Imagine for a moment that every time you submitted your work the only feedback you ever heard was "Great" or "Thanks".
How would that make you feel?
Engaged or isolated?
Would you wonder if they are even giving your work proper consideration?
Feedback is critical to improvement. Improvement is a continuous never ending process.
Try leaning into it, Actively asking "Where is this falling short?" "Where is my thinking flawed?" Soliciting comment in this manner makes you an active participant in the feedback process.
Having followed this approach for my entire career, I can say that it has paid off handsomely. Some of the most valuable criticism coming from professionals that would not have offered actionable feedback had I not pushed past their initial stock "looks good" response.
Most of the time criticism = engagement, a person taking time to pay attention to your output.
Making yourself vulnerable in this way will encourage a subset of others to behave similarly, which could lead to some pretty awesome peer relationships. Certainly has for me.
As a 51 year old man who has been lifting consistently for 35 years it is heartening to see these studies back up my anecdotal results. My workouts have evolved as I have aged certainly, but I remain dedicated to keeping muscle packed on. Doing so has kept my weight under control (I restrict type of foods, but never portion) Made me more injury resistant (I can take a fall) and remain active enough to enjoy moving my body through space. Tracking with others my age I can see that significant performance deltas have opened. We are decades apart. My takeaway is start early and stick with it. Never stop. One needs strength, flexibility, and endurance. Keep switching it around, confuse the body, and generally always be terrible at something. Working out is about probing your weaknesses not celebrating one’s strength. If there is an issue to take with weight lifting it is that it tends to encourage practitioners to reach higher and higher levels of strength in a relatively small range of movement. This is motivating when young and the thing that kills momentum once you get older and don’t heal so fast.
It is interesting how much these discussions are focused on the earlier, procreative stages of marriage. ‘Free love’ / freely connecting with people has a certain attraction but what about the commitments later in life? (see: declining health, aging parents…) Such responsibilities feel overwhelming with two sets of parents, it would be hard to imagine more. The flip side of commitment would have less takers i’d imagine
When I was in a poly relationship, we were all very low income, so we'd help each other out with rent and emergencies. I helped someone's brother navigate the process of getting a GED and figuring out community college, the group as a whole helped another member kick his alcoholism, and we were there for each other during challenging times. I was only dating one other person in the core group, not everyone else, but it was like having a large extended family that truly had your back, and still is -- even though I'm in a monogamous relationship now, I'm still close to my ex and everyone else in that group. They're my chosen family
I think when practiced mindfully, this kind of relationship structure is really powerful. You don't have to go through things alone or with only one other person who'll always truly have your back.
I don't want to idealize it: polyamory is hard work, without which it becomes a toxic dumpsterfire shitshow. Being able to have a tight knit community like this and maintain it for years is tough, and requires lots of patience, honesty, vulnerability and mindfulness. But it's gone a long way towards showing me how flimsy the traditional family structure in the West can be -- particularly for those of us who have complicated relationships with the families we were born into.
Could you expand a bit on the link between free love, and later-in-life commitments? It seems a little like you're saying that people have a responsibility to make the next generation of caretakers?
To me as a late-30s person with no intention to reproduce, that seems a little like: damned if you do, damned if you don't. And, it leaves me wondering if I've missed out by not pursuing this free love thing.
They're not implying such a responsibility to reproduce, seems to me.
What I'm hearing from the parent comment is that they're weighing positives and negatives of focusing on commitment vs focusing on freedom, respectively, in different situations.
Hmm, I'm still not seeing the connection. How does a steady monogamous relationship, especially in that "procreative stage", make it easier (or harder?) to grow old, or deal with aging parents?
The web of responsibilities multiply. To your point, children are a choice and thus effect the shape of said web. As the reading mentions that some advocated for more romantic fluidity, moving with the heart. I saw this as a more youthful pursuit. As with aging, other issues, that have more to do with compassion and duty, come to the fore. I would say the hope of a steady relationship would be a partner to help navigate said challenges.
Thanks for the response - I like the sentence about the web of responsibilities multiplying, and I think that's kinda what I'm getting at.
Maybe I'm weird, or doing it wrong, but in my life so far, I just don't see a real tie between romantic relationships and those familial/aging/life responsibilities. My partner and I each have our webs of responsibilities; the edge between us goes both ways, and I can't see how it being labelled "romantic partner" has any bearing on the rest of the web. Sometimes that edge makes dealing with a particular family situation easier, sometimes it doesn't. I don't think it's even possible to say whether there's any net effect, since of course there's more to it than this, and the experiment only gets run once.
There are two straightforward contributors to younger people being more interested in that sort of romantic fluidity: hormones and energy.
I worked myself to the bone in my 20s. I live in NYC. I can’t remember how many times it was a holiday or weekend night that i was toiling away. I had my own business and wanted it to be successful.It lasted decade, then the industry (print) collapsed, and at 38 I went back for a Masters and transitioned to tech.
Most times I read comments on this forum, it is asking if there is some point at which you need to be ‘serious’ or have accomplished as particular goal. In the end I think such questions are pointless. Life is unpredictable. There is a bit of luck and timing in everything. IMHO the most important thing is to stay curious, out of debt, and avoid working for or with jerks. The stress isn’t worth it.
I think this problem will take care of itself. It is a numbers game. Eventually all these twenty-somethings will be thirty-somethings; and with that they will need the long term work relationships needed for raising families and planning for pivot into the Golden Years. Statistically the vast majority of them will have to work for money and I very much doubt that people will just exit the game at 30. They will just have to adjust their expectations.
Having followed this approach for my entire career, I can say that it has paid off handsomely. Some of the most valuable criticism coming from professionals that would not have offered actionable feedback had I not pushed past their initial stock "looks good" response.
Most of the time criticism = engagement, a person taking time to pay attention to your output. Making yourself vulnerable in this way will encourage a subset of others to behave similarly, which could lead to some pretty awesome peer relationships. Certainly has for me.