I am in my 60's and What Thaths Said :D
On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 8:12 AM, Thaths <tha...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm in my 40's and dammit I don't want to waste it reading
> intellectual-self-wankery premised on dubious extrapolations from limited
> first-world data sets.
>
> Thaths
>
> On Tue, May 10, 2016 at 11:43 AM Udhay Shankar N <ud...@pobox.com> wrote:
>
>> Venkatesh Rao is a very smart (if extremely prolix) guy. I don't actually
>> agree with the basic premise of this essay, but wanted to see what silklist
>> thought - several of the regulars have probably passed this milestone
>> already, including myself.
>>
>> Comments?
>>
>> Udhay
>>
>> http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/04/28/immortality-begins-at-forty/
>>
>> Immortality Begins at Forty
>> April 28, 2016 By Venkatesh Rao
>>
>> I discovered something a couple of years ago: Almost all culture, old or
>> new, is designed for consumption by people under 40. People between 40 and
>> O (an indeterminate number defined as “really, just way too old”), are
>> primarily employed as meaning-makers for the under-40 set. This is because
>> they are mostly good for nothing else, and on average not valuable enough
>> themselves for society to invest meaning in.
>>
>> Immortality
>>
>> The only culture designed for people between 40 and O is prescription drug
>> ads and unreadably dense literary novels. Between age O and Ø, the age at
>> which you die, there is only funerary culture. That second link is to an
>> app for managing your own death called Cake. Why cake? Your guess is as
>> good as mine.
>>
>> But there’s a plus side. Forty is when immortality begins.
>>
>> A very general life-stage map across civilizations and eras looks like
>> this:
>>
>> 0 to a: Achieve launch velocity
>> a to 40: Play culture!
>> 40 to O: Ah crap, I have to make shit up for others now?
>> O to Ø: Let them eat cake
>> The new number in the scheme above, a, is the age at which you achieve
>> enough of a restless drive, via either increasing resentment (some sort of
>> red pill) or cluelessness (some sort of blue pill), to play for meaning.
>>
>> In the scheme above, 40 is the only roughly stable number. It exists as an
>> approximately fixed point because it is an emergent outcome of history. It
>> is reflected in the nature of humanity’s collective cultural archives,
>> religions, sitcoms, ideologies, self-improvement plans, justifiably ageist
>> 40-under-40 award schemes, weight-loss plans, and dating advice.
>>
>> In case you hadn’t yet noticed, the few older archetypes and characters who
>> do play a role in our collective cultural imagination tend to be
>> unrealistically wise, healthy, evolved, and wondrously well-prepared for
>> retirement. Unlike archetypes of youthful beauty and vigor, these are not
>> meant to set unrealistic standards for older people to actually strive
>> towards. It’s too late for them. They are meant to prevent young people
>> from getting too distracted by their own future concerns to play the
>> present-day meaning games the world needs them to play.
>>
>> The other numbers can float, which means you can get extraordinarily
>> fucked-up lives if (for instance), your a is higher than 40 or your O is
>> under 40.
>>
>> If you’re lucky, the following set of inequalities will hold for you, and
>> you will be able to experience that most precious of all things, a life
>> lived forward in time:
>>
>> 0 < a: you have childhood innocence to lose
>>
>> a < 40: you have enough value that society does culture to you
>>
>> 40 < O: there is enough time to take revenge for having had culture done to
>> you
>>
>> O < Ø: if you’re lucky, there will be time to rest and observe in peace
>>
>> Some well-known fucked-up life scripts include:
>>
>> O < a: Acting dead
>>
>> a > 40: Peter Pan
>>
>> 40 > 40: Has-been
>>
>> 40 < 40: Burnout
>>
>> Ø < a: Died tragically and heroically young
>>
>> Ø < Ø: Painful and unwanted life extension
>>
>> Once society stops doing culture to you, and you’re on your own,
>> immortality begins. The morning after your fortieth birthday, you
>> experience the first day of the rest of time.
>>
>> There is an obvious question that everybody should ask but nobody does: how
>> would you know if you were immortal?
>>
>> It is not enough to merely go through one or more death experiences,
>> miraculously surviving each one. By virtue of living in 2016, you’ve
>> probably already sailed through many infections and diseases that would
>> have killed you a few hundred years ago. You’ve probably also committed
>> what would have been capital crimes in ages past.
