Henry wrote: So in some ways, this is it between me and the material world.
The magic of compound interest might yet lift you to level of arranging for your family office and foundation. However, beyond all that, there is still the possibility of change or growth in the subjective and inter-subjective to consider. Part of the reason why at this point in my life my narrative seems rather incoherent is that it is smeared or pinball game fluctuating along the spectrum from Level Blue to Level Turquoise value meme (maybe even down to Level Red on a very rough day) and likely centered at Post-Modern Appreciation for the Ridiculous. For example, if I were to make a statement like "I really don't care about money." , there would be at least two frameworks from which I would be speaking my truth, and another two frameworks from which I would not. The entire statement that would most accurately express my current perspective would require several qualifying clauses. And it is possible that I might add a couple more clauses before I hit 90 and/or collapse the whole mess into something more elegant.
Right now I am simultaneously fighting pretty hard in my eNTP juvenile masculine energy (the boy who sez the emperor has no clothes) against this Level Turquoise Ken Wilber Vudu B.S., while also having experienced how well it "works" in my feminine energy for a couple decades now. The odd thing being that I was exposed to the practice
before doing all the reading. When the topic of Spiral Dynamics first came up on this forum, I did not realize that it was directly related to the sexual-dichotomy practices I had earlier encountered. This fact that I hit the same juncture from two different paths adds to my feeling that the direction of development/growth in adulthood is inevitable/predictable. I don't like this thought. I want more options. I want for there to be more "everything" than Wilber describes in his Theory of Everything. However, personal ambition at Level Orange is way too boring, too small of a problem, to compete with the lure of Level Turquoise.
chenda wrote:I wonder if demented old folk would benefit from acid trips or magic mushrooms on a regular basis?
My much older ESTP BF asked me to get him some magic mushrooms (one of my housemates at the time was a young Phish follower) for his 70th birthday, so he could celebrate by wandering through his very well maintained wooded acreage butt naked. I only recently learned, upon reading his obituary, that it was actually his 75th birthday he was celebrating.
In his dating profile, he had set his age as 59, but he copped to 69 after we met in person (still making himself 5 years younger than true age!) At one point he told me that the reason why he lied was that all the women who popped up when he put in his true age looked like Barbara Bush. His ex-wife who was still in love with him and co-executor of family trust with him and even stayed with him when her house on the side of a mountain had its access blocked by snow, looked much more like Diane Keaton. She stalked me at a library sale I was attending on one occasion, and this contributed to my choice to break up with him. Although the actual precipitating event was the occasion he could not be bothered to help me when I was having car trouble.
Acts of Service is tied with Physical Touch for my primary love language, so I tend to become somewhat angry and think "Useless!" when I theoretically have a male partner, but have to deal with fixing my own car and/or I am not getting laid. OTOH, somebody telling me that I am still gorgeous to him (Words of Affirmation LL5) and buying me a new phone (but refurbished, and only after looking at Consumer Reports, because frugal at Millionaire Next Door level) and paying for my phone service (Gifts LL4) because my old IPhone 6 can't even run the Uber app anymore, and I decided to become car-free again, and he doesn't want to be bothered with driving me home, but he feels bad if I have to ride the bus for an hour on Mother's Day, works okay for me too, but only within context where the sex is also very good and the Quality Time (LL3) is adequate. (His first wife was 10 years older than him (brief marriage in his early 20s), and he told me when he recently found a recent picture of her on the internet, she now looks like Barbara Bush.)
So, Barbara Bush is kind of the icon for a woman looking too old for Gen-X Henry, my Silent Generation ESTP BF,
and my Boomer "ex." My theory is that she became an icon for "too-old" mostly because she looked so much older than George Sr. at mid-life. If you put her on top of a late-life wedding cake with Wilford Brimley, she looks much better. This is why I don't grok women who feel younger by being with significantly younger men. Every time I have attempted dating a significantly younger man, I have ended up having moments of feeling like the Crypt Keeper as well as feeling like a Cradle Snatcher. Although when everybody in the room is past the age of "could easily be a grandpa/grandma", level of fitness and/or preservation due to luck or craft might come more into play.
