Evoked memory of these passages from Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312, on the compounding of this by life extension:
> this culture’s structure of feeling could also be called balkanized. Gender therapy and speciation were both parts of the longevity project, and the combination of the three created a new structure of feeling that is often characterized as fractured, compartmentalized, bulkheaded, firewalled. Usually longevity itself is identified as the primary force driving this; until now, no one has had to integrate a personality in its second century (or more), and often it is experienced as an existential crisis. The super-elderly have had so many experiences, gone through so many phases, lost so many companions to death or simply time that they have grown distanced from other people. Spacers, mobile over huge distances, especially bold in trying all the augmented abilities, often live as isolatoes, in a solipsistic narrative or performance of their own (495)
> She liked her work; she liked her play; she liked her art, the play that was work. So it was something else. Really the question became quite philosophical; how to be? What to care about? And how to become a little less solitary?
> . . . .
> Maybe nothing. There was a pruning of life by death. Parts died before the whole. When the people you loved died, part of you died. Some people by the time they went were like certain junipers she had seen, one live strip on a dead trunk. There was no way to counter that. (619–620)
> “Marriage,” Swan repeated, marveling at the word. To her it was a concept from the Middle Ages, from old Earth—an idea with a strong whiff of patriarchy and property. Not meant for space, not meant for longevity. One moved through one’s life in epochs, each a stage in one’s history, lasting some few or several years, and then circumstances changed and you were in a new life, with new associates. That could not be altered, not if you were out there riding the great merry-go-round; and so to deform one’s life in the attempt to make a relation last longer than its natural term was to risk wrecking its end, such that it splintered back along its whole length and left a bitter wound and a sense that it had all been a lie, where really there should only be a passing on, in one of the little death-and-transfigurations of one’s epochs. That’s just the way it was.
> At least so it seemed to her, and to many others she knew. It was the current structure of feeling in her culture and time. Spacers were free humans, free at last and human at last. So they all felt, and encouraged each other to feel, and she had always believed it, always agreed it was right. But structures of feeling were cultural, historical; they changed over time like people did; the structures themselves went through their own reincarnations. So if cultures changed over time, and an individual lived on through a change in that culture, then… didn’t the individual change too? Could they? Could she? (621–622)
> this culture’s structure of feeling could also be called balkanized. Gender therapy and speciation were both parts of the longevity project, and the combination of the three created a new structure of feeling that is often characterized as fractured, compartmentalized, bulkheaded, firewalled. Usually longevity itself is identified as the primary force driving this; until now, no one has had to integrate a personality in its second century (or more), and often it is experienced as an existential crisis. The super-elderly have had so many experiences, gone through so many phases, lost so many companions to death or simply time that they have grown distanced from other people. Spacers, mobile over huge distances, especially bold in trying all the augmented abilities, often live as isolatoes, in a solipsistic narrative or performance of their own (495)
> She liked her work; she liked her play; she liked her art, the play that was work. So it was something else. Really the question became quite philosophical; how to be? What to care about? And how to become a little less solitary?
> . . . .
> Maybe nothing. There was a pruning of life by death. Parts died before the whole. When the people you loved died, part of you died. Some people by the time they went were like certain junipers she had seen, one live strip on a dead trunk. There was no way to counter that. (619–620)
> “Marriage,” Swan repeated, marveling at the word. To her it was a concept from the Middle Ages, from old Earth—an idea with a strong whiff of patriarchy and property. Not meant for space, not meant for longevity. One moved through one’s life in epochs, each a stage in one’s history, lasting some few or several years, and then circumstances changed and you were in a new life, with new associates. That could not be altered, not if you were out there riding the great merry-go-round; and so to deform one’s life in the attempt to make a relation last longer than its natural term was to risk wrecking its end, such that it splintered back along its whole length and left a bitter wound and a sense that it had all been a lie, where really there should only be a passing on, in one of the little death-and-transfigurations of one’s epochs. That’s just the way it was.
> At least so it seemed to her, and to many others she knew. It was the current structure of feeling in her culture and time. Spacers were free humans, free at last and human at last. So they all felt, and encouraged each other to feel, and she had always believed it, always agreed it was right. But structures of feeling were cultural, historical; they changed over time like people did; the structures themselves went through their own reincarnations. So if cultures changed over time, and an individual lived on through a change in that culture, then… didn’t the individual change too? Could they? Could she? (621–622)