Having a Good Life Involves Partially Dying Several Times
I'm writing thirty posts in thirty days. This is number twenty-four.
Let’s say you’re a famous touring musician. You’re in total synchronization with your environment: you love music, you love fame, you love bad road food, and the world is happy to give you all of these things. But, over time, the world gets tired of you faster than you get tired of music. So then suddenly you’re sort of out of step with your biome. Suddenly, you’re 45, and you find yourself regaling some young person in a bar with your stories of drugs and groupies and private jets, and they keep glancing at their phone. You are now boring. You’ve been boring for ten years. The whole basis of your self-worth is over now.
This happens to just about everyone, to some degree, in some dimension of our lives. We carefully cultivate an identity, and we’re rewarded for this. We find a niche and evolve to achieve some degree of fit. Everyone agrees that we’re obviously the thing we say we are. Then slowly things become misshapen. Either our needs change, or the world’s needs change—you used to be wanted in a certain way, but now you’re not. Or sometimes technology just takes your job away. Or people require things of you that force you to put your own priorities aside. (Perhaps they are people you manufacture.) So you just have this awkward chunk of yourself hanging off that doesn’t have anything to do with the current state of reality.
And if you’d like to move on, you have to excise this chunk, as best you can. You have to kill that part of yourself, and then look for new sources of meaning, after some period of mourning. It’s hard work. Starting from what feels like zero is humiliating. Given that we’re social creatures, we’re terrified without some degree of legible identity—it’s uncomfortable to say ‘I’m figuring that out’ to the question of ‘who are you,’ especially if that question comes from within.
But the other option is decay. You unhappily do a job badly that you’re not really suited for now. Or you spend your whole life basking in nostalgia. Or you just wonder why nobody calls you anymore.
Some people become comfortable in decay. If you rest quietly in frustrated inertia, you can tell yourself the comforting story that it almost would’ve worked out, except for some factor beyond your control. Moreover, you can avoid the most confusing thing about personal evolution, which is that when you’re forced to change, you have to take stock of what’s actually essential about you. And, often, it’s not what you thought. Some of the purportedly central parts of your personhood were actually just gestures invented in dialogue with happenstance. They were just a costume you were wearing for awhile. And now you have to go buy another one.
At 45, you've been dead to people under 30 for nearly 15 years.
But there's a counterpoint to this: the nice thing about being in my 40s is that most of my friends are, now, too. Millennials challenge my GenX soul. I'm glad I'm no longer in my 20s.
You are correct that life is a constant stream of loss and reinvention. All change - marriage, children, first job - carries a component of loss most people don't like to discuss.
Well said! We are far too attached to who we think we are