Thread by @eigenrobot

we moved out to the suburbs this week. still tidying up the old apartment, but we're sleeping at the new place.

im a bit surprised to find that i actually like a suburban home an awful lot

some time ago i took a medium dose of a tryptamine and among other things considered my relationship with work. one thing that I realized was that in fact I was holding myself back from some of the drudgery of the job for reasons of identity

i actually monologued about it to @selentelechia. something like:

"the thing is i think ive been approaching work and meetings and schedules and corporate life like im too cool for it. (pause) which. I am"

and nevertheless here i am living in a boring suburban house with a yard and owning a car and having a wife and a baby and actually paying attention to work and busting my ass every day

and it feels good actually

I spent some time turning this over as i drove to the store to get dinner for my wife and it was productive.

two points

1. there are several major periods in a person's life. some of them are biologically linked, others not. they are not of fixed duration. most are common but some are not.

examples from my life include infancy, adolescence, young adulthood, whatever im in now

the demands of life and desires of the heart are very different across these phases. a schoolboy wants very different things, and needs to be a different sort of person, than a breadwinner

2. letting ones desires and identity transition to accommodate the demands of a new phase is disorienting and possibly the most challenging part of a person's life, and stumbling may be the source of many hard lives.

I am imagining two main classes of failure modes here

the first failure mode is the obvious one of not letting oneself change. i had been stumbling about with this one without knowing it for a while by keeping work (which does actually matter) at arms length from what I imagined my life to be about

the second failure mode is swerving so hard into the new phase that one fails to integrate it with their past lives

this is subtler and I don't have any clean examples from fiction but I suspect its nevertheless a real problem

https://twitter.com/acidshill/status/1435828877469704196?s=19

im imagining the damage from such a failure as the debris of broken relationships and a loss of personal meaning, of waking up at 45 and getting a divorce and a sports car and getting hair plugs and wondering what has happened with your life

I hate a lot of things about _American Beauty_ but maybe it does get this right

I dont know that I have any good advice about how to manage this apart from "this happens, and remember that scylla and charybdis bound these channels"

let your identity be flexible as your needs change I guess, while tending to things you care about to keep them continuous

good luck pals 💪💪

I love this yes thank you

https://twitter.com/PageSeverian/status/1435837457946144770?s=19

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