Trances People Live

Afternotes |II| VI: The Normative Trajectory of Life

The tension between what life is and what it could be - particularly when the latter has been tasted - is unlikely to ever be resolved.

And that is what cuts to the heart of the at least sometimes elitism of Nietzche, Jung, and Maslow. For those who spend their lives in pursuit of the further reaches of the possible, what so many voluntarily accept and even embrace as their daily lot is sometimes difficult to fathom without resorting to pejoratives.

Even Bateson grew disheartened as he approached death and saw how little all that we had come to know about the inter-connectedness of ourselves and the world had actually impacted anything. How little his life’s work had done, and how obdurant our myopia is.

In one of Maslow’s books he has a picture of a bright-eyed baby on one page, and of a tired middle-aged subway rider staring vacantly ahead on the next and asks: what happened?

We know more about this than ever before, but it’s rarely spoken of. One recent review though dares to tackle this head-on, and parses the adult developmental variables into two conceptual groups that hit on this: adjustment and growth.

And the authors ask: over the life course what is the typical trajectory in regards to each?

On the first, adjustment, humans appear a broad success story. We appear to be naturals at looking around and adjusting our personalities to be in harmony with our surroundings and achieve “mastery of everyday life, productivity, and maintenance of subjective well-being”:

…research on indicators of adjustment both native to classical personality
and developmental psychology revealed mean-level increases from young to the beginning of late adulthood; findings for very old age are mixed but point to a reversed trend. There is a consistent pattern of desirable age trajectories for indicators of adjustment: Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Environmental Mastery, Self-Acceptance, Positive Social Relations, affect optimization, identity certainty, and confident power.

If you collected all the self-help books ever written, then the above list would encompass most of what they purport to help with. And it turns out, most people move in that direction anyways - with or without Dr. Phil. Everyone wants it, and most everyone gets it - to some degree at least.

And I don’t want to shit on that success. There is a complex dance we all must partake in to an extent to avoid being cannabalized and achieve the necessary foundation to have the time and strength necessary to pursue other things.

But there are some obvious downsides if this is the entire focus, and if one never bothers to attempt to become a “human being rather than a sheep” in the words of our friend Erich Fromm. If one dares to consider there may be more to life than the fever dreams and promises of our secular gurus.

But sadly, the non-sheep-like parts of the human appear vanishingly small and uninfluential:

Maturation toward growth does… not normatively occur across adulthood. With regard to the Big Five traits, Openness to experience was found to increase somewhat from early adolescence until age 20, then it remains stable, and subsequently declines by one standard deviation starting in midlife. Constructs that are related to Openness, such as Novelty seeking and Self-transcendence, show similar decreases from young to middle adulthood. Hence, with increasing age, adults become on average less behaviorally flexible, less intellectually curious, and they have a decreasing motivation to explore and actively seek out new and varied experiences and ideas.

Social vitality was found to decline starting in midlife, which parallels the Openness trajectory. Growth indicators derived from other traditions also showed stability or declines after middle adulthood, such as Ryff’s Personal Growth and Purpose in Life. A meta-analysis demonstrated a highly consistent pattern: older adults reported lower levels of Purpose in Life than younger adults. This is in line with findings from a longitudinal study that reported mean level decreases in Purpose in Life across a 3-year interval in late adulthood. These findings seem to be linked to the loss of work and social roles in later adulthood. Such declines in later life are in line with findings for personal wisdom. Older adults were found to show less personal wisdom, which was partially mediated by declines in Openness.

Affect complexity, another marker of growth, was found to increase up to age 45 and to decrease thereafter. With regard to Loevinger’s stages of ego development, it was found that progress decelerated once individuals became self-aware, which suggests that stabilization depends on the level, rather than a particular age. This finding also suggests that the stages following self-awareness, which increasingly shift away from adjustment toward growth, are harder to achieve. In sum, in contrast to the increase of adjustment across adulthood, growth indicators remain stable or even decrease in later life, such as for Openness, emotional complexity, personal wisdom, high ego levels, Personal Growth, and Purpose in Life.

