IlliniDave said: Disclaimer: Yes, I had a very melancholy October Sunday afternoon where I hid in a nearby nature preserve and watched the leaves fall one-by-one onto the river to drift with time and the flow away.
So, you were in your juvenile feminine energy relating to Nature as the adult feminine energy source. The ability to express feelings and allow yourself to experience them without instantly trying to "fix" them shows that you have strength in the juvenile feminine quadrant. Also indicates that you are likely artistic
For a variety of reasons such as genotype, environmental conditioning, and cultural training, I have a history of being bloated in my adult feminine quadrant and hyper-active in my juvenile masculine quadrant. So, if I was not super self-aware, and I had been in your company yesterday afternoon, I might have attempted to take responsibility for your feelings and help you "fix" them with offer of pie OR I might have exhibited behavior like that of a 9 month old mutt terrier who can talk. Then, because people who are often in their juvenile feminine energy are also often in their adult masculine energy, you might say or think something "Why can't you shut up and sit still?", and then I would silently vow to never, ever bake you a pie again.
Anyways, that's why it's important to not think of your personality as completely set in stone or static. It is commonplace or easy to seek higher function in realms where you are already fairly comfortable. Stretching yourself to be more like somebody you are not is much more difficult, but also more likely to result in greatly improved functioning overall. Unfortunately, you may also have to go through an awkward phase where you drop some of your higher functioning. For instance, if you temporarily dropped your adult masculine functioning towards juvenile masculine functioning while maintaining your juvenile feminine functioning, you would find yourself in the realm of behavior between juvenile feminine and juvenile masculine which most other people will react/respond to as "cute." This is what happened to me coming at the problem from the other direction and choosing to drop my adult feminine energy towards juvenile feminine energy while retaining my juvenile masculine functioning.
RealPerson said: Becoming less adaptable as you age is not necessarily accurate. Some young people hate any kind of change, and some older people are very comfortable with it. I see that more as a personality trait than an feature of aging. The one thing older people may not want to give up is the status that comes with experience. People may need to give up the idea that one day they will have the status of an expert. It goes against our natural primate social structure: alpha (fe)males rarely give up their status voluntarily. It is possible that we are asking humans to act against millions of years of social evolution and reverse ancient structures in a matter of a couple of decades.
Right, that's why it can be very difficult to get old men to take you to new restaurants. It's not just status, but knowledge of territory that comes into play. You have to say "I like going new places." about 10X for every time you say "I feel hungry." if you want to create a vacuum into which behavior such as that might fall. You can't just say "Let's go to that new Thai place." like you could to your sister, because most men are more oppositional defiant than your sister due to testosterone poisoning in the womb
Some people in some cultures are more likely to take pride at being good or strong in the beta (follow) vs. the alpha (lead) or independent (lone wolf) role. If you take a step back from the system in which you are currently enmeshed, it is pretty easy to see that you can only begin to learn in follow mode (with very rare exception of being able to learn solely from experience in the non-human mediated environment.) When we say that somebody is an "independent learner" we usually mean that they are able to self-direct enough to learn from interaction with author of book or by taking apart an engine that was previously built by somebody else, and then putting it back together, rather than having to be hit by a stick and forced to recite multiplication tables.
7Wannabe5 and Zalo pursue social and sexual experimentation. I think that this is driven by personality traits more than anything.
This is actually a good example of how behavior (manifested personality) can be a combination of inherent temperament, social conditioning and environment. Zalo and I do not have the same inherent temperament, but we exhibit the same behavior because he is a young man who exhibits some high level adult feminine strengths like empathetic listening, and I am an old woman who exhibits some high level juvenile masculine strengths such as being game for adventure. If Zalo did not have adult feminine skills/tendencies then he likely wouldn't self-describe as poly-amorous, but something more like "player." If I did not have juvenile masculine skills/tendencies, then I would be more Polly-Anna than poly-amorous.
The trade-off for being locked in the adult masculine realm of status/dominance/power enthroned in your well-defended kingdom is lack of the ability to experience freedom/fun/adventure of exploring new realms. I have to struggle to keep myself tied to my current commitment of 7 years towards mastery/completion of permaculture project. Other people might have to struggle to periodically cash in their chips and set off on new venture. One thing I have considered is whether it might not be better to only achieve FI on a 7 year cycle rather than a lifetime cycle. What if you lived in a realm where you had to turn in or cancel all of your accumulated cash, assets, certificates, licenses, contracts every 7 years and start again from scratch? How would that change your behavior?
Ego said: So, how do we cultivate meaning without work while avoiding drugs and video games (bread & circuses) and without resorting to the juvenile-feminine solution of procreating to create a little bundle meaning which would further stress our limited and diminishing resources?
You are right that "bundle creation" is the function of the juvenile feminine heading towards adult feminine OR the adult feminine heading towards juvenile feminine once again (seed,stem,bud,flower,fruit,fall,winter,spring...,), and you pose a very good question that I have pondered myself. The best solution I have come up with is that there has to be a "baby", but maternal energy can be sublimated in a self-aware fashion towards other "bundles." First course of action being forthrightly taking on the responsibility for "mothering" yourself. IOW, engage in self-aware self-care rather than self-abuse/abnegation/neglect/indulgence. Real human mothers obviously exhibit authoritative behavior as well as purely loving care-taking behavior, but "meaning" occurs when you attach emotions to purpose. Once you have loved on you hard enough (
), then you will naturally be better able to love on some "bundle" in your environment that doesn't necessarily have to be a human baby or anything like a baby, it could even "just" be an ideal like justice.
When my kids were babies, and I was totally fed up with being a mother because they were driving me crazy, I would purposefully choose to do something like give them a bath and dress them in clean pajamas. The act of caring renews the feeling of love, and the feeling of love inspires the act of caring. It is my belief that you will not have meaning in your life if you do not choose to engage in caring acts. IOW, I don't think that BRUTE literally ought to adopt a puppy, but he ought to do something like unto that. Other people, like maybe some of the economically-challenged mothers your wife works with, need to focus on limiting taking on or creating too much responsibility for caring for others before caring adequately for self. If I was the blue-haired matron Queen of the World, I would marry BRUTE off to one of the more self-aware members of the economically-challenged young mothers group, and thereby kill two birds with one stone. My friend who is worth something like $50,000,000 ended up adopting the illegitimate (not his) child of his long-time drug-addicted girlfriend after she turned 18 (he was already in his 70s.) It's going to end up happening one way or another, sooner or later, so it would be better if some intelligent design was applied earlier on.