Ornamentals

I live in a part of the world where I am surrounded by a predominant group of people. This is an interesting category, specific to our modern society. People who, frankly, don't really have a purpose anymore. Subconsciously they know it. They appear at ease, resolute, though radiate as depressed, bored, practically done, but forced to be alive, and forced to try hard to find things to do tomorrow.

These are people who made sufficient money in life that they no longer need to work. They have walked away from any risk, danger, misfortune, and now try to live as retired, for decades to come. Ornamentals, is what I would call them.

Beyond what I can control, I seem to be fighting not to become one. I can feel the pull, the pressure, trying to pull me away from my destination. Like trying to get from A to B under a blizzard. The world almost doesn't let you choose to be something else in the meantime. It forces you to pay, in years, in attention, it wants you through that gate.

Most of our previous generations, and the further back we dig, life would end before basic goals were achieved. Living to see a dream come true was not realistic. For most of us the dreams got smaller, driven by fear, by insecurity. It balanced out somewhere, and the predominant dream ended up being money, because money was/is what you could accumulate against the constraint of dying. It would start pretty much from the moment one felt, that based on rough math, they were all set until they die. Savings, retirement accounts, children's accounts, accounts to back up the main accounts, investments, real estate, you name it.

But today the top of that rollercoaster has been reached, for enough of us that it's become a category. There are countless people with this exact problem. They are not prepared to do anything beyond it. They are lost in time, and every day passes with a waking thought of how to stay happy, while, of course, aging, like everyone else.

There is another kind of person, rarer, who reaches the same math and does not stop. Who keeps searching for purpose past the point where purpose was supposed to have been financial. Who fights the battle with awareness of the war. Who races without a finish line. I want to believe this is a nascent class, and that it becomes the more common one, eventually. Today, that's not the case.

I wonder what happens next, because if history has guaranteed us anything, it's that nothing persists. And there's a specific thing coming that I think changes this faster than any of us expect. We will discover, relatively soon, that quality life can be extended for centuries rather than decades. How we get there won't matter much, and I don't think it will even feel like an event when it arrives, more like a policy update to something we already assumed. What matters is what happens after.

Because the entire Ornamental arrangement depends on a number that has a horizon. You can coast for twenty years, thirty, and call it retirement. You cannot coast for hundreds. The math that let so many of us stop, quietly, decades short of the end, breaks completely once the end moves that far out. Something will have to replace the old winning dream, because the old winning dream was only ever a way of paying off death early. Once death stops being close enough to pay off, I don't know what any of us do with the rest of it. I don't think anyone does yet, including the Ornamentals, including whichever version of me will be fighting against the currents of those times.