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I'm close to 40, and working in Silicon Valley it makes me feel old every day, but I'll be damned if I'm ever reduced to this sort of narrow-minded pop-culturist bullshit mode of thinking.
What does society think of me? I couldn't give less of a fuck. How about asking what the people around you think of you?
If that's all you got from the post, you either weren't paying attention, or are not ready for it yet.
For one, whether "you give a fuck for what society thinks of [you]" or not, what society thinks of you has implications for you and your role in life. To put it jokingly, "it's not all about you".
Not to mention that far from "narrow-minded pop-culturist bullshit" the whole post drives endlessly the inverse notion.
"what society thinks of you" is what (according to the post) ends at forty: society doesn't think anything of you, -- it could not give less fucks, to use your wording. And part of the idea is that you should care even less, and instead (cynically or not) become a culture-maker yourself, selling truth to the younger generations.
It doesn't apply to everybody. In fact people content with work, family life, and 3 hours of TV/browsing everyday until they die at 80 won't even understand the thing.
Exactly. I think the OP takes a wrong turn in thinking "meaning" arises in relationship to "society", and declaring that "meaning is a game." Society is a game. As people grow up and find their own individual meaning in their pursuits and relationships, they stop caring so much about society and may sign out of the game completely.
The majority of people over 40 are not out there "making meaning" (the author's terminology for "influencing pop culture"), and that's just fine.
If you're successful person, you can already give a damn about what others think. When you're not that succesful, maybe it matters then.
Well, I wish you luck the next time you go looking for VC
This article is, from my perspective as a 36 year old, a poorly aimed arrow from a far away location. It isn't even wrong; it didn't start out from anywhere I recognize.
If you're living in the middle of a sea of what you recognize as cultural signifiers, and it slowly dawns on you that those cultural signifiers swarm and bubble around a particular age cohort, I guess the experience of drifting out of that age cohort can be disorientating.
But I don't even agree with what this chap seems to recognize as culture - it's mostly froth, mostly commercial pablum - and it never gripped me much. But I can only guess at this, because he isn't precise enough to define his terms.
The search for meaning in my life came to me in my late teens, and was over by the time I was 25. The meaning I found was not derived from the attention or efforts of other people. I don't expect a decline in marketing of cultural objects towards me, because I've never been much of a target for cultural object marketing that was targeted to the 15-40 age cohort.
I don't watch much TV, I don't watch many movies, I don't go to music events, I don't visit the gym, and I generally feel quite comfortable in life. I don't feel pressure to try and appear young. I've never got much dating advice because I never spent much time dating. The world this chap seems to have been living in (as near as I can tell) is almost unrecognizable to me.
As near as I can tell, the chap has just discovered existential angst. Welcome to late adolesence, is all I can say.
This might be a bit more compelling if you were > 40. Most 40 year olds who are engaged with others en masse probably recognize what this guy is trying to say.
To change this logic, I think we need to change mass culture. Simply being more mature in the way you talk about, is nice, but it also means you can't participate on an even playing ground (again, en masse)
If you the article is about existential angst (something like "the difficulty in searching for meaning"), I'm not sure it "clicked" for you; it's essentially the opposite of mere existential angst - it's about realizing something crucial about cultural meaning.
I used to really like his writing, especially the series of articles he wrote about The Office. But these days I find him too insufferable to read. It has jumped the shark where everything is now how to be meta about being meta. At the same time I still continue to enjoy reading essays written by Paul Graham since his words are backed by real experience derived from practice, rather than philosophizing for just the sake of it.
I enjoyed Tempo very much. Haven't read much else by him, but this article is almost ironically self-unaware in its sweeping generalizations. For a guy who once wrote that simple 2nd order systems should be considered as weather systems (coincidentally I was pondering these words all day today!), his "banded" view on age vis-a-vis "society" is unnuanced. Surely he realizes that society, including the culture industry, is comprised of people interlocking at all levels and ages, but this reads like someone who just realized that older people have capital to invest and younger people have time to burn. V.R. must surely have put that together earlier?
It's as if to comprehend this essay, your definition of "culture" must be constrained to "pop music." If he doesn't believe that people >=40 have meanings manufactured for them, just pick up the NYT for example... The same with sports cars, fancy homes. Perhaps he's simply out of touch with "stuff people over 40 like." The entirety of child-raising, college-funding etc. is all part of culture...
