A Life is a Trilogy of Trilogies #
A human life is a trilogy of trilogies, a fractal saga in 9 major acts.
The acts are Child, Adult, and Old. Each act contains 3 scenes: Baby, Competent, Expert. Each scene is about 10 years long, though of course these boundaries vary from life to life, especially in the latter stages.
From birth through age 10, we are a baby child. Even the basics of childing are new to us, and we struggle and need constant support and supervision.
From 10 through 20, we are a competent child. The basics of childing are well understood, and we can mostly not die.
We often pretend that adulthood starts then, but actually, no. It's still pretend. In our 20s, we are not truly adults, but expert children. There is still little if any true expectation that we'll function as fully autonomous and self-directed adults, and we're expected to make tons of mistakes. But boy oh boy, are we good at being kids. (This is why everyone should go away to college for a few years if they can afford it.)
At 30, the pretense starts to drop. Childing becomes boring, and adulting starts to set in. But wait, wtf? This is hard. We are only baby adults, not yet any good at it. The older
A human life can be viewed, roughly, as a series of phases. These phases repeat and build upon one another, and tend to follow a sequence which exhibits a pleasing symmetry. A trilogy of three-act stories, each mirroring some of the developmental phases as the other two, despite building upon one another.
The three stories are: Child, Adult, Old. Each story has a different context, a different set of concerns.
The three acts in each story are: Baby, Competent, and Expert. These reflect the degree of comfort and ability one has with the concerns of that particular story.
Each act is 10 years. The numbers are approximate. Borders are fuzzy in the moment, but with the distance of hindsight, shifts in landscape become evident.
child #
The primary concerns of this story are raw and simple, chiefly focused on basic survival in the world. The rewards are simple, hedonistic, and exuberant -- play, sugar, affection, discovery. The upward progress in power and capability is intoxicating and swift.
baby child: 0-10 #
Oh shit! Existence!
From birth through age 10, we are in the first of the 9 stages of life, dealing with one of the two greatest transitions possible in a human life, passing between non-existence and existence.
As a baby character within this story, we are unable to accomplish much of this on our own, relying on support and guidance from those within our caretaking group. Even simple aspects of the human experience require careful guidance.
The greatest and most pressing terror is abandonment. Everything else is abstract and far away, mediated as the world is through our caretaking community.
competent child: 10-20 #
Moving into the expert child phase, we are able to do more and more on our own. A child of 12 can make themselves a sandwich. A child of 16 can drive a car. In this phase, we push for, and eventually attain, nearly unrestricted autonomy. The basic concerns of staying safely fed, bathed, and clothed are less of a challenge, and fade into the background.
The hedonistic rewards of the baby act begin to gradually be supplemented or supplanted by social status, more complex forms of intellectual and emotional stimulation, and by the end of this phase, for most people, sex.
However, we are still at the start of our journey through life. Still a child.
expert child: 20-30 #
In the expert child phase, people finally take on the full autonomy they have craved through the child story. They get jobs; and less often just the "cranking time into a trickle of money" part-time jobs of a competent child. No, they can now choose careers, and the concern shifts from immediate survival and emotional validation, into a more conscious self-improvement process.
A baby child grows however they can, pushing boundaries and seeking validation, like a plant growing around obstacles and leaning towards the sun. A competent child starts being able to consciously understand and plan for those boundaries, optimizing for more valuable rewards. But an expert child can decide which way to grow, albeit still largely within the structures defined by the society around them.
The support structures fall away, and they are able to become the fullest expression of childhood. Free to have the most complex sorts of fun, with minimal restrictions and responsibilities.
Like most people, I would have been somewhat offended if referred to as a "child", even an "expert" one, when I was in my 20s. But that offense belies an unspoken understanding of the truth of that statement. (Today, in my 40s, if someone called me a child, I wouldn't be offended any more than if they called me a giraffe.)
baby adult: 30-40 #
Oh shit! Responsibility!
After a decade of excess and irresponsibility, pushing to climb the ladder, we reach a point where there is no more ladder to climb, and we have to start building.
For many people, this is when they decide to start having children of their own. Relationships get more serious. Rotating friend groups give way to families and the responsibility to provide for them.
The limitless options of "what do you want to do when you grow up?" have narrowed considerably. We have a career, and switching can be prohibitively costly.
The identity one had as a carefree expert child starts to slip away, replaced with longing and the crisis of how to conceive of oneself in this new role. There just isn't time to do as much as we once did, and it isn't as much fun as it once was.
We find that the adult world is more challenging than we'd expected, and that the party of our 20s did little to prepare us for it.
I found that in my 30s, I rarely felt like a "grownup", if ever. Even though I was no longer dealing with the concerns of childhood, every adult concern was new, alarming, and
competent adult: 40-50 #
At this point, we start to settle into the adult role, and form a new identity structure around the career, family, and various other priorities in our lives. We've come to understand our needs, and who we are as an adult person, and hopefully shed some of the anxieties about who we "should" be.
We stop thinking about what we'll be "when we grow up",
expert adult: 50-60 #
baby old: 60-70 #
Oh shit! Aging!