There is a particular kind of person who becomes, somewhere in their fifties or sixties, structurally harder to spend an afternoon with than they used to be. The change is not, in most cases, the change the cultural register associates with difficult aging. They have not become louder. They have not become crueler. They have not, in any visible sense, become less kind. They are still warm, in their way. They are still capable of generosity. They still produce, in any given conversation, the same surface behaviors that have characterized them for decades.
What has changed, on close examination, is something subtler and harder to articulate. They have, by some quiet process, committed to a particular small set of stories, opinions, and grievances that they have, somewhere along the way, decided constitute the final version of themselves. The commitment is not visible in any single conversation. The commitment becomes visible across enough conversations to reveal the pattern, which is that the same small set of stories keeps recurring, the same opinions keep being stated as if for the first time, the same grievances keep being aired in the same vocabulary that the person was using a decade ago.
The afternoon spent with this kind of person is, by its end, exhausting in a way that is hard to attribute to anything specific. Nothing has happened that would warrant the fatigue. The conversation was warm. The person was kind. The afternoon, by every external measure, was fine. The fatigue, when one examines it later, turns out to be a particular kind of fatigue that the cultural register does not have particularly good language for. It is the fatigue of having spent four hours with a person who has, in some real way, stopped becoming, and the fatigue is the fatigue of watching the stopping in real time without being able to do anything about it.
What the stopping actually looks like
I want to try to describe the stopping carefully, because the stopping is not, in most cases, dramatic. The stopping does not arrive at any single moment. The stopping is, more accurately, the slow consolidation of a particular set of internal positions into something that the person no longer permits to change.
The consolidation involves a few different elements. The first element is the stories. Most adults, by middle age, have a set of personal stories they tell to convey particular features of who they are. The funny story about the early job. The slightly self-deprecating story about the first relationship. The story about the time something difficult happened and they handled it in a particular way. These stories are, in most adults, alive in a particular sense. The person who is still becoming continues to produce new stories, drop old ones that no longer fit, and modify the existing stories as their understanding of their own past evolves. The stories are, in some real way, the running record of the person’s continuing internal work.
In the person who has stopped becoming, the stories have, somewhere along the way, frozen. The same five or six stories keep arriving, in the same order, with the same punchlines, in the same vocabulary the person was using a decade ago. The stories are not, on close examination, being told to convey new information. The stories are being told because the stories are now, in some real way, the person’s structural account of who they are. The account has been finalized. The telling of it is the maintenance of the finalized account. The maintenance does not, in any single instance, register as a problem. The cumulative effect, across an afternoon, is that one realizes one has not, in fact, learned anything about this person that one did not already know. The person has not, in some real way, been there for one to learn anything new about.
The second element is the opinions. The person who has stopped becoming has, by some quiet process, arrived at a particular set of opinions on the various subjects that the conversation might naturally cover. The opinions are not, in themselves, objectionable. The opinions are often reasonable, considered, and perfectly defensible. What is striking about them is that they have, somewhere along the way, become non-negotiable. The opinions are no longer in any active sense being examined. The opinions are, more accurately, the fixed scaffolding the person now operates from. New information, when it arrives, is processed in light of the existing opinions rather than being permitted to revise them. The processing produces, in the conversation, the appearance of engagement. The processing does not, on examination, produce any actual movement in the person’s positions. The positions are not for moving. The positions are the structural feature the person is now defending.
The third element is the grievances. Most adults, by middle age, have accumulated a particular set of small ongoing grievances about specific people, institutions, and historical episodes that have, in their internal experience, treated them unfairly. The grievances are, in many cases, legitimate. The person was, in some real sense, treated unfairly. What characterizes the person who has stopped becoming is not the holding of the grievances but the structural permanence the grievances have acquired. The grievances are, by now, part of the architecture of the self. They cannot, in any easy way, be set down, because the setting-down would require the dismantling of a piece of identity that has been load-bearing for decades. The grievances, accordingly, remain. They arrive in conversation. They are aired. The airing produces, in the listener, the small slow recognition that one has heard this particular grievance in this particular vocabulary before, and that one is, in some real way, watching the person perform the same internal ritual one watched them perform a year ago and will watch them perform a year from now.
