WRT the decline with age, I&#x27;ve always felt like a lot of it is &#x27;ego based&#x27;, for lack of better terms.<p>I&#x27;ve found that as time goes on, people are far more concerned with doing things by the book, projecting an image, etc. rather than just &#x27;being&#x27;, enjoying life in the moment, doing things just because.<p>I&#x27;ve certainly been guilty of this to some extent because it seems impossible to avoid.<p>Personal anecdote: At age 16 it was fun to hang around at a bus stop or street corner or whatever and just chat bollocks. Move forward a bit and in college we&#x27;d hang out in someone&#x27;s dorm room or flat or equivalent.<p>Now everyone is off at work, spaced out all over the place. You might be able to get one or two people to do something, but it&#x27;ll probably mean some sort of sanitized commercial experience (go and get pizza at a restaurant, pay to commute there, pay to commute back, etc).<p>And it&#x27;s all because we&#x27;ve sort of decided that working all the time is more important than being social.<p>I think that&#x27;s sad. I often wonder if it&#x27;s how we end up with such warped political environments. No-one just relaxes, any more, it&#x27;s all 40 hour weeks and &#x27;scheduling appointments&#x27; months into the future.<p>You grow up, and what were 20 kids, become a banker, a lawyer, a janitor, a policeman, a nurse, a dropout, a homeless guy, and so on. And it just doesn&#x27;t work, because of all these rules we&#x27;ve made up, status games, location, whatever. Why can&#x27;t we just go to the park again?<p>And no, this isn&#x27;t just about childhood friends moving away. It&#x27;s the same story up and down the scale, in my experience. Everyone is busy, everyone is pushing.<p>The community takes a back seat to economic needs, it seems. Something like that. I&#x27;m not sure. I know we still got stuff done back then, I have a bit of paper with a hologram on it that proves it. But it wasn&#x27;t all consuming, somehow.