For years now I’ve been following a blog of longform essays called ribbonfarm which was started by Venkatesh Rao. (It’s considered by some to the “slightly evil” twin of Eliezer Yudkowsky‘s Less Wrong blog. In 2012, Rao drew a map of various rationalist blogs active at the time and their surrounding environs.)
In April of 2016, Rao wrote an essay titled “Immortality Begins at Forty”. Its opening paragraph still haunts me:
“I discovered something a couple of years ago: Almost all culture, old or new, is designed for consumption by people under 40. People between 40 and Ω (an indeterminate number defined as “really, just way too old”), are primarily employed as meaning-makers for the under-40 set. This is because they are mostly good for nothing else, and on average not valuable enough themselves for society to invest meaning in.”
He goes on to say that for this very reason “Forty is when immortality begins.”