• slappyfuck@lemmy.ca
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    10 hours ago

    I cannot imagine wanting to spend time with children after being around for hundreds of years!

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        17 minutes ago

        Maturity comes from life experience and plenty of people mature very quickly in periods of adversity, while their peers linger in childhood or adolescence because there’s no stressors propelling them onward.

        I should note that “maturity” isn’t some kind of universal good, either. A person regularly subjected to physical violence will learn coping mechanisms to avoid or endure that abuse. They’ll come out with these reflexes and responses that other adults can read as “mature”. But I wouldn’t say they’re better for it.

        Similarly, people who endure poverty have to learn mature habits as a method of survival far sooner than their wealthier peers - how to provide food and shelter for yourself, how to navigate social bureaucracies, how to operate motor vehicles safely. But the techniques they adopt - lying, stealing, driving without any formal training - aren’t condusive to a safe neighborhood or a functional social network.

      • Test_Tickles@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        Ya, but your life experiences change you and the way you think. If you’re software developer it becomes really difficult to watch any show with “hacking” in it. Firefighters and other first responders find it really difficult to watch anything that involves “rescue”. There’s a YouTuber with over 5 million subs who got his start on YouTube by being a firefighter who made fun of firefighting shows.
        Now magnify that be a couple hundred years. Your experiences, the things you would have lived through, the basic changes in technology, the world and just the way people live… Your way of thinking would be so radically different from someone who’s only experiences have been in school, parents, and modern life that it would be insanity try to pretend to be one.
        I have enough trouble finding common ground and stuff to talk about with those old friends of mine that decided to never have kids or buy a house. I can’t even conceive of how I would go about “blending” in with high schoolers for the rest of eternity.