Age

"I'M NOT A PUPPY, NOT YET A DOG"

i'm really terrified of aging. terrified.

It's much much worse than you've been led to expect. So, just relax and pretend nothing bad will happen until it's much too late.

thanks.

It's not like you can avoid it...Okay there is one way, but that's not the best of ideas.

I heard aging was cool!

Oh wait, I heard aging was the worst thing ever from my grandpa, over and over and over and over again.

Well, you die at the end of it. Which can't be good.

you're dead before it starts as well, tho

This is getting deep, bros.

I'm starting to remember who I used to be, like, inside of me.

Aging is good because you get to be a beligerent git, and steal seats on the bus, without looking weird.

You can do that by sticking a cushion up your top, though.

OK, if you're a man, it's harder, at least without forgoing the without looking weird part.

I dunno theres a few fat old hobos on my tram who are beligerent and stinky enough that they get alllll the seats they like with their pong-zone.

good thread revive

growing older's gotta be better than the alternative

you seem grumpy, JOrdan S., maybe you are chakstruating.

ha no i meant this was a good choice of a thread to revive

im totally in favor of every single existential surmounter question

sorry for the false ch'accuse.

Once you get past 30, you rarely think about it. Especially if you have kids. Or rather, once you have kids, you're terrified of not aging cause that way you miss out on your kids growing up. It's the most wonderful thing seeing your kid blossom.

Hmm... I read that as bosom.

but stevie, what if you have no kids????

I'm only 29, but I'm definitely happier now than I was at 19. I'm enjoying the being-an-adult business.

i don't want to wake up one day and realize i can't remember what the lawns of my college campus looked like. to feel like all the hopes i shared with my friends are so old they barely exist anymore, whether or not they came true.

bring the joyz Surmounter. you'll be reet mate =)

:D

"Things mean a lot at the time, don't mean nothin' later".

Gor bless you Mr Kozolek.

http://www.actioncat.com/platinum/images/quick-dogtyping.gif

That dog REALLY has some sort of palsy going on there....

i'm really terrified of aging. terrified.

― Surmounter, Tuesday, June 17, 2008 9:19 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^^

Gawd. This kind of thread is like catnip for me. Somebody shoot me before I pontificate again.

(...waits...silence reigns...examines torso for wounds...finds none)

Being terrified is pointless. It gains you nothing, changes nothing, unless you get so frightened you kill yourself. My advice on that: don't. It's worse than futile.

So, what should you do? I'm glad I asked me that question.

Just concentrate on what you can control, however clumsily, however uncertainly, which most definitely does not include halting the passage of time so that you will never age. It does include (however clumsily, however uncertainly) learning, and growing, and adapting to whatever the passage of time drops in your lap. Engage every day. It works wonders.

This sense of engagement is a full time job. Get absorbed in it sufficiently and you will scarcely notice the aging process. Your days will lengthen and become more interesting and rewarding. Years will pass slowly, not in a haze or a blur. A week will seem as roomy as a cathedral. The slow dissolution of your body will become as natural to you as the rain or the wind.

And you will age, irrevocably, steadily, but you'll stop being terrified by it. I promise.

the biggest age-related fear i have is that one day i will wake up from many years of near-total freedom from fear of growing old

meaning fearing it is to relinquish your freedom

thanks Aimless

for me the fear has become an impetus.

It's funny. I don't have a fear of death or aging per se, I have a fear of poor quality of life. Hence all my imaginary Mad Max visions.

Aimless, that was an amazing post.

A week will seem as roomy as a cathedral. The slow dissolution of your body will become as natural to you as the rain or the wind.

And you will age, irrevocably, steadily, but you'll stop being terrified by it. I promise.

― Aimless, Friday, September 19, 2008 11:37 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

This sense of engagement is a full time job. Get absorbed in it sufficiently and you will scarcely notice the aging process. Your days will lengthen and become more interesting and rewarding. Years will pass slowly, not in a haze or a blur. A week will seem as roomy as a cathedral. The slow dissolution of your body will become as natural to you as the rain or the wind.