Oh man, is THAT who the author is? Yeah, the Gervais Principle is brilliant writing.
He didn't provide any empirical evidence with this article. He's just proselytizing about... whatever.
This article sucks. I guess he must be a has-been now. Does that count as empirical evidence? Studies with a sample size of N=1 don't really count.
Oh well, can't win 'em all.
Wow, this is amazing! Everyone here is reacting exactly the way the OP's theory would predict. Those under (approximately) 40 rave against the article. They still have a sense of meaning. Those who are at the apex of 40 are depressed by it, they still bemone the loss of meaning. Those over 40 and past the transition like myself find the article to be great and not depressing at all, just a bit of gallows humor.
Granted it's a young crowd and the young are a noisy bunch, so you expect the comments to skew towards the dissenting view.
Really fantastic result, and article. Thanks. I found it eminensly helpful.
What a self indulgent outpouring of sanctimonious and facile drivel.
Mortality sucks, and meaning is a personal journey. I appreciate the urge to share meaning and truth but anyone who's truly long in the tooth will know well that the only way to know the path is to walk it.
At 30 I enjoyed this but have a certain criticism in mind. I do recognize that my frenzied "quest for meaning" is fading a bit as I settle into habit, but I'm also certain that that doesn't mean that I'm in a better place. I just have to look at my own parents to know that being too stuck in your ways is like a state of death manifest in everyday entropy, pardoned by believing that the entropy is a temporary illness and "normal" will return tomorrow without urgency.
It is the changes in life that make it lively, and so to live I should strive to maintain some rate of change in myself, so that I never die while still alive.
I am surprised and relieved at the abundance of other 35-give-or-take folks reacting positively to this article. It was a tough read but somehow funny and true at the same time. As I rapidly approach 40, I find myself going through a similar series of midlife, nihilistic trends of thinking.
Though I bet the author would disagree (as this piece seems a lot like an attempt at Explaining Everything -- therefore, how can you refute it?), I think this kind of thinking is largely driven by unprecedented inequality and the apparent reality that we are on the brink of destroying the planet.
This article is honestly not the worst way a midlife crisis can express itself.
"People between 40 and Ω (an indeterminate number defined as “really, just way too old”), are primarily employed as meaning-makers for the under-40 set. This is because they are mostly good for nothing else, and on average not valuable enough themselves for society to invest meaning in."
Deliciously dark.
The article's starting-point is spot on- you'll find very little of culture is aimed at people above an age category loosely defined as "youth." This is not only a matter of marketing or ageist tropes, its built into the very way we think about storytelling- characters are designed as stand-ins for the reader, or as role models, or as representations of forces in the world, all capitalizing on a reader trying to define their sense of self, their future, and their place in things. Where are stories for people who have solidified their ideas about these matters? What would these stories look like? We have no idea- few or no artists have been brave and inventive enough to go there.
A cynical part of me (though it cannot match the article's author's cynicism, in the slightest) speculates that the reason culture is geared towards the under-40 crowd is simply that people above that age have usually had children, and therefore don't really do much worth telling stories about- and, further, are focused on individuals below 40 rather than themselves. Perhaps we'll reach the point that we've raised the concept of youth to such a height that people will forego even childrearing to hang on to it, and then we'll have some culture for these emancipated older crowds. It would be nice, I think.
"I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round" from Watching the Wheels[1] -- John Lennon at 40. He also says he is now "No longer riding on the Merry-Go-Round". Maybe 40 is when you actually become you, just watching it spin while you be you. Just do what you want at 40, if you don't you haven't reached escape velocity from the show.
You're telling me that all I need to do to build the institution of my dreams is provide people with a sense of meaning!? LOL.
I do the things I do because I like them and others find at least some of them valuable, and there's probably a significant chunk of biological determination behind my enjoyment of those things. And that biological determination is enough intrinsic value in my "meaning games" to satisfy my existential angst. I went on this whole meaning search in my early 20s which I'm just completing and came to similar conclusions, but apparently on a lighter note after going through my Debbie Downer bouts.
(1) Sunlight and exercise. (2) Friends and good conversation. (3) Women. (4) Pursuit of goals. (5) Altruism.