Shaw’s quip that “A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes” appears to have broad applicability to most who are older and speaking. Their development beyond basic adjustment ends rather early, and they appear to float - rather uselessly on anything of daring or depth - through the rest of their lives.

So instead of giving a young person a copy of “How to Win Friends and Influence People” it may be more appropriate to relay some version of R.L. Stevenson’s message to a youth asking for life advice:

It will probably not much matter what you decide upon doing; for most men seem to sink at length to the degree of stupor necessary for contentment in their different estates.

Yes, sir, this is what I have observed. Most men are happy, and most men dishonest. Their mind sinks to the proper level; their honor easily accepts the custom of the trade.

I wish you may find degeneration no more painful than your neighbors, soon sink into apathy, and be long spared in a state of respectable somnambulism, from the grave to which we haste.

Such a beautiful if frightful passage. Yet the “paradox of aging” refers to just this latter point - that as we lose capabilities, loved ones and virtually everything else with age, subjective well-being tends to stabilize or even increase.

Mastery of the “art of not giving a fuck” - in the words of a recent superfluous bestseller - is the fate of most of us (at which point perhaps we’ll wish we could care). Just give it time, soon enough little will matter or have the capacity to move us anymore.

For life is not easy. Our early valiant struggles over time lose their vitality, and there is a tendency to accept what one perceives as one’s “estate”. And with no friends or family willing to stick out their necks to tell you (or care enough to notice), without the terrifying but fortuitous intervention of “God”, one slinks away into the darkness.

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We once had many figures like Stevenson unafraid of such blunt and stinging honesty - but they appear to have all died without heirs or gone out of fashion.

And so the sheer terror that is the basis of our optimism rules the day, its victims weaving a broad social discourse composed of a complex web of lies and distortions. Of “toxic positivities” that prevents us from dealing with life on its own terms, and making the kind of hard decisions that otherwise are made for us; by life, by other people, by fate.

For such a message contains more promise than any sermon of a Carnegian or even a Maslownian kind. The vision of the former will be achieved to some extent anyways, and the latter - generally little socially validated - is barely seen, much less considered of interest.

Maybe at one point some aspects of growth held some appeal, but it does not appear to last. What makes a person say, as a friend of mine from youth I used to have intense conversation with did recently, that an interest in philosophical questions is a “juvenile phase”?

Proust suggests an answer:

We do not succeed in changing things in accordance with our desires, but gradually our desires change. The situation that we hoped to change because it was intolerable becomes unimportant to us. We have failed to surmount the obstacle, as we were absolutely determined to do, but life has taken us round it, led us beyond it, and then if we turn round to gaze into the distance of the past, we can barely see it, so imperceptible has it become.

Young children have audacious desires and dreams, as anyone who spends any time around them quickly learns. Adults, less so. 

There’s a problem we (as in most people, though not - I imagine - the fine readers of this publication) want to solve, a dream we want to realize, to be independent, to be alive and a million other things. But we don’t know how, or have only a fuzzy idea of it, or there are major obstacles we don’t know how to surmount and no moment of truth or decision comes, and so our lives pass us by.

Thus the dream slips away and in the end we let go of it - often without realizing it. It just happens - “life takes us round it”. We forget we even wanted what we wanted.

Instead, we look around and adapt ourselves to that. Our own personal dreams - those wispy things - recede and the apparent demands of the moment take over, and that becomes our lives.

And all that remains is a past enveloped in a fog - an inaccessible graveyard of all the high hopes we used to have.

So maybe it’s well nigh past time to take a wrecking ball to that barrier between us and who we used to be and once aspired to, to clear the air and exhume those graves, at least the ones not based on a narrow lack.

Maybe there's another option than capitulation to happenstance, maybe there is beauty and richness in the continued struggle for something other than getting better at what is often a form of game-playing. Maybe if we had something other than tips on survival or hedonism to pass down, our families and friendships wouldn't be so brittle.

But who needs to decide when we can just float along on the great social adaptation trance - so wisely helped along by our technological marvels - and hope the fates will be gentle with us as we sink into oblivion?