The time for reckoning is now at quarter-life

What used to be at mid-life now comes sooner.

Source: OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”

From an early age, we are making and updating our mental map of the world. The map-territory relation brings with it the fatal flaw that no map is entirely faithful to that which it represents. However, this doesn’t mean that maps aren’t useful. The faithfulness to which the map represents the territory, or the drawing of the pipe represents the pipe itself, is what is useful.

It takes a great many of us a long time to build a verisimilar map of society and our place in it. Some have steadfast decided their world maps and their place in it since they were teenagers. I have no idea how some do it at such a young age. Partly, it is to be commended. For them, as for all of us, though to differing degrees, some structure is required to move forward at all in life. However, sometimes the creation of a world map and the early moral attribution of its elements makes for stagnation in later life, either due to i.) confirmation bias or ii.) acknowledgment that reality was not as you imagined at the outset.

It should take one a long time, in my estimation, at least until quarter-life, to have a verisimilar map of the structure of society and your moral grounding within in it to orient your behavior. Life is complicated and ever-evolving. Sometimes the rapid change of the world can outpace the rate at which you can update your model of it. It’s a wonder to me that people can manage to create comprehensive affective maps at all that orient their behavior in a stable manner across time. But for this, any map developed at the outset, I argue, requires updating over time.

Pictured: ‘Happiness’ peaks at ~18 and plummets until reaching a minimum at ~54.

Happiness plummets from the age of 18 to the age of 54, when mysteriously, people tend to become happier, and maintain a relatively constant happiness in old age. The reason for this, I posit, is due to the maturation of the part of the brain that I call the inner eye or inner critic.

The time for reckoning (when he truly wrestles with his own potential and whole-life trajectory) in the age of freely accessible information and technological upheaval is now quarter-life. No longer at mid-life, as it has been. Boundless information is at the fingertips of each individual in a way it has never been before. In a way, it is making us rethink, in the face of updated knowledge, how we are to live our lives differently from the previous generations. How we are to balance the risk of love, marriage, divorce, and kids, in a way that is optimal for us, society, and the Earth. The generation before mine learned the lesson that a marriage forcibly maintained for the good of the children is usually for the good of no one. Hence, divorce rates are at an all-time high, and we have blueprints at our disposal of how multiple loving relationships can be navigated, kids and all, throughout one’s lifetime.

By quarter-life, we are no longer primitive emotional beasts inhabiting a corporeal body. Our inner eye is a representation of a fragmented self. This part of us performs cost-benefit analyses, is more rational, and pragmatic, and understands the dual significance of things. It does not let us waste time in the absence of judgment for the potential of said time. This part of ourselves, which we do not understand, can be ignored. But ignorance leads to i.) the “desired outcome,” but to ii.) a less-than-desired effect. You let yourself watch one YouTube video after the next, as desired by some algorithm, until you hate yourself. The inner eye is a step in maturation that comes around quarter life, and is largely responsible for our crisis.

It is when this part of ourselves is fully manifest that we face a choice. We use our best faculties of information and imagination, we contrast the unbearable present from the ideal future. We can see two pathways with our inner eye: one in which we continue to feed the ‘wolf’ inside us which acts out of instinctual volition, or one in which we act to the standard demanded of the inner critic. However, this involves the difficult choice of our own limitations and the limitations of our whole-life path. It takes the human spirit a certain amount of years, trials, tribulations, and humbling experiences, to come to grips with the fact that our every decision at once i.) decides our path forward and ii.) decides every path forward which we are not to take. The cost of opportunity, if you will, of making choices.

This is a crushing realization to make, but also at once, one that can be motivating and liberating, if one is ready to take on the challenge with alacrity, voluntary sacrifice, humility, and gratefulness. This way, one can at least find solace and purpose in being a role model for the early adoption of responsibility.