Good quote from Kieron Gillen's newsletter that resonated with me:
But that it’s nonsense doesn’t make it useless. It’s made me think about time, perspective and who I was at each of these points. One of the things that has struck me as I’ve aged is that old people never actually explain what they mean “you’ll see things different when you’re older. You’ll have a different perspective” That only comes across as patronising, because it is patronising… but they’re also not really saying what they mean.
What being older does is provide a variety of perspectives – not just who you met, but from your own moving identity. You have been a different person at different places, and seen the world from where you stood. It’s not about the final perspective being correct – but an awareness that there are multiple perspectives one can inhabitant, and they were (mainly) true and necessary responses to where you were in that moment. Unless they’re being a total shithead (which is entirely possible) what they’re really saying is “you will see things differently when you’re older because you will have seen things differently at different points, and then have a different understanding based on all those people you’ve been.”
The danger for the old is that because they have had all these multiplicities of experience is that they think their multiplicities are all there are. That is fatal.
This is the fractal version of something I've held for a long time, which is utterly obvious but for me has explained so much of various people's behaviour over time. Your worldview is not universal. Worldview here being the internal model of/interpretive lens you hold up to the world based on the aggregate of your life experience.
Again, I think this is utterly obvious to a lot of people. But so much that I see in other people's behaviour that I think of as wrong or destructive (in the minor or the major key) comes down to them just not operating as if this is true, and treating their own perspective as a monolith.
(This is not the only thing that leads to those behaviours, of course -- it's perfectly possible to understand this and still do bad things or things badly. But it's a common 'thoughtless' thing, as far as I can see.)
The temporal aspect to this is important, too. I remember hearing some years ago (I think also on the Hidden Brain podcast, as referenced yesterday) about a study where participants were asked for their forward- and backward-looking perspectives on themselves over time. They were asked:
- How much have you changed vs you a decade ago? (Answers generally boiling down to 'oh wow SO MUCH!')
- How much do you think you'll change in the next decade? (Answers generally amounting to 'oh, not much, really'.)
Those answer patterns were consistent across all age groups. Generally, we seem to think we're 'finished' at whatever age we happen to be. We underrate how much will continue to grow and change, despite the preponderance of past evidence for the fact that we will. Understanding this has been hugely important to me. I feel in continuity with my past and future selves, but without feeling I am the 'correct' form of George, either.
(And the change talked about doesn't mean a strictly negative reckoning, either. We can have compassion for our past (or even future) selves even if we don't like them, or wish they'd done things differently, or had access to (self-)knowledge or insights that we have in the present.)