>>
>> No, you begin to experience immortality the first time you recognize the
>> transience of experiences you thought were permanent, and more subtly, the
>> permanence of experiences you hoped were transient.
>>
>> This recognition generally ruins culture for you, since culture is built
>> around the game of a meaningful search for eternal truths, timeless values
>> and changeless habits of prowess. And, it goes without saying,
>> transcendence of the unpleasantly transient.
>>
>> Time, of course, is the merciless slaughterer of all these infinitely
>> qualified anchors of the meaning of life. Wait long enough, and every truth
>> will crumble. Wait long enough, and every value will dissolve into moral
>> ambiguity. Wait long enough, and every habit will decay, first into ritual,
>> then into farce. Wait long enough, and every slain demon will rise again.
>>
>> And then you will be free. Something almost nobody wants, but almost
>> everyone is forced to endure past 40.
>>
>> Unless you have kids, in which case you may be eligible for an extension.
>>
>> Forty years is not enough to specifically undermine every truth, value, and
>> habit, but it is long enough to generally undermine the idea that there are
>> non-transient truths, values, and habits. You’ve seen too many business
>> cycles, too many political cycles, too many cultural cycles, too many
>> saints and sinners trading places, to believe that this time a source of
>> meaning will endure.
>>
>> I’ll call any emotionally coherent collection of truths, values and habits
>> meaning. The half-life of a representative basket of meaning is about
>> twenty years, adjusting for purchasing power parity.
>>
>> Forty is also the age at which point it stops being worth anyone’s while to
>> manufacture and invest meaning in you. It is this drying up of supply —
>> meaning, by virtue of its transience is a consumable — more than any
>> maturation into nihilism, that triggers the shift into an immortal frame of
>> mind.
>>
>> What really drives home the visceral sense of the transience of all meaning
>> is the realization, around forty, that not only is nobody going to supply
>> you with comforting permanences anymore, but that you have to begin to
>> repay a debt you did not realize you had incurred. You have to create
>> meaning games for others to play. There are not many other jobs for the
>> 40-to-O crowd.
>>
>> Not only is it all meaning transient, it must all be manufactured by
>> somebody. Meaning doesn’t just happen. Civilization functions by putting
>> the 40-to-O crowd to work, creating meaning games for the a-to-40 set to
>> play.
>>
>> Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Stock a lake with fish, and
>> he’ll fish till he’s 40, at which point it’s generally not critical to
>> anyone else that he continue to eat.
>>
>> If you’re lucky, the meaning game you play in your a-to-40 years will have
>> been designed by a tradition of not-entirely-malevolent 40-to-O sociopaths.
>>
>> If you’re even luckier, the meaning games you help create for others in
>> your 40-to-O will not be entirely bereft of kindness. This matters more for
>> you than for the people who play your games.
>>
>> The transience of the seemingly permanent is well-recognized, even though
>> Buddhists around the world work hard to mystify it. A word or two about the
>> permanence of the seemingly transient.
>>
>> There are many experiences we hope are transient. Experiences that
>> threaten, and ultimately destroy, meaning. Experiences about which we say,
>> this too shall pass.
>>
>> Generally they do. Unfortunately they also keep coming back. The causes
>> change — today it is Zika, Trump and robots, yesterday it was the Spanish
>> Flu, machine guns and George Wallace.
>>
>> The transient experiences keep coming back, but the meanings they destroy
>> don’t. Indeed, the permanence of transience is merely the negative space
>> formed by the creative destruction of meaning. Change, as the saying goes,
>> is the only constant.
>>
>> This is a good thing.
>>
>> Culture is the necessary art of perpetuating the disturbing rumor that
>> reality is meaningful. That beneath the pain and the pleasure, the cruelty
>> and the compassion, the estranging and the connecting, the breaking and the
>> making, the ugliness and the beauty, the losing and the winning, the dying
>> and the living, there is Something More.™
>>
>> Reality of course, is the bit that doesn’t go away when you stop believing
>> in it. The meaning of reality, unfortunately, isn’t part of reality. And
>> beyond reality, there is nothing more.
>>
>> But with a little skill, it is possible to prevent most people from
>> figuring this out until they have paid more in taxes and social security
>> than they will demand back.
