Maybe because, for the first time in my life I'm starting to feel it genuinely older genuinely—beyond a certain threshold of life—I’m starting to see how much everything in American culture is oriented towards the perpetuation of youth, and about about how much my own choices, implicitly, are basically driven by this market-driven anxiety about maintaining youthfulness.
It’s hard to face the facts. I don't think there's any answer to the problems of created by the fact that our bodies are finite, that we are biologically designed to have children and raise them live to see our grandchildren before dying off; there's no intellectual solution that is. The solution might be something like existing in a state of nature or practicing religion and tradition—but beyond that when you're just living in a hypermodern way, and consuming all this advertising and trying to make money constantly, while trying to maximize sensation in your free time… there's no tradition or belief or to guide you (and our biological signals are largely scrambled and distorted). So what do you do? Should people like myself, in their mid 30s and mostly