We Now Have a 4th Stage of Existence, and it may be the end of us all.
We need a new plan for the last 30 years of life.
There are, in a manner of speaking, 3 stages to life, and each lasts roughly 20 to 25 years: Youth, The Middle, and Old Age.
The first 20 years of life are spent in Development. You are born tiny and helpless and empty, a vessel for hunger and need. You grow, but more importantly, you LEARN. You learn to move, to crawl and then walk and then run and jump. You learn to speak, you learn to think. You learn and you learn and you learn. The average 3-year-old acquires a new word every 20 minutes. In 16 years, a human being goes from a vocabulary of one (the ‘waaaa!’) to 15,000. That’s a thousand new words a year (and with a peripheral ability to change and order words in near-infinite variety).
That’s just language. There’s also number sense, history, culture, music, narrative, diet, danger, rules, games, grasping, psychology, cooking, art. There’s the body itself and all the things it’s capable of. There’s our machines and all they are capable of. A near-endless ocean of things to learn.
The learning never really stops, but eventually it becomes Purpose. One emerges from development into independence and the building of a new life. The nest, the home, the job, the kids…
