When Youth Ends

Youth ends when you start evaluating behavior and proposals by their likely outcomes, based on what similar actions have been observed to achieve. You begin discriminating against short-sighted, disorganized, illogical, unrealistic approaches that are unlikely to end well, and instead prefer to achieve positive, worthwhile, and attainable outcomes.

No longer does drama entice, but rather you understand that people creating chaos are suffering, and at best you can help them settle gently closer to sanity by refusing to feed them provocations that cause them to fight against themselves.

You take risks, but only those that offer reward. Your friends are wise, capable, and productive rather than those who seek idle amusement and frivolity. You choose good art and considered works instead of disposable entertainment and novelty.

This geezerdom creeps into all preferences, from food to clothing to kitchen tools. You no longer feel immortal; rather life is short and thus good actions and results are important, with no time to spend on likely failures and delusional ideologies.

You might be called hateful for this discrimination against the lifestyles of the ineffectual, or for not indulging losers and the doom they spread by normalizing bad outcomes, but your life isn't bogged down by people going nowhere, and each day has the clarifying simplicity of honest relations toward all things.

It creeps up gradually until it becomes the dominant force. What happened? Outcomes became undeniable to old eyes, as well as recognition that idealistic promised results never materialized, and can never be expected to arrive because their properties are at odds with the real world. We banish the make-believe to imaginary worlds and place such ideas on the same level as dragons, unicorns, and tooth fairies.

Youthful hope and propaganda taught that everything was equal and that improbable and irrational consequences should be expected and wished for, but after being wrong every time for decades or centuries, and producing nothing but disaster and horrid abortions, magical ideations could no longer hold sway. We turned back to nature, relying on what we had seen, understood as actual, could deduce of the world, and was possible through effort and insight -- walking away from a complex framework of imposed superstitions.