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Youth
4 min read · 933 words
Youth is the period when the hardware runs configurations that are not available in the same form later.
The biological recovery capacity. The plasticity of patterns that have not yet compiled into fixed defaults. The wider sense of possibility that has not yet been constrained by accumulating commitments. The energy that does not require the careful management later configurations require. The configuration is not better than later configurations; it has properties that are not available later, while later configurations have properties not available during youth. The two are different, both real, both worth what they are.
One’s relationship to youth — both during it and after it has passed — shapes substantially what the subsequent decades become.
TWO COMMON MISREADS
Pursuing youth backward. Later life gets organized around the wish to return. The continuous pursuit of activities, configurations, or substances that produce youth-like states. The continuous comparison of current functioning to youth functioning, with current functioning always falling short. The continuous attempt to defy the changes the system runs across decades. The configuration produces people who do not engage what the current decade actually offers — because the attention is on what an earlier decade had, and the current configuration is being measured against a standard it was not built to meet. The current decades produce less than they could have, not because the decades themselves were inadequate, but because the inhabitant was not in them.
Dismissing youth. The opposite misread. The framing that youth was a period of inadequate understanding the subsequent decades have corrected. Those who have aged often produce this configuration without examination: I know better now. Some of what gets called wisdom is, on examination, accommodation to constraints that have stopped being challenged. Some of what youth registered was accurate. The conflation of getting older with getting wiser is partial at best; some people compile wisdom across the years, many do not, and the act of having aged is not the same as having developed.
ENGAGE THE CURRENT DECADE ON ITS TERMS
The forties, fifties, sixties, seventies each have properties that youth did not have.
Depth of relationships compiled across decades. Capacity built through sustained work. Perspective on what compiles into what across time. Specific capacities the current configuration has access to, that the younger configuration did not. Whoever registers these — actually registers them, not as consolation for what was lost, but as what the current decade actually contains — engages a different life than whoever continues to grieve the youth that has passed.
The diagnostic for whether the current decade is being engaged or compared unfavorably to an earlier one:
- Are the operations being run matched to what the current capacity actually supports, or to what an earlier capacity supported?
- Is the pursuit of what the current decade can actually produce, or chasing outcomes that belonged to the previous one?
- When honest about the current configuration, is it being read as adequate to its own conditions, or as deficient against the prior conditions?
The honest reading usually surfaces specific patterns that can be adjusted. The current decade has its own properties. Engaging them as what they are produces what they offer; comparing them to what they are not produces continued dissatisfaction.
TOWARD YOUNGER OPERATORS IN THE LIFE
The patterns one can now see did not work, that the younger operator is currently running. The decisions that will produce regret, that the younger operator is currently making. The configurations now known to have been unsustainable, that the younger operator is currently sustaining.
The recognition does not warrant continuous correction or warning. Younger operators have to run their own operations to compile their own wisdom; articulated experience usually does not transmit at the level required for the younger operator to actually integrate it before running through the same configurations themselves. The well-intentioned advice often lands as criticism, as condescension, as the older operator’s refusal to take seriously what the younger operator is doing.
What is more useful: recognition that the configuration the younger operator is in is real and substantial. Not an immature version of what the older has now. Its own thing, with its own properties. The younger operator who is taken seriously by the older — who feels seen rather than corrected — often develops faster than the younger operator who experiences continuous instruction from the older about what they should be seeing differently.
This is also the configuration in which whatever transmission is possible can occur. The younger operator who feels respected absorbs more from observed example than from explicit instruction.
YOUTH IS NOT MATURITY’S OPPOSITE
Distinguish age from maturity.
Whoever has aged has not necessarily matured. Whoever is young is not necessarily immature. The configurations are connected loosely but not tightly. Some older operators run continuously immature configurations across all their years. Some younger operators run substantial maturity earlier than the surrounding culture expects. The conflation of age with maturity is wrong on the mechanics; what produces maturity is examined experience compiled across time, which can be present at various ages and absent at various ages.
The inhabitant who has done the examination across whatever time they have lived produces a maturity that is not specifically a function of having aged. The one who has not done the examination, regardless of how many years they have accumulated, produces something other than maturity.
The period passes. What it produced continues to be available — through what it built, through what it taught, through what was integrated. The inhabitant who engages each subsequent decade on its actual terms produces what each decade actually offers.