There are reasons why older is not necessarily wiser. You’re never more open to new experience than when you’re twenty. After that, the need to make money, the fear of having no work, the demands of children, the sense that the world is moving in strange new directions, the appearance of unfamiliar forms of expression that inevitably seem less wonderful than the ones that changed your life when you were twenty cause the aperture to slowly narrow.
I can feel it happening in the way I absorb the news. In my twenties, I devoured the newspaper with the fearless zest of moral outrage. No atrocity story was too horrible for me to revel in every last detail—in some way, none of it was quite real. But, over time, indignation gave way to fear. Nothing makes the news more real than having children—it’s as if you lose a layer of skin, and even minor abrasions with the world get infected. On some days, reading the paper is almost unbearable. The Newtown killings hit me in a deeper place than all the wars and genocides of the past few decades. There were certain articles I couldn’t finish, even though I was unable to think of anything else.
This is selfishness—parents are at once the least and most selfish people on earth—and it feels like another way of pulling back from the world. I have less time and attention than I used to for faraway stories that don’t touch me and my family. (I once despised people who admitted that.) I am a less curious, less capable consumer of news than I was ten or twenty years ago, when the stakes were lower.
One of the biggest problems with getting older, other than the place where it’s headed, is a massive projection about the state of the world: by fifty, the obvious fact of your own decline is easily mistaken for an intimation of the world’s. And, since there’s never a shortage of evidence that things are, indeed, worse than they used to be, it’s incredibly satisfying to indulge the idea, and easy to confuse it with a veteran’s seasoned judgment. That’s the impulse you have to resist if you want to retain your credibility while you lose other features.
- More Here
I can feel it happening in the way I absorb the news. In my twenties, I devoured the newspaper with the fearless zest of moral outrage. No atrocity story was too horrible for me to revel in every last detail—in some way, none of it was quite real. But, over time, indignation gave way to fear. Nothing makes the news more real than having children—it’s as if you lose a layer of skin, and even minor abrasions with the world get infected. On some days, reading the paper is almost unbearable. The Newtown killings hit me in a deeper place than all the wars and genocides of the past few decades. There were certain articles I couldn’t finish, even though I was unable to think of anything else.
This is selfishness—parents are at once the least and most selfish people on earth—and it feels like another way of pulling back from the world. I have less time and attention than I used to for faraway stories that don’t touch me and my family. (I once despised people who admitted that.) I am a less curious, less capable consumer of news than I was ten or twenty years ago, when the stakes were lower.
One of the biggest problems with getting older, other than the place where it’s headed, is a massive projection about the state of the world: by fifty, the obvious fact of your own decline is easily mistaken for an intimation of the world’s. And, since there’s never a shortage of evidence that things are, indeed, worse than they used to be, it’s incredibly satisfying to indulge the idea, and easy to confuse it with a veteran’s seasoned judgment. That’s the impulse you have to resist if you want to retain your credibility while you lose other features.
- More Here
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