-First Stage: Birth through like maybe 16-17. The basic cognitive development stage, where everything in the world is experienced without context or clarity. It's all loud and threatening and you lack the materials to construct the skills to cope. Ideally you have parents who recognize this and do a lot of the pre-coping for you. If you were born in the 1970s like me, however, your parents were basically roommates you only had to see a few minutes per day, usually when they fell asleep watching M*A*S*H while eating their frozen dinner from a TV tray, so you had to put together a worldview guided mostly by what you gleaned from your peers' experiences and sitcoms (see previous reference to M*A*S*H). This is when you're at your most stupid, and, paradoxically, the most bored.
-Second Stage: Post-high school through about 44. Mostly just trying futilely to recreate the sense of new experience and wonder you knew in First Stage using all sorts of ingestible stimulants (romance, alcohol, drugs, love, sex, work, pornography, politics, friendships, culture...). Not everything is a surprise anymore, so you have a platform of experience/experiences that you can plant your feet on and drive forward toward intense engagement with things, where you fall in love the hardest and get your heart the most broken. The vulnerability is the last vestige of the First Stage, the part of you that is still a big stupid dummy. This stage is about beating that vulnerability out of you.
-Third Stage: the Homer-Simpson-into-the-hedge meme, but in an actual human life, like 45 to around 80. Sure, you still care about stuff, but you've suddenly found that "wait, why am I getting so worked up about this?" is a gear that is available for you to shift into. This is the Slow Disengagement, but the luxury of it as a life-stage is sort of dictated by events sometimes. Like if you're in Minnesota recently, you're still actively engaged, because the secret police stealing your neighbors and ghouling around your kids' school perimeter won't let you leave it be. This is definitely where I'm at. The Third Stage, I mean, not Minnesota. It was 85 degrees here today, for example.
There's a Fourth Stage after age 80, but how that plays out basically comes down to how you're doing mentally and physically. I call this part JESUS CHRIST HOLD ON!!! But I can't really speak much more to it as I don't hang around with a lot of 80+ year olds. The only ones I'm aware of on the daily are all the ones who hold all the influential positions in the American government. I know enough to know that drawing conclusions about life quality in this stage from that demographic subset would be a massive injustice to literally everyone else. Not every geriatric is a daywalking vampire trying to pass for a regular human (and failing badly).
When I was younger (Second Phase), I would have watched every minute of the State of the Union speech Tuesday night. I would have lived and died with every line and howled at performative injustice of the Other Side standing up or not standing up as the president wheezed his way through whichever particular talking point. And two days later I'd still be all worked up, with a ready-to-go fifteen minute chunk on How The President is Transformatively Good/Apocalyptically Bad (depending on what president it was) for anyone who asked. Or happened to be near me. Or the cat, if we were home alone and I felt like pacing for exercise (can't pace without ranting, everyone knows this, that's the sign of psychopathy).
Because I'm in Third Phase I know: you don't need to hear me tell you what I thought about the dumb president and his stupid speech and the attempts to spin it one way or the other. The beauty of this phase is the analysis and the talking points floating around don't really matter anymore because I understand my own mind, specifically: I understand what not to let in too deeply, so as to maintain my equilibrium. Let's see a First Phase baby do that. Babies are shit at boundaries. And walking. And catching things. Pretty useless all around.
Also this is the time of year where I should be getting all hand-wringy and het up about baseball arriving and how my team is looking to continue a phase of historical badness. But look: sometimes your team, like the dominating political order, is in the range of disastrous-for-the-foreseeable-future. By the Third Phase, you learn that these things cycle and upswings are just as likely as the downswings, even if the downswing is sometimes a sledgehammer aimed at our collective brain-case. Yes, in those cases you can't afford the bemused earned-wisdom distance of disengagement and you've got to learn to move. But you can be a resource to the panicking goose-flock of Second Phasers in your life and let them know: the sun'll come out tomorrow. And you know you only know that because you were old enough to experience the film version when it came out 40-plus years ago. They'll learn to integrate the same lesson from their own experience in time.
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