Why this is so specifically tiring
It is worth thinking about why this particular configuration produces exhaustion, because the exhaustion is not, in any obvious sense, the exhaustion of being mistreated. The person who has stopped becoming is not, in most cases, mistreating anyone. The exhaustion is, more accurately, structural.
The exhaustion comes, on close examination, from the structural absence of any actual exchange. The conversation is occurring. The exchange is not. The person who has stopped becoming is, in some real way, no longer available for the kind of substantive contact in which both parties are changed, however slightly, by what occurs between them. The substantive contact requires both parties to be, in some sense, in motion. The motion does not need to be large. The motion does, however, need to be present. In the person who has stopped becoming, the motion has been quietly retired. The retirement is not announced. The retirement is, more accurately, the structural condition the person now operates from.
What this means, for the listener, is that the listener is doing all of the structural motion of the conversation alone. The listener is processing, updating, considering. The other party is, in some real way, only retrieving. The retrieval is the playing-back of the consolidated stories, opinions, and grievances that constitute the finalized account of the self. The retrieval is competent. The retrieval is also, structurally, not a contribution to a conversation in the deeper sense. The conversation is, accordingly, occurring on only one side. The other side is, more accurately, performing a piece of self-maintenance that the listener is, by social convention, expected to receive as conversation.
This is, on close examination, what produces the fatigue. The listener is, in some real way, holding up the entire structural weight of the conversation by themselves, while the other party performs the retrieval that the social form is allowing them to perform in place of contribution. The holding-up is, by the end of four hours, considerable. The fatigue is the cost of having held it.
Why some people stop becoming, and what it might mean
I want to be careful not to suggest that the stopping is, in itself, a moral failure. The stopping is, on examination, an understandable response to a particular kind of accumulated experience. The person who has stopped becoming has, in most cases, spent decades doing the becoming, and has arrived at the position they have arrived at by considerable internal work. The position represents, to them, the considered conclusion of that work. The reluctance to keep revising the position is not, in most cases, laziness. The reluctance is, more accurately, the natural protectiveness of someone who has worked hard to arrive at where they are and does not, at this stage, see the point of continuing to dismantle the structure for the sake of further movement.
I also want to be honest that the stopping is, in some real way, a kind of small death that occurs while the person is still alive. The person was, at some point, in motion. The motion is what made them a person in the full sense, capable of being known and changed by the people around them. The motion has, by the stopping, gone offline. The person is still warm. The person is still themselves, in some structural sense. The full version of the person, however, the version that was still in motion and accordingly still available for substantive contact, is no longer in the room. What is in the room is, more accurately, a competent performance of the consolidated version. The performance is functional. The performance is also, in some real way, a much smaller thing than the person used to be.
What this means for the people who love them
For those of us who have people in our lives who have, by various degrees, stopped becoming, the most honest acknowledgment available is that the exhaustion we feel after spending afternoons with them is not, in itself, a moral verdict on those people. The exhaustion is, more accurately, the structural result of the absence of the motion that used to make the contact substantive. The absence is real. The fatigue is real. Neither of these requires us to think less of the person who has stopped.
What it does require, on close examination, is the willingness to calibrate the frequency and duration of our contact with such people to what we can, in fact, sustain. The afternoons are tiring. The afternoons should, accordingly, be fewer than they used to be. The shorter visits should, in some real way, become the new default. The person we love is still in there, in some sense. The person we love is also, in another sense, no longer in active form. The contact we can have with them is, accordingly, more limited than the cultural register would suggest a close relationship with them should permit. The acceptance of the limit is, on examination, the most realistic kindness we can offer ourselves while continuing to show up.
The watching is still happening. The becoming, on their end, is not. The fatigue is what the structural asymmetry produces. The fatigue is, in some real way, the cost of continuing to love someone who has, in their own internal experience, finished. The cost is real. The cost is also, for most of us with such people in our lives, worth paying, in the doses we can sustain, for as long as the person is still alive enough to be visited. The visits will, in time, end on their own. The motion, by then, will have been gone for years. The remembering of the version who was still becoming is, in some real way, what we will be left with. That remembering is, on close examination, what most of late-life love for the people we have watched stop is, in fact, structurally composed of.
