented the sea change between youth, singleness and research vs. middle age, familial responsibility and work.

"He wants his home and security, he wants to live like a sailor at sea. Beautiful loser, where will you fall, when you find out you just can't have it all?"

> That finding one woman anything less than immediately perfect will cut me off from all the small, lovely moments I have had with women across the world in my life.

You had those moments. You could keep trying to chase that bouncing between different partners going forward, but consider: a) more women exit the dating market with age (especially the good ones), b) there is a richness of experience also to be found with a devoted lifelong partner which can't be had with a mere fling.

As time goes on, your odds of success are harsher either way, risking being alone much of the time. But in particular, good long-term prospects more rapidly diminish.

Opportunity-cost goes both ways. Speaking from my own bias and experience, investing and relishing in a life-long relationship with a flawed-but-loving partner is worth it, having had the non-committal phase when I was younger.

It's difficult to maximize for some characteristics in a partner. Beauty, sure, you know what you like so you can ball-park. Many traits/qualities are difficult to discern and luck-of-the-draw: reliability and trust, compatibility and love, capacity to raise children well, etc.

No one is perfect and there is no unicorn, novelty is attractive in itself. My heuristic is if a partner can be assessed as "good", holding on is the right move.

I think about Voltaire's Candide often, and the lesson applies here.

Are you anything less than immediately perfect? I mean this in the way that inverting a question sometimes snaps me out of some loop or rut of indecision.

I think it's important to remember we're happily compatible with many people, many houses, and many entire existences.

Have you considered what's said in "Why you will marry the wrong person"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EvvPZFdjyk

I'm single in my 40s. I was the same way. Just pick one. Soon there won't be any to pick from my friend.

the way I've always thought about this uncertainty - the time will pass anyway. good choice or bad, but you can't avoid the time passing by trying to carefully consider which one to choose, and indecision eats the same time away, right?

as you note you're already probably living in some imperfect city. you might consider buying a house more of a commitment to it, but how much more than coasting along in apartments thinking of where to buy the house, for example? you'll live somewhere in that time either way. you might as well commit to things.

> The world was good, but the world was no longer full of all these possibilities. What, then, fills the void where possibility once lived?

Children fill this void

Counterpoint: they will lock you down even harder, and you'll be dreaming of the possibilities that will present when they eventually move out.

unless you understand yourself as part of a larger arc of a story that is told over decades and generations.

learn

create

teach

consult

each has its time

The first in line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by ants.

I was very scared of this happening but it didn’t. I’ll be so sad when they move out but will be exciting to see what they do with their lives.

That's a sad, cruel way of looking at it.

Well he did say "counterpoint". But i agree

For a lot of people, but not for everybody.

Not only that, but there are several different modes of meaning in a life. Family is one aspect, career/community is another, building yourself and heath is another. Thinking of the "one" thing that gives life meaning is very limiting.

Especially as what is meaningful to you may change as time goes on.

It depends on individuals. I have a son but I believe having kids is just taking and giving away. One takes something and gives away other stuffs. Eventually it's a gamble and one better feels that one gets a bit more than he throws away.

Yes, exactly!

Part of maturing is realizing that you are but a link in a chain; and all the potential futures in which you saw yourself as the protagonist fade into a fuzzier (and less direct) set of potential futures which your children will shape and navigate through.

Meanwhile, we are also becoming captive to the stories that we tell ourselves about ours lives and the stories that our culture tells us about our value. But though it's not easy, you can change the story you tell yourself at any time... and watch your life fill-in with possibilities again.

It's actually that easy. I know quite a few people who try to fill the void with dogs, cats or even work, but children are the real deal.

You’re being downvoted and I know why: I ran into so many people in the Bay Area that felt that pets were sufficient substitutes for kids. It’s not even remotely the same level of love, emotion, and wholeness.

It's only karma points, I have more than I need :)

Yes. People do not want to give up some finite freedoms in exchange for preserving their lineage. This is a very modern and sad problem and the source of so much angst of the middle aged. But of course, most people are too hedonistic and self absorbed to realise this.

I disagree with the premise that one should make children for the sake of filling a void.

You make children due to other unrelated reasons and afterwards you realise that they fill the 'void', too, besides fulfilling the initial reasons.

I have a child. In fact I am an empty-nester. So here we are again.

People who have children to fill a “void” end up disappointed. They grow up, they move away, they either resent how little they had or how much they had given to them and what it has done or not done for their fledging careers.

I have three. No regrets, but I didn’t do it to give my life meaning. They are their own people and I am responsible for giving my life meaning, no one else.

