Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Consolations of Late Adulthood

Despite the fact that the Grim Reaper, the ultimate 'Repo man,' is hot on my trail, I wouldn't go back to being a child, an adolescent, or even a young adult for anything. What is that makes childhood and adolescence so rotten for some of us?  In a word, powerlessness, and in a three-fold sense.

One is first of all physically undeveloped and weak. But grow tall and strong, brisk of stride and stern of visage, and you project a secular analog of Christ's noli me tangere,  don't touch me. (Cf. John 20:17.)
  
The child is also psychologically without defenses, overly impressionable and suggestible, and at the mercy of anyone who cares to launch an attack. But as the years roll by one develops the requisite filters. One learns to hold people and their attitudes at arm's length, psychologically speaking. Reading the Stoics helps, as does blogging. One develops a thick skin given all the bottom-feeders and scum-suckers that patrol its vasty deeps. But mainly it is just living day by day and dealing with the world's tomfoolery that has the requisite desensitizing effect. One becomes self-assured and sufficient unto oneself. Validation by others becomes less and less important.

In third place comes the financial weakness of childhood. Money buys freedom, freedom from the wrong environments and the wrong people. A little thought discloses that money is negatively related to happiness. Money can't buy happiness, but it can buy the absence of misery. Or to put the point precisely, it can buy that without which most of us will be miserable. It can put one in a position where the pursuit of happiness is likely to succeed. It doesn't take much by way of money and what it can buy to be happy. But happiness does require a modicum, with the possible exception of a few enlightened sages.

So adulthood has its advantages, and for some of us they outweigh its disadvantages. But your experience may vary, and a fool's errand it would be to argue against another's experience.

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Bill Vallicella

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5 responses to “Consolations of Late Adulthood”

  1. Joe Odegaard Avatar
    Joe Odegaard

    When you get old, your friends and grammar school classmates die, so there’s that.
    “Now I am alone, my King!” Bedivere loudly cried, “Whither shall I go, my King, now that our world has died?”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fs8Td5AKwxE

    Reply
  2. BV Avatar
    BV

    Joe,
    Would you agree with me that it is better to be our age than to be young?

    Reply
  3. Vito B. Caiati Avatar
    Vito B. Caiati

    For me, one of the advantages of old age (78 last month) is the sense that this material world has a diminishing hold over me. While I do not welcome death, which is certainly on the near horizon, I value the distance that has opened up between me, whatever I am—body and soul or body alone—and the material reality that I have inhabited for almost eight decades, which, its many joys aside, is instilled with so much that is hurtful, threatening, and worrying. I cannot, obviously, eliminate the last great threats of this world—physical decay and a miserable death—but the anxiety filled shadow that the rest of this reality has cast over me is certainly less ominous than when I was younger. I seem to say to the world, do what you may, I am passing beyond your grasp.

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  4. Joe Odegaard Avatar
    Joe Odegaard

    Well Brother Bill, When I look at now, and also look back, I like them both. The whole ride has been glorious. I am very glad that I have been created; thank you God.

    Reply
  5. BV Avatar
    BV

    My disposition is less sunny that that of my old friend from kindergarten, Joe’s. I incline, not so much to the saturnine, but to the serious and melancholy. Is this world an abbattoir or a garden of delights? Forced to choose, I’d say the former. Joe has no use for Benatar with his anti-natalism; I sympathize with him: I am happy not to be responsible for the creation of any more consciousnesses.
    Another friend of mine, deeply affected by combat action in Vietnam, proferred the curious speculation that THIS is hell, right here, right now. I can relate to that, though I would prefer to see it as purgatory. But these are dubious speculations.
    Plato came closest to depicting our untenable predicament, one from which we need salvation, in his Allegory of the Cave.
    What we are touching upon here is what Ayn Rand calls “sense of life.” I don’t think much of her on balance, but this is good:
    Sense of Life
    A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence. It sets the nature of a man’s emotional responses and the essence of his character.
    Long before he is old enough to grasp such a concept as metaphysics, man makes choices, forms value-judgments, experiences emotions and acquires a certain implicit view of life. Every choice and value-judgment implies some estimate of himself and of the world around him—most particularly, of his capacity to deal with the world. He may draw conscious conclusions, which may be true or false; or he may remain mentally passive and merely react to events (i.e., merely feel). Whatever the case may be, his subconscious mechanism sums up his psychological activities, integrating his conclusions, reactions or evasions into an emotional sum that establishes a habitual pattern and becomes his automatic response to the world around him. What began as a series of single, discrete conclusions (or evasions) about his own particular problems, becomes a generalized feeling about existence, an implicit metaphysics with the compelling motivational power of a constant, basic emotion—an emotion which is part of all his other emotions and underlies all his experiences. This is a sense of life.
    The Romantic Manifesto “Philosophy and Sense of Life,”
    http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/sense_of_life.html

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