My favorite thing about getting older

trying on one self after another

My favorite thing about getting older is that your self-knowledge only ever increases.

There are lots of things I don’t like about getting older. Your body wears down and your skin isn’t as vibrant and your knees and back start to hurt in strange ways. Each year you add more and more items to the list of “things to be careful about,” things you are no longer quite as capable of doing (all-nighters, intense bouts of concentration, several mile runs without any warmup). The possibilities start to narrow, you’re forced to make more and more hard decisions, and there are more and more attack surfaces for the feeling of regret.

But here’s a constant: each year you learn more about yourself. You see yourself in different environments, different styles of living, different communities and friend circles which reward slightly different things. You get to see yourself bend to the world around you as you evolve from one stage of life to another. When a caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly, every part of its body is destroyed and recreated—and yet it retains certain memories from its past life. As you get older you watch yourself change and you also get to see what remains the same.

I’m convinced each of us has certain fundamental dispositions, whether they’re contained in our genes or attachment styles or Enneagram types. But we’re also prone to making up stories about ourselves, stories that we wish were true. Time is the best antidote to all our attempts at self-deception: it’s easy to lie to yourself for a day, but a lot harder to lie to yourself for a decade.

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of “the arrow of time”: the fact that the past leaves its traces in the future, but not vice versa. As you grow up you contain so many traces of past experiences, thoughts, and identities. The sheer number of traces is a source of strength: you have survived enough to know that all the challenges you fret about are never the end of the world. You’ve become wiser—you’ve spent enough time cycling through patterns of behavior (inner monologues, habits, principles) to know which ones are helpful to live by, and which aren’t. You’ve learned more about what kinds of experiences feel like a big deal in the moment but don’t actually mean that much to you in retrospect. You know better when an argument with a friend, or with yourself, is heading in a productive direction and when it isn’t.

As you get older you get bruises and burns, but your self-knowledge only increases. You make mistakes, you feel regret, but your self-knowledge increases. It’s hard for me to imagine what it’ll be like to have lived for twice as long as I’ve lived till now, to have read twice as many books and visited twice as many places and had twice as many arguments, breakups, weddings, funerals, career pivots, spiritual awakenings and late-night conversations. Much of it I am looking forward to and much of it I am dreading. But I know I’ll learn something from all of it. That each experience, good or bad, will play a crucial role in the person I am to become.