I have this theory that people go through certain discrete stages in their life, and that for most people this sequence of stages is very similar but has a different timing. That timing depends on wisdom, and wisdom in turn depends on experience and the ability to introspect (and so, indirectly, on intelligence). Note that I’m not equating wisdom with age, because not everyone experiences things at the same rate, and not everyone can internalize them as well.

I’ve listed these phases, starting with the beginning of actual adulthood, that is, graduation from college and the assumption of the first regular job. The phases and roughly listed in order in which I think people pass through them but the order is not necessarily linear nor do I think that everyone has to hit every phase.

• Early actual adulthood: there is no longer a clear objective to follow and a grade to get (unlike at school). Habits become to form. Everything is exciting, and we cherish routine as something new. The first furniture shopping experience (at Ikea), real food in the fridge (visits at the supermarket take forever and are very frequent because we forget things often)
• Commitment to work: we seek that objective, that A that we wanted to get back in school but in real life. We tend to work as something we can put a lot of heart into, get a bonus. We usually spend a lot more time at work than we should; we know that but we still do it. In that stage we still stay in touch with our college friends fairly frequently
• Craze: we go out a lot, often till late at night, we spend much more of our disposable income on services. We seek an outlet for the angst we feel at work, either as things don’t happen fast enough (perhaps we don’t get the raise we were thinking we’d get), or to fight the routine at work, yet, ironically, our weekend activities are just as routine as work — play video games, late dinner with friends, go clubbing, late-night snack, followed by some social gathering back at the house at the end of which everyone passes out or goes home
• Domesticity: we realize that we are spending a lot of time at our apartments so it’s perhaps time to start making them our own. We learn to cook, we get better furniture, we get plants. We begin to surround ourselves with artifacts that make our home feel homely
• Hobbies: similarly, we stop working as much and we find ourselves longing for the intellectual stimulation, or the sense of mastery we felt while in college. We learn to dance, or learn a martial art. Perhaps we learn a language. At the same time we maintain our social interactions, with few close friends, and an occasional visit to the bar with a larger group. We rarely get crazy drunk or stay up till 4am
• Increasing sophistication of taste: we start understanding what wines we like, what food we like. We go out to good restaurants (after all, we have more disposable income now)
• Balance: we increasingly favor moderation over extremes. We start working out, realizing that our bodies can no longer absorb everything. We have quality dinners with a few friends. We find some time to travel to places we wanted to travel
• Seeking of purpose: we ask ourselves what we want to do with our lives. Perhaps we switch a job, or at least we think about it. Money can’t buy happiness, which we discover after we’ve bought a bunch of expensive things (perhaps moved to a bigger apartment)

(There’s more phases after that, but I’m not there yet and neither are most of my friends).

It’s interesting to note that, paradoxically:

• We enter each stage having left the previous one behind clearly as something that was good but also something that we had to move on from. We think of ourselves as wiser; we see our utility functions change.
• At the same time, as we watch people older than us who no longer have our habits, we tend to look down on them as someone who are somehow constrained from maintaining these habits forever. We don’t see older people go clubbing — this is probably because they can’t stay up that late anymore, we tell ourselves

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 1st, 2010 at 19:21 and is filed under changes/cyclical, for reflection, lists, reductions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.