You could almost say the same about drugs - hardly a great endorsement for jobs.

It seems a bit sad to have your job as your overwhelming raison d'etre. Bring on the robots and full automation, let's enter the leisure age and become a world of lotus eaters.

Oh Bob, it was clearly a metaphor.

You writers and your metaphors..so confusing for us poor aspies.

engagement is not that easy

It's been a long time since I've seen someone miss the point quite so completely.

I am liking Aimless's posts on aging.

Have you read the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi? (I hope I spelled that right, it looks like I just hit random keys on the computer.) He seems to bring up the same points that you do, about engagement.

The flow guy...He features in a lot of those books about happiness; I've never read anything directly by him.

Going slightly off-topic, as well as perhaps off the point, I wonder about the idea of flow, though. Taken to its conclusion you'd end up like some Getting Things Done adherent, moving from effortless from one task to another without giving it too much thought...Is that enough? Maybe you'd be happier - but have you given up your self-consciousness and turned yourself into a robot?

Also there's a kind of implicit idea that your best work is done when you're 'in the groove'. But looking back some of my best work was done in frustrating intervals of self-conscious grind, crushing it out painfully.

You could almost say the same about drugs

Bob, I don't get this comparison at all.

In my experience, for the great majority of drug takers, drugs induce both haze and blur - in spades. Even those drugs which purport to sharpen awareness, in real life tend to destroy memory and mental capacity, which has very little to do with growth, learning or adaptation.

The result is generally along the lines of: a loss of acuity (alcohol, weed), or a pathological narrowing of attention (meth), or an obliteration of self (heroin), or something equally unlike engagement with life. Which, for the drug taker, is quite often the point of taking drugs.

I agree with you that it is possible to do good work by "crushing it out painfully", but in order to define such work as 'good' you must first disintegrate your sense of self, so as to disassociate the crushing pain of the process from your appreciation of the outcome. Sometimes this is the only way to get to a particular outcome. But I hope you understand that if you allow this dissociation of process from outcome to become a way of life, then you will drive yourself into a peculiar, narrow corner of your intellect and wither your ability to experience most of the pleasures of life.

i turned 27 this month and am trying to dress more conservatively, don't wanna end up looking all "skate dad" (30 something chump with frosted tips and ltd edition trainers)

love frosted tips

it's a look

not really feeling it

It is a full-time occupation maintaining a sense of engagement.

I don't think for a minute he's saying that you should make a full-time career type job your life or whatever. It's just a metaphor to show the scale of commitment to the idea of engagement.

I'm only on chapter 2, but I'm willing to give the guy a chance. The biggest problem in my life at the moment is boredom. I strongly doubt, at my age, that I'm going to have some life-changing thing that's going to every make my life permanently exciting. So I'm willing to hear the guy out on some way of changing my perceptions/focus/whatever to avoid spending the rest of my life bored off my tits.

The times when I'm at my best, are those ego-obliterating times, drawing, playing guitar, going on a long like, when I forget my body, forget my self, just engage. If this guy has some trick to feel like that more of the time without the aid of drugs or kooky religion, then I'm willing to give it a try.

27 is still really young although i know at the time you feel like you should be an adult. seriously - dont waste it doing shit you dont want to do.

i know 27 is young, but it's all relative, innit? if i go to some studenty club in town where everyone is about 19, then i'm gonna feel old. yet at work where everybody is at least 35, i'm like the baby of the office.

im just saying it really isnt the time to go conservative and i dont think its that weird to skateboard at 30? what you should do by 27 though is stop saying innit

sorry im stuck working on a saturday and im bored shiteless - prime conditions for giving out unwanted advice

my 58 year old dad still says "innit", he is from peckham tho, innit.

its kind of wrong

lovely jubbly