growing up.. rambling

[OakLeaf]

I posted a couple of thoughts in Zombeav's doomed thread but they're relevant here, too, I think.

It seems that when people reach a certain age, we tend to convince ourselves (or succumb to welcome brainwashing by commercial interests) that we're immortal. Not only don't we plan for our deaths (emotionally, I mean, obviously many people plan financially, with the assistance of a different group of commercial interests ), but we're willing to sacrifice huge chunks of the quality of our lives for an uncertain promise of more quantity. I read recently that the increases in life expectancy that have occurred in western countries over recent decades, have been accompanied by an actual DECREASE in the number of years of healthy life a person can expect.

Maybe, pretending that you're not going to die, and pretending it's impossible that you might die soon, is what's considered "grown up" in western societies.

Maybe, cognizance of one's own mortality is a luxury of childless persons, and that's why forgetting it is considered grown up. The idea that your children might die with you in a mass catastrophe - or that you might orphan your children - is unthinkable. (But I don't think that's really the case, since people in past generations dealt every day with their own mortality as well as their children's.) So doing something "risky" that makes your mortality evident to other people is considered immature.

I think about this a lot, because people "our age" tend to accuse young people of acting as though they think they're immortal, when I believe it's exactly the opposite. Young people think about death frequently and accept that it could come to them at any minute. It's when we've reached 40 or 50 and it hasn't happened to us yet, that we start believing it's never going to.