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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33194 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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I suppose just mass and everyday consumption- it's difficult to explain without watching but they will eat out every single day, spend all day every day in dance classes, or golfing, and so on. Don't get me wrong, it looks like a great time (vacation!), but there is something about the specifically ersatz nature of the places they live, the entertainment they enjoy, and the constant nature of it being off-putting for me.

Also, it is pretty unnatural right, a community of just thousands of old people living together, a whole town/city full of them nearly. Society isn't really meant to function like that- people of all ages are usually mixed up (with obviously some peaks and troughs). It feels like a regression of a person, rather than a maturity, where at retirement you decide to basically go back to college.

Maybe that's completely unjustified from myself, and they all look happy, much happier than dying in a traditional nursing home. But it's less of me giving a moral judgement, even though it still gives me an uncanny valley kind of effect. If you're an ethical realist then don't take me as making a normative claim on this! It's definitely more of a visceral unease.

It would have to be super depressing living somewhere and going to funerals all the time.

I remember hearing this interview with an older woman, and she was like, "I'm finished with men! I fall in love with them, and them with me, and then we get married, and then they die! I can't take it any more!"

I don't think it comes across as any more uncanny than, as you mentioned, a college town, where the booze and sex flow freely, social life is overly preoccupied with the football team, and there's not much mixture of age demographics, only in this case it trends old instead of young.

I guess to me the issue is that it seems like there's no 'future' being built here, where there might be in a college town. These folks are, without literally admitting it, coming here to live until they die. Thus, the Villages can be seen as private equity sponging up the accumulated wealth of an entire generation at the very terminus of their lives, to be used for I-don't-know-what. Not their families, for sure.

That is surely their right, but its not the outcome I would choose if I had any control over it.

The question of what they would be doing otherwise is an open one. Is there anything for them to do? What responsibilities would they have if they were to maintain an active role in their society?

I know the feeling you mean, but, on the other hand, would have it been better if they'd just been spending more while they were still working, so had no savings, and now need to live frugally? You're basically punishing them (morally) for being financially prudent.

would have it been better if they'd just been spending more while they were still working, so had no savings, and now need to live frugally? You're basically punishing them (morally) for being financially prudent.

Definitely the point I'm aiming at.

I am fine with a person actually enjoying the fruits of their labors, I'm just wondering whether this is really what we would aim to end up for our twilight years. That is, concentrating a bunch of retirees together in a community that is insulated from the rest of the world and has, in my view, little to offer the next generation.

Although, I think there's something to be said for managing your finances such that you're able to make decent use and enjoyment of them throughout your life rather than either being destitute in old age or having so much accumulated wealth that you can only hope to spend it all before you die through years of partying into orgiastic decadent celebration of life.

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