Cycles

A post about growing old, written from my own perspective because it’s easier to write that way, not because I think these musings are even slightly unusual. Here we go then –

A problem with growing old is how dissatisfaction with the present seems like a nostalgic comparison with the past. Merely the rose tinted spectacles game, but in my case it is generally isn’t that. My memories of the past sometimes compare favourably with the present, but it is too easy to forget the silly fashions, industrial strife, creeping ugliness and the seeds of decline. There are all manner of comparisons any oldie could make, but the seeds and green shoots of decline were there.

As I grew older, a number of changes occurred in my general outlook. I have seen the cycles all old people have seen. The same mistakes, assumptions and fashions cycling round from generation to generation. Lessons have to be learned and relearned, they cannot easily be passed on. No amount of education does that.

As my personal stake in the future ebbs away into younger family members, I also feel a certain indifference towards the present. I know it will pass away and become the past, all old people know that. We know it viscerally in a way that younger people don’t, but in time they will come to know it viscerally too, but we can’t teach them that either.

A strong and persistent impression is how stupidity never relaxes its grip on human affairs. That’s an effect of growing old too, knowing about the durability of stupidity. It’s a human failing, always has been, but we pretend it can be cured in spite of all the evidence that it can’t, it just has to be avoided. Yet stupidity creates opportunities for people who aren’t stupid but are prepared to join in and exploit it.

It’s a core problem, the exploitation of stupidity by people willing to seem equally stupid in order to exploit it. It’s where political equality ends up, a corrupt willingness to seem equally stupid. 

Climate change is just one example, exploited to such an insane degree that it has become racketeering on a vast scale, but this too will fail as stupidity always does. And this is one of the lessons of growing older. Not so much the stupidity, we’ve always known about that, but the intractable nature of it, the impossibility of ever curing ourselves of it.

In my case that’s where the nostalgia comes from, it comes from remembering that stupidity can be contained by sensible people, but today the sensible people have still not found effective ways to counter the overwhelming level of stupid lying our digital world has enabled. The best we can hope for is that this is merely the beginning of another cycle.