From your own perspective, you have less of an interest in pursuing entirely new projects because the horizon of good experiences from those gets shorter, and as you have said you also gravitate more experience towards the things you have pursued, which unlocks other experiences on its own.

Orson Scott Card once said that Asimov was one of the few writers who kept improving in old age, because most others would fall into the trap of indulging in their eccentricity and assuming that the image people had of them was already set in stone.

I'd say it's helpful to always keep a slight distance, even from things that become increasingly foundational to your life. True bitterness comes when you cease to believe that new generations are actually capable of enjoying their things the same way you did yours in your youth. As long as you don't lose your capacity for theory of mind or refuse to believe that time goes on, you'll be fine.

Fun fact: STDs are common in young adults and in 55+ communities - the reason behind this is left as an exercise for the reader.

https://www.aarp.org/health/conditions-treatments/news-05-20...

According to my mother, is because nobody in her retirement village is afraid of getting pregnant anymore.

When you are younger, you have a community of people and friends who push, pull, and otherwise shape you.

When you are older, there is no community. That’s an oversimplification, but it’s close enough.

So there’s no pushback about “hey man, that’s enough about your hobby.” There’s no influence to curb any parts of your personality. It’s just you, instead of being in a health community, living in a kind of void, in between your interactions w others.

Now it’s true there are people (say, your parents) who continue to exert influence. But it’s like the number of people actively involved w you falls from 100, to like 5. In terms of true peers who are your age - they number may very well fall to 0. So the amount of eccentricity, or really indulgence of personal preference above every other consideration, skyrockets.

I'd like to believe this was true, but much of Asimov's late works, particularly the final "Gaia" sequels to Foundation, were terrible.

The sheer breadth of his output (which went way beyond robot scifi) is impressive though.

I agree that a lot of late Asimov isn't as great as some of his foundational (heh) works.

I used to call it the "Kramer Effect", much like you, without knowing it was called Flanderization and was using it in the early 2000s to describe my displeasure with the character Joey from Friends.

Joey went from kind of low intellect to full retard by the end of the show and very inexplicably.

It's not to say that tropes are bad but it's important to use it as a repository of easily accessible writing mistakes so you can quickly learn from the past and contextualize them for your own synthesis.

If you're a writer you should be trying to say something new, but you shouldn't try to make everything new. People would be confused and put off by something that was violating and subverting every trope in fiction, but they would be amused by something that subverts one or two tropes in an interesting way. And subversion isn't even necessary to be good fiction, you could imagine a well executed work that isn't pioneering, but is still quite satisfying.

Maybe, but from my experience I find the more time I spend on browsing through tvtropes in a certain week, the more I overthink my writing and get absolutely fuck all done.

Don't get me wrong, it's worthwhile to understand tropes, but its not going to make you a better writer instantly. And repeated exposure to an attention-sucking site like tv-tropes doesn't help. It'll maybe make you a slower more methodical writer, but that's not necessarily a good thing. You can always fix quite a bit in editing.

After I wrote the original comment, I started thinking, even if you accept that hobbies / skills / preferences are a vector, what is the model where it makes sense to multiply vectors together? Then I thought, what if every time people encountered each other there was a kind of vector multiplication, about the salient aspects of their vectors? And this resultant "encounter vector" served to motivate the encounter, and potentially update each person's original "personality" vector? And day-to-day life could sometimes result in self-multiplication, depending on what you're doing.

That seemed fruitful, though obv very incomplete. I mention it in case you want to return volley :)

It could be the case that it's not the usual way things go however, and instead of finding a perfect transformation instead an imperfect one loses some of the information (for example if you and I were to have this exchange in a language where one of us isn't comfortable and the other is). And I guess there's also the question of what to do with the resulting projections we get when we do get some.. are they part of feedback loops around the measure of engagement between people, perhaps? Can the measure of that projection become actionable in any meaningful way to either party? etc.

In the beginning, you explore. Later, you exploit by doing more of the things you found fruitful.

If all else were equal, it might be fine to pick something you like and just exploit the hell out of it till death. But I don't think all else is equal. Perspectives on the world, skills, knowledge, versatility, resilience -- an anti-caricature penalty on all this stuff seems good in a whole bunch of ways, even if I concede that you might be leaving some unexploited fun on the table.

Like I said, I am open to being argued out of this opinion; but that's where I am so far.

To counter the anti-caricature penalty, there's also the stereotype of the older person that never found something to anchor them in life. This stereotype of an older person never found a hobby, friends, community, or partners and travels from place to place constantly searching and consuming. Most people are probably in the middle and most people relative to themselves probably become more focused with age.

And, like you said, some people would be happy being totally captured by woodworking / European travel, and wouldn't see it as a problem. And maybe some people would be happy in the anchorless, 100% drifting way, although I personally am suspicious of that -- if you have to choose, being a caricature is probably better than being completely un-anchored.

I once had a chat with an exec-level nurse. Don’t remember how it came up, but she mentioned that growth comes with leaving a practice area once the butterflies in your stomach leave and comfort sets in. Her experience was this came at about a 5-year cadence. My experience so far is this advice was spot on.