Youth and what happens when it's gone
175 comments
·March 3, 2025y-curious
getnormality
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.
cnity
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.
iterance
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.
the__alchemist
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.
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)
throwawayq3423
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.
deadbabe
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!
FredPret
It's tough to be wired as an optimizer
BoostandEthanol
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.
pants2
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.
hn_throwaway_99
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.
ANewFormation
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.
xnx
Good reminder that it's everyone's first time doing this.
soperj
I believe in re-incarnation, so I've failed at this thousands of times.
2-3-7-43-1807
accept, let go and surrender.
joshuamcginnis
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.
mattgreenrocks
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.
UncleOxidant
> 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.
allturtles
> 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.
alabastervlog
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.
otreblatercero
You must be younger than 45, not to be patronizing but, otherwise, you'd get it.
mikestew
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.
JKCalhoun
I'm sixty and can see both points.
joshuamcginnis
I'm 42
rowanG077
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.
dangus
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.
null
tgv
And one man's vice is another man's virtue. Just look at international politics.
jayd16
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.
munificent
> 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.
testfoobar
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.
Arisaka1
All more probable to happen over time, but not less probable to happen due to youth.
inanutshellus
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.
mattgreenrocks
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.
stvltvs
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.
cj
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.
bongoman42
“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
Nition
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.
svat
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...
jp57
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.
PaulDavisThe1st
> 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.
MaxHoppersGhost
> 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
schnebbau
Counterpoint: they will lock you down even harder, and you'll be dreaming of the possibilities that will present when they eventually move out.
froh
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
Arisaka1
I disagree with the premise that one should make children for the sake of filling a void.
yoyohello13
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.
markus_zhang
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.
zusammen
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.
markus_zhang
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.
corry
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.
jansan
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.
asdfman123
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
bigstrat2003
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".
asdfman123
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.
markus_zhang
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.
asdfman123
Yeah, it's important to live your best life and try to forget the world. But in the meantime I can pine a little.
pdonis
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.
lurk2
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.
nicbou
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.
haswell
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).
markus_zhang
> 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.
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danhodgins
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.
stavros
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.
rikroots
> 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!
asdfman123
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.
markus_zhang
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.
stavros
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.
markus_zhang
OK I'm a bit different with the author on this one...
h2zizzle
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.
null
Min0taur
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."
breadsniffer
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.
Min0taur
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.'"breadsniffer
Image to go along with Hokusai's beautiful bit: https://i.imgur.com/Q6khyva.png
airstrike
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.
breadsniffer
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.
lisper
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.
asdfman123
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.
lisper
> 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.
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chubot
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
stnmtn
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.
moultano
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.
j5r5myk
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.
formerphotoj
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.
pier25
> 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 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.