And Why it Sucks Being Older

So, I'm in the latter half of my 30's. Not old, but no longer young. It's a pretty good age to be. Still physically well off. Plenty of experience to help overcome the lack of confidence that comes with youth (or turn arrogance into confidence for those young people too dumb to know they're idiots). Getting comfortable with yourself.

Yet, it feels like shit.

I think a big part of that is the natural narrative of life. By your 30's, a natural human should have kids and be in the family stage of their life, which should occupy them well into their 50's, where they start getting old and retire and can start spending the rest of their life feeding pigeons or whatever. So if you're not there, it feels like failure.

Yeah yeah, lots of people will say that story is fabricated by a society that aims to shoe-horn all people into a stock mold so that "one size fits all" measures can be taken to tend to people's wants and needs.

Feeding ten-thousand people is the same thing as feeding a hundred if you just scale up. But that assumes everyone is comfortable eating the same thing. Take into account various dietary structures and things gets wildly more complicated.

We live in an age of vegans and keto, so the one-size-fits-all narrative is no longer considered an acceptable guide for how life SHOULD go. Except the problem is that it's such an old narrative, there really isn't really anything it can be replaced with.

The natural story of boy meets girl, they bone, make babby and then spend the rest of their life keeping babby alive, is a story that goes back waaaaaaay longer than humans. There were organisms that didn't live their lives like that, and those creatures are the losers of existence.

The successful, chad eucariote is responsible for pretty much most creatures you'd recognize. Their DNA lives in each of us eucariote a couple billion years since it's emergence.
The failure virgin, whatever species probably didn't even leave a fossil, so it may as well not have existed. I guess it made a molecule of hydrocarbons or something, so thanks.

Humans think we're all evolved beyond that. But we are animals. Humans were animals way longer than they've been bloggers. The natural story is, undoubtedly, a part of us.

Understand, I'm not saying the nuclear family is the ideal state of human life or that people without kids and family are incomplete apes. I'm saying there's a distinct lack of a replacement for the natural story. What do we got?

Boy doesn't meet girl. Boy lives alone in a bunker obsessing over his profession. Boy gets lots of money and dies.

Sure, that's a valid life. But does that story excite you? Is that a story you want to live out? Even the exciting versions of that story lack a certain depth to them.

Boy watches parents shot by gangsters. Boy spends his youth training to be a ninja. Boy uses family billions to become a bat-themed crime fighter. Boy has long career of beating up themed bad guys and gets unanimous praise for it. Boy dies alone and is forgotten in a generation.

Even Batman's story gets spiced up by the involvement of protogés and clones, because without them, he's just a weird guy who lives and dies alone in a mansion.

The point of this rant is that getting older and living a boring, loveless life is hard to be optimistic about. Even stories about older people having adventures, usually come round to the natural story, but later.

The animated film, "Up," which is a story about an old man who has some good times, then they end and he settles in to die, but ends up finding a child and a dog to fulfill his life in the twilight years. The positive take-away is that it's never too late to live out the natural story. The downside is that his life prior to that is a tragedy, and his adventure is kind of a consolation prize.

The best narrative we have for people who are too old for the natural story, is the same story but later and therefore shorter.

That's not very comforting when you're living in the moments that make up the montage of loneliness meant to illustrate a miserable existence.

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