growth,

of a mind or meaningful complexity, isolates those aspects of diachronic change that depend on most of its history — are conservative, organic, difficult to steer, sometimes even to notice: growing is building upon the already-there. It is thus contrasted to the more instrumental aging — largely controllable (even reversible), “facial” changes leaving but a trace in the foundation of future growth. There’s a continuum between the two poles, often hard to tell which is closer; in humans — where the duality originated — the body is usually seen as the domain of aging whereas the mind is “mostly growth” (never that simple, though); deep sleep resets both but differently.  ■    Each act of forgetting is “a bottom of growth” — a point beyond which no presagements are traceable. The wider your context, the farther in the past that point of no return — but it still exists for anything from an individual (“live long enough and your growth becomes aging” as your body rebuilds itself and your mind forgets; whether anyone has really crossed the threshold is arguable) to a whole civilization with its knowledge fossilizing into the speculative residue. Humans' newfound ability to stave off death changed little: we’re as dying as ever, our bottoms eating us from behind — not just in deep sleep rebirths but in every instant of waked lives; and we crave to leave a mark just as desperately as those who struggled in the adjacency of death. Do work to expand your contexts, scoop in cultures to deepen your growth — and yet so many let it slip, addict themselves to explay, double down on rejuvenationry (“I’m a new person every day”): their growth gets shallower, memories shorten, happiness reduces to sweeping problems under the rug of “not me anymore”; with the alleged society-wide fadeout, even a respectable growth of today might seem silly aging to an observer in a past.

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