The Ratio Shrinks

Setting: While I was playing the game Factorio on one of those Saturdays when I wasn’t able to gather the energy to do anything particularly productive

I recently realized that as I get older, there are fewer and fewer people with more experience than me. This is a truism, of course, but something that I never thought about before. As the ratio of the number of my seniors to those of my juniors shrinks, the feelings of loneliness and isolation also increase. This, of course, is also a truism. There are fewer and fewer people that understand my experiences, and there are more and more that haven’t had to go through them yet.

As there are fewer and fewer people with which I can relate, I have tried to form more mature connections with those that have less experience than those with whom I am accustomed. This is, many times, futile. The reason for that is because even people that are remarkably similar in personality still have experiential gaps that cannot be breached. The closest we can get is a genuine attempt at understanding the difference those experiential gaps produce in each other.

Recently I’ve made the mistake of assuming similar personalities see the need for belonging the same as I do. The beforementioned experiential gap has caused others to not feel the isolation that my experiences have, and therefore the idea of it being foreign to them, makes understanding my position difficult. It is my own fault for assuming that people will understand simply because of their personality and ignoring the differences in experience. It’s like assuming two computers that have the same hardware can do the same thing, but they have different software, so they cannot, or at least they go about it differently.

I suddenly have the feeling that perhaps I am being greedy in my desire to find a twin with the same experiences. It also would be selfish, to desire some of the same experiences that I went through to be endured by someone else for the sake of trauma bonding. To what degree is it realistic to hope to find not only a personality twin but also an experiential one? To what degree is it not selfish, and only human? Of course, selfishness is a core trait of humans, so maybe the desire, while selfish, is also natural. I’m not sure how to judge this on a moral basis. After all, if someone else had the same selfish desire, I would surely understand it, and wouldn’t blame them for having it.