Rinse and repeat. Good enough for me. When I'm feeling down, it can be at least partially attributed to not checking one of the above boxes.
I've never come across anything that was so effective at being depressing that I felt weighed down just from skimming it.
This:
No, you begin to experience immortality the first time
you recognize the transience of experiences you thought
were permanent, and more subtly, the permanence of
experiences you hoped were transient.
Being 41, my answer is to engage younger folks in search of naive energy and older folks in search for stories of experiences. I've found optimism in both.
Does anyone feel like taking a stab at explaining in non-poetic form what he means by "meaning games"?
stuff that I can imagine would be unbearable to read with an "everything is possible" 20 year old mind, but actually quite helpful when you're 35, nearing your wits end and the exit moves closer than the entrance.
tldr
" Almost all culture, old or new, is designed for consumption by people under 40"
== people over 40 are free pressures of culture == immortality
Rest of the article is filled with smart sounding incoherent fluff like this
> culture is built around the game of a meaningful search for eternal truths, timeless values and changeless habits of prowess.
No. culture is built to improve biological fitness of the population.
This seems to be written by someone who harbored strange and misguided misconceptions about life, truth, reality and culture and is now realizing all that he believed in has no value at all.
An excellent example of playing the game he sought to escape.
Isn't it all, from religion to the vague algebra in TFA, just a riff on the only real question?
...not that I'm above it, either. As a 35-give-or-take person, existential angst is hitting me more and more frequently. Just seems to be the way things are.
It's not all culture, but US culture, that is designed for people under 40. (Actually, for people under 30, but it usually takes until 40 to notice it.)
>The grim truth is not that there is no profoundly satisfying answer. The grim truth is that there is no overwhelming question.
You don't have time to philosophize if your house is burning. If you zoom out and speed up time, humans are burning the Earth. So the overwhelming question is this: can we stop ourselves. A related question is this: can we spread life beyond Earth?
When humans are spread throughout the solar system and under the oceans and (hopefully) around other solar systems, then let us kick our feet up and ask these questions (or rather, our descendants). It is a bad decision to entertain this kind of nihilism - and although I think it's unlikely any nihilist will have an "aha!" moment reading my words, but it's worth a shot.
I'm 45.
I spent most of my life learning to draw and tell stories.
My current project is a TV cartoon pitch. In my wildest dreams, it is the seed for a long-running SF franchise like Star Trek or Star Wars, that will affect and inspire people in ways I can't even begin to imagine. In less wild dreams, where it simply makes it to the screen for a season or three without me having to compromise the values I'm slipping into it, and it slides a bunch of my liberal humanist queer values under the radar of a bunch of kids who just want some cool space adventure.
So yeah. I'm hunting for a certain kind of immortality here.
Loved it. As someone approaching 40, it was a mind bender that resonated.
The author lost me at "The only culture designed for people between 40 and Ω is prescription drug ads and unreadably dense literary novels."
If anything I think things seen by younger people as "unreadably dense" often unfold once you become older and have life-experience.
If at 40 you haven't found a single piece of music, literature, film, or art created in the twentieth century which has depth and value to you, then you haven't really tried.
Making judgments about people based on their age is as immature as this article. It is a tragic generalization of humans probably designed to make the author feel better about getting older. If it took you till 40 to realize everything is bullshit then I feel sorry for you. If you think that getting really old is when you finally get to rest then you're a real moron. You should be happy now. If you're putting it off or you think there is something that you just haven't quite learned yet that is going to make some difference then someone gave you some bad information. Remember when you were a teenager and you thought you knew everything? Guess what? You did. There are only 2 states of being: Confidence and Not Confidence. You choose it. I hope the author reads this and pulls his head out of his ass.
As the pace of innovation in healthcare continues to increase exponentially, 40 will be the new 30 and eventually the new 20. People who are 40 now might live to 120. Am I being too optimistic? Probably. But I wouldn't be surprised if a whole lot of us live a LOT longer than our grandparents did.
I'm 35 and I thought this article was spot on, it sounds a bit nihilist the way he puts it, but the great upside of this view is that you can pretty much ignore culture whenever you feel like it. It is after all just the byproduct of all those meaning games.