>>
>> This is a good thing. And I am not being snarky. It is good that things are
>> this way.
>>
>> The way you perpetuate the rumor is by making meaning games. These come in
>> many forms, besides the obvious ones like creating a religion or writing a
>> poem. Like being a good middle manager, running for President, or
>> announcing a daring plan to colonize Mars.
>>
>> All fall into one of two patterns: redistributing meaning and creating new
>> meaning. There is also a third category, accelerating the destruction of
>> rotting meaning. But since rotting meaning self-destructs naturally anyway,
>> there isn’t much demand for accelerating the process. Still, there’s a
>> living to be made in shorting the meaning markets.
>>
>> Redistributing meaning requires creating strongly escaped realities by
>> sealing off inconveniently meaningless bits of reality. Things like
>> religion fall into this category. By shifting Significance from Some Things
>> to Some Other Things, redistribution can manufacture a new signal from old
>> noise, and motivate the restlessness and motion the world requires of the a
>> to 40 set. It may not be very useful motion (indeed the motion is usually
>> circular), but it creates liquidity in the meaning economy.
>>
>> Creating new meaning means disturbing the universe. By sciencing the shit
>> out of it, as we have discussed several times before. This does not
>> directly create either meaning or meaning games. In fact, given the
>> fundamentally nihilistic character of sciencing shit, the core activity
>> threatens meaning more than it creates meaning.
>>
>> But for those standing far enough away that they can Fucking Love Science!
>> instead of actually doing science, disturbing the universe creates
>> pleasantly disturbing rumors that J. Alfred Prufrock actually had an
>> overwhelming question. One to which he could have discovered the answer if
>> only he’d had the courage to disturb the universe. A fucking lovely answer.
>>
>> The grim truth is not that there is no profoundly satisfying answer. The
>> grim truth is that there is no overwhelming question. Poor Alfred just
>> wasn’t very good at turning 40.
>>
>> Redistributing meaning or creating meaning. You’re either an art history
>> major, or you can science the shit out of things. There is no middle.
>>
>> This way of talking about meaning is similar to how we talk about money.
>> You might conclude from this that if you seek meaning, you will also make
>> money. This is exactly wrong. You have to make meaning games, which is
>> exactly the opposite sort of activity.
>>
>> Being exactly wrong is actually a useful thing to be. It’s the next best
>> thing to being right. You can get to right by flipping exactly wrong.
>> Flipping somewhat wrong merely makes you somewhat wrong in a new way.
>>
>> To seek meaning is to believe in truth before virtue, virtue before beauty,
>> beauty before creation, creation before victory. This is the honor code of
>> meaning-seeking. If you follow this code perfectly, you will make exactly
>> no money.
>>
>> I was dumb enough in my twenties to try to follow this code perfectly.
>> Fortunately for my solvency, I am not very good at following instructions,
>> and a succession of mid-life crises and crashes ensured my survival.
>>
>> But it is important that you don’t stop believing in this code too early.
>> That’s a recipe for a fucked-up life. It is also important that you don’t
>> continue believing in this code too long. That’s also a recipe for a
>> fucked-up life.
>>
>> You must stop believing in this code exactly when you are ready to begin
>> immortality. When your own appetite for meaning is satiated, and you are
>> ready to start making meaning games for others. When you’re ready to play
>> god for your own amusement.
>>
>> Here is how you disturb the universe to make meaning. It isn’t pretty, and
>> there’s a reason most who are able to do it on a grand scale are above
>> forty.
>>
>> Winning before making. This is survival.
>>
>> Making before beauty. This is perpetuation.
>>
>> Beauty before virtue. This is leadership.
>>
>> Virtue before truth. This is realism.
>>
>> To win you may need to do destructive, ugly, vicious, and false things.
>>
>> Then, to create, you may need to do ugly, vicious, and false things.
>>
>> To make your creations endure, so they don’t go away when you stop
>> believing in them, you may need to do beautiful, vicious, and false
>> things.
>>
>> Then, you may need to do beautiful, virtuous, and false things to create
>> happiness.
>>
>> And finally, you may choose to seek truth. This is an optional,
>> meaningless, and essentially solitary activity. Something the immortal and
>> free may choose to do, to entertain themselves in the amusement park that
>> is the part of eternity that does not go away when you stop believing in
>> it.
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
>>