At some point, you are back with yourself and own thoughts. This is neither good nor bad. It simply is.

My parents used to complain a lot about how much they sacrificed for me and I didn't get it.

Well now I do get it that I have a son, but I'll never say that to him. He is only 4.5 so we will see. I just don't want him to feel that he owes me anything. He doesn't owe me anything. Whatever I do for him, I do so willingly and the result is all mine to take, good or bad.

That behaviour was frequent for the previous generation of parents, but it almost vanished with the current one

As a guy who's dating in his 30s I'm just envious he's able to choose "the best woman" and doesn't feel his options are limited to the only woman in online dating who's willing to stick around

I can't believe I am the one on the other end of this comment. For real. I cannot believe I am typing this out. Me, the eternally damned one is now the virtuous savior typing those empty feel good words on the internet.

I met her when I was 35 and she was 36. Totally unreal human who is the best person I have ever met. She settled on her ex-husband and after 5 years they split amicably, both understanding their mistake. She was "too old" so she figured she would just live a solo life. After a few years her friends made a profile for her and put it up. Its been two years and people are still jealous of our intense bond. Currently I'm looking for a ring.

Hold out hope, it's not totally over. I was you for many years.

Thank you for your reply. I love hearing stories like this.

I believe I will find the same eventually, it's just the search and the waiting that's running me ragged.

Happy for you, brother!

Well... that woman is de facto the best. One of the great secrets to life is that happiness is found primarily through changing your mindset, not through changing your circumstances. It's easy to say and hard to do, of course. But it is true. You'll be a lot happier if you can focus on the good qualities of whatever woman you find in your life, than if you look at her in terms of "she's just the best that I could do".

> One of the great secrets to life is that happiness is found primarily through changing your mindset, not through changing your circumstances.

Not at all in relation to dating (rather to something related to age) that was exactly what I needed to read today :)

The right woman to marry is the one you're married to

I should know by now that complaining on the internet is seen as an invitation for people to give you bad advice, yet I still do it from time to time anyway.

Who you marry is the most important decision of your life and ending up with someone you don't even like that much because she's the best you can do is a terrible idea. Who would want to be the woman in this situation?

The women you meet in online dating are much lower quality than the ones you meet in real life, and a part of you is aware of that. The answer is to meet people in real life.

The woman who I thought was "best" that I was wildly in love with a few months later cheated on me. I've never really fully recovered from the ordeal.

That said, as I've entered my 30s things seem more strategic. I want love more than ever and after re-locating to the SF Bay Area women seem more sparse than ever.

Idk if modern women in america "stick around" anymore.

It's online dating. Most of the women in the pool are either using it out of boredom or are dating non-monogamously, and that doesn't work out for most guys.

I think a lot of women use it as a hookup app but women often take their time and are more cautious when trying to hook up.

Women who aren't just looking for a hook-up often filter out because they meet a lot of guys who just want that.

Honestly, as a man with a family and a kid, maybe, just maybe, not getting a family is a blessing, especially for people who have to try hard for that.

Just maybe, fight for your passion and forget about family and kid. You might find them on the road that you avoid them.

Yeah, it's important to live your best life and try to forget the world. But in the meantime I can pine a little.

I get it. Good luck! Hope you find someone that share the same value.

It's true that, once you make a specific choice, other choices that you could have made in its place are gone. Once one possibility becomes actual, the other possibilities that could have taken its place are gone.

But some possibility has to become actual at some point. Otherwise you aren't living at all. Life is making choices and living with the consequences. Dreaming is nice, but it's not the same as living. And if you spend all of your present imagining possible futures, you never have an actual life.

In other words, what fills the void where possibility once lived is actual living.

> 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.

At your age, I left Philadelphia and ended up living in a tiny village in rural New Mexico. I had lived almost entirely in large cities since I was 10 years old. Since that move, I became a (volunteer) firefighter, and joined the boards of 3 village organizations. I learned how to shop for a week rather than a day. I've had to reassess my own landscape aesthetics, now that green is no longer the signifier of beauty (at least, not below 9000'). My construction skills have had to expand to encompass a house built of dried mud.

I would say that this has been as much "a new life" as any that I started when I was younger.

