The current typo in the article title ("Immorality Begins at 40") would make for an article at least as interesting as this one. To be honest, the first few paragraphs talking about finding meaning and age could apply to either.
The idea that people could manufacture meaning for others was something that I hadn't really thought about until some years ago, when I first read this essay.
I think the rest of it is bullshit, but that core piece has stuck with me. I try to create meaning and connection for family and friends when I see them.
Just because this stuck with me: Viktor Frankl once wrote that meaning in life is not a Rorschach test (i.e. has to be made up) but rather a puzzle picture ("Vexierbild", is already there and has to be found).
I don't think this contradicts what you wrote, though.
Not the OP but I agree with you. Synergy, as cheesy as it sounds, is a happy way to look at meaning making. The dance between friends, colleagues, families that keeps us all happy and together...
I found this essay to be supremely logical and insightful but also pessimistic from a unitary point of view.
My days now consist of finding happy people who are doing things I also think are cool. Like, pappy the Japanese pianist on TikTok. God she's so infectiously joyful. Yes it's a plug for her. Heh. Meaning making
What an incredible waste of words. What is this even based on?
For a start, where I'm from, there is no marker around the age of 40 (or 35 or 45). It's the age when people are extremely busy because of career & kids.
Secondly, culture is made by a lot of people. Not so many in their early 20s, but several from late 20s to 60s.
Thirdly, it is also made for people over 40s. Not perhaps Hollywood movies but how about carnatic music? Concerts in Chennai overflow with people over 50s, and barely anyone in their 20s.
Fourthly, it just sounds like someone had their 40th birthday, felt the usual crisis, and tried to make up some idea to create meaning for themselves. Nothing wrong with it I suppose, except that it has no meaning for others.
I don’t really have the energy to debate it in detail, but I wanted to let you know that personally I found the article extremely insightful. In fact, I ended up reading two other in-depth articles written on the same site. I can see what he’s pointing at and why the angle is worth writing and reading about.
I read it as 'immorality' and that fits too, people over 40 tend to be more 'openminded' about loosening tight social norms.
Obviously the age barriers are not fixed but culture-specific and have moved higher in recent generations. However there is the biological fact that humans age rapidly at age 44 and at age 65 which could roughly be the two ages the article is talking about
It's an interesting article, though I can't relate at all. I've had a single lens of meaning that has followed me my entire life, and it appears to conflict with the author's assumptions that meaning is always transient.
Ageism like many other forms of bigotry is popular in some communities, and considered a high form of justifiable wit for those of a certain intellectual prowess.
“Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72” (Mark Twain)
"If you’re lucky, the meaning game you play in your α-to-40 years will have been designed by a tradition of not-entirely-malevolent 40-to-Ω sociopaths."
"And finally, you may choose to seek truth. This is an optional, meaningless, and essentially solitary activity. Something the immortal and free may choose to do, to entertain themselves in the amusement park that is the part of eternity that does not go away when you stop believing in it."
An advanced nihilist on the verge of discovering spirituality. He is done with mind games, they no longer amuse him, and he knows there is no truth in them. At this stage one of the two things happen: he might discover spiritual materialism - an incredibly deep rabbit hole, demonic in nature. Or he may start searching for the nature of life and get out of that hole.
What he has described - a cynical market for meaning - rhymes a lot with a much deeper philosophy that divides people into three groups: those with prevailing cosmic consciousness, those with personal consciousness and those who live in their subconsciousness. The middle group is your average man and woman who lives in their daily chores and hardly thinks about anything else. Those with active subconsciousness are poets, artists and philosophers who create a fantasy world for the former group. They create an illusion of orderly life with a purpose. Finally, those with active cosmic consciousness bother themselves with things unthinkable for the former two groups: they quickly recognize each other, form a wall around everyone else to protect the herd from even greater evils and to balance the good and evil deeds, prolonging the suffering of the herd. The morale of this philosophy is that nobody is really forced to play this game, except by their own beliefs, and the moment one turns his face to the true source of life, by giving up his egocentrism, the veil of false meaning will start falling down. And those with cosmic consciousness will expel those dissenters because they no longer contribute to the economy of the herd.
> Finally, those with active cosmic consciousness bother themselves with things unthinkable for the former two groups: they quickly recognize each other, form a wall around everyone else to protect the herd from even greater evils and to balance the good and evil deeds, prolonging the suffering of the herd.
What kind of evils and good are we talking about here?