I don't think culture is produced only for under 40s, a lot of it targets families, frightened grannies, and so on. He's right that people tend to fade out of the public eye as they get older--everyone stops giving a shit about you unless they have a specific reason to.
I didn't understand the snarky/cynical undertone. When you're young you think a lot of dumb stuff matters. You eventually realize it doesn't and start to chill out a bit. Thank god for that, it feels good!
Actually TV shows and movies are made for the young, the under 40 people. When they reboot a movie or comic book it is for the younger generation not the older that grew up with it.
Immortality comes with a cost like losing teeth, gray hair, wrinkles, you don't look as good as when you were younger. You might need plastic surgery, hair dye, or even Sens if it is available to prevent aging.
Businesses want to hire recent college graduates and not 40 or older people because 20 somethings are strong enough to work extra hours, don't get married and have kids yet, and can work for less money.
This guy is an interesting case of a gifted person gone wrong.
He gets to 'I think I'm full of shit', but then bounces right back into explaining the universe in the most convoluted, wrong, pretentious way.
There is no magic at 40, it is simply that most people have kids by the time they're 40, and their interests are in seeing their kids succeed - not much else.
So there's not much left to sell to someone who's 40+ - except better health, as the author correctly points out.
As for immortality etc - just a bunch of pompous nonsense.
> Creating new meaning means disturbing the universe. By sciencing the shit out of it, as we have discussed several times before.
This text is utterly self-indulgent bullshit.
> When you’re ready to play god for your own amusement.
What did this guy smoke
... and why is this in the top 50% of HN?
Winning before making. This is survival.
Making before beauty. This is perpetuation.
Beauty before virtue. This is leadership.
Virtue before truth. This is realism.
Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.
When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When justice is lost, there is ritual.
Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty,
the beginning of confusion.
Knowledge of the future is only a
flowery trapping of the Tao.
It is the beginning of folly.
Therefore the truly great man dwells on what is real
and not what is on the surface,
On the fruit and not the flower,
Therefore accept the one and reject the other.
To make your creations endure,
so they don’t go away when you stop
believing in them, you may need to do beautiful,
vicious, and false things.
His sense of value is from the attention society gives him before he is 40, and when that attention runs out, from the money society gives him after 40:
you have enough value that society does culture to you
You might conclude from this that if you seek meaning, you will also make money. This is exactly wrong. You have to make meaning games, which is exactly the opposite sort of activity.
He thinks because there's no permanence in this world, nothing is of meaning, and therefore he should invest in creating and consuming imageries, because only then will society gives him value:
You’ve seen too many business cycles, too many political cycles, too many cultural cycles, too many saints and sinners trading places, to believe that this time a source of meaning will endure.
But he doesn't realise, it's because everything is transient, everything is always transforming from one to another, everything is of value. He doesn't realise, economic booms and recession are two sides of the same coin - one creates the other. He doesn't realise for every winner, there is a loser. For every saint, there's a sinner[2]. He doesn't realise, it's all the same thing, changing into one and then another. This is the universe, making itself, and everything is part of that process. And that, is truth.
[1] http://www.wussu.com/laotzu/laotzu38.html
[2] If there were only saints, would there be saints?
"Wisdom is what's left after we've run out of personal opinions."
~Cullen Hightower
This was obviously written by an insecure 40 year old. Let's tar and feather him.
>Almost all culture, old or new, is designed for consumption by people under 40.
I wonder how you would even do that? I mean if I'm writing a book or a movie or such how can I design it to be consumed by 35 year old but not 45 year olds given their behaviour is much the same? There must be some trick I'm missing.
> When your own appetite for meaning is satiated, and you are ready to start making meaning games for others. When you’re ready to play god for your own amusement.
So what the author is effectively saying is that at a certain age one jumps (more or less) from being at the receiving end of meaning-games to being at the transmitting end of it. What the author is reluctant to acknowledge is the fact that his (ever more abstractly phrased) "appetitive for meaning" has not ended (via being satiated, for culture-induced meaning by its nature cannot be satiated), but rather has taken on a new form and position (whilst still remaining an appetite).
The author, as of now, is as bound to the cultural shackles as his teenage self. Indeed now he is helping perpetuate the cycle.
Sure beats being a 30something "leftover" woman in China because China.