I have been struggling with the same problem for quite a while. When I was in high school and my early 20s I had a group of friends I was constantly hanging out with. I realized a few months ago that I hadn't seen or talked to any of them in more than two years. We all changed and went our separate ways. I wondered if I would see them again. I found it troubling to think that I might not - but the love was still there, even knowing that we might never all be together again. It can be difficult to enjoy something for what it is (or was), rather than for what it could be. As we age we are forced to reconcile the potentiality of our dreams with the finite reality of our lives. This can be discouraging (and even frightening) but it can also allow for a much deeper enjoyment of the present moment. I do not need to worry about what something might become - I can just enjoy it for what it is here and now.

Every 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.

Having 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).

> 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.

Indeed. I'm at 40+ and is in this stage exactly. Nothing seems to be really meaningful. Work, family, kid, OK, then? I think it is ultimately a lone road as no one can help me to answer questions that only I myself can answer. I guess it's totally possible to not find an answer for the rest of the life.

> 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.

I say this gently, but it sounds like you're trying to find reasons why you can't move anymore, none of which are very convincing.

Of course you can't move to everywhere exotic and different—that was never possible even when you were young. Of course you can't start a new life there in the same way that a young person would—even as a young adult it's often impossible to integrate as deeply as someone born there.

If that didn't stop you before, why does it stop you now? Do you perhaps simply like your current life enough that the incentive to move is much lower? If so, that's a great problem to have and should be celebrated.

>>> What, then, fills the void where possibility once lived?

Laughing at the world for letting me exist.

This is the allure of nomading for me. I can claim to live in a place and generally know it better than others staying for only a week. Right now I'm probably settling down with my wife but a part of me really hates to close off all the possibilities. I think it would be so exciting to live in a country in Africa. It really makes you think about how much you are giving up by buying a house or leasing an apartment.

So 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.

I 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.

> 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!

That'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.

Happiness 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.

Sure, but if your strategy for life happiness is to spend your youth to try to win the lottery, I'd say maybe that's not a good investment.

OK I'm a bit different with the author on this one...

I 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."

I 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.

Your 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.'"

Image to go along with Hokusai's beautiful bit: https://i.imgur.com/Q6khyva.png

In 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.

Reads 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.

I 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.

I 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.

Yeah, but that's the perspective of a veteran of the industry and not an "up and coming author." We have this narrative that people get rewarded for their virtue and not their ability/willingness to play the silly little game, and it takes a while to see through it especially if you tend to be more idealistic.

> that's the perspective of a veteran of the industry

Yes, of course. The target audience for that comment is today's version of my younger self, the one who thinks that if you haven't made ten million dollars by the time you turn 30 (or won a Nobel Prize or a Fields Medal or published a novel or had a screenplay produced or whatever) you're a failure.

I 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

I 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.

Why 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

You might enjoy Shopenhauer's "On Authorship":

<https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11945/11945-h/11945-h.htm#li...>

> 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).

“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

I 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.

The 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.

From my own experiences: children aren't small adults, adults are large children.

I 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.

I 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.

Moving 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.

Youth 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

Youth 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.

If you enjoyed this as I did, you might enjoy John Tottenhams Inertia Variations: https://johntottenham.com/category/inertia-variations/

I prefer them read by Matt Johnson: https://open.spotify.com/album/67crhBYB2f2xIiZWSDsFvI?si=GLZ...

Ambition, 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.

The 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.

I actually feel younger with younger people than with older people.

Both 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.

Set the bar low, your sights high, and work your ass off, and you'll achieve much and have a blast getting there.

As 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.

28 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.

1) 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.

I, 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.

If 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.

Going by past results, Bitcoin's better.

> Going by past results

I'd rather go by future results like Biff Tannen.

Sadly, my crystal ball is out of commission due to Heartbleed 2.

Not 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.

What 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"

https://asitis.com/11/32.html

Time I am, destroyer of the worlds, and I have come to engage all people.

It'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.

I 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.

Tom 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!"

"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.

I 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.

I 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

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.

Love the roses, very nice!

The 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.

This 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.

According to my mom, when you hit 70 or so is when you start "feeling old". So it'll come in a few years.

I 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.

I 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.

> 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.

Youth is that part of age where you never stop achieving your goals one after another and inspire youth to do the same.

Don't worry if you're over 30/40/50 - Évariste Galois is judging anyone over the age of 18.

Complete 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.

Great 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.

The 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.

My 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.

Very 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.

As a guy your age I'm increasingly realizing our role in the corporate world is to get younger people to pull heroics for them.

A captivating proposition! Let me look into that...

No offense intended of course, but maybe that's what your managers were doing (and were getting paid well for it).

Probably!

I am 30 :(

Two 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.

Don’t worry, the worst is still before you. ;)

my life started around 30

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