Recently I’ve been thinking about the strong nostalgia I’ve always experienced for the rich places & experiences in my past. I remember longing for childhood play when I was a teen, so much nostalgia for my college life when I was a young adult (and even to this day), and nostalgia for the life I had in Minneapolis now that I’ve moved away.
I’ve also been thinking about how much resistance & control I have about death. I have a contract with a cryonics company, so if I die anytime soon, I’ll get frozen and hopefully revived someday. I also have high hopes that at I and others of my generation will make to the point of “negligible senescence” – where biomedical science can rejuvenate us in enough ways to keep us effectively young forever.
And I had a recent realization that part of my resistance to “growing up”, to fully occupying my mature and sovereign adulthood, has been a sense that I really don’t want to let go of the precious little boy I carry within me.
It feels like these are really all the same thing. I’m under the impression that something precious could be lost, and it’s my job to hang on to it, tightly.
Is it true? What would it mean if it wasn’t true?