To live, perchance to grow down

I have settled on "growing down" as a description of the next 30 years of my life ("if, if, if, cry the green bells of Cardiff").

A childhood of sorts is coming on, a slow losing of touch with reality as my hearing deteriorates (the world is too noisy, anyway). How long before my eyesight goes, my sense of smell, my ability to feel? I'm not worried about Alzheimer's, if I get it that won't be my problem; I will be in some other planet. I do hope I can avoid pain.

There's also a dawning realization of what wasn't and won't be. I didn't grow up to be President of the United States like John F. Kennedy nor win the Nobel Peace Prize like Albert Schweitzer. I wasn't a particularly well-liked individual (although I was a profficient seducer, one on one). I took care of myself and mine, passably well in material terms, but I don't think that outside my household anyone's life is better because I existed. 

My generation was going to bring peace and love and and sharing ... and here we are ... fighting "terrorism," watching African-Americans unjustifiably killed by police with impunity, watching how even in the richest countries the poor swallow up the middle class into their pits of misery while a banal meaningless few live in Luxuristan.

Growing down is a kind of solution. Perhaps there is reincarnation. Perhaps I was even worse in a past life and in the next I'll carry the lessons of accomplishing nothing in this one.

Eventually it will be all over. A thousand years from now, or one hundred thousand perhaps, an archeologist will pick up a bone fragment from my skull and exclaim, "ah, a primitive from the turn of the 21st century."