When Decline Quietly Begins

Here’s a hard hitter from Nassim Nicholas Taleb that’s been stuck in my head: decline starts with the replacement of dreams with memories, and then with the replacement of memories with older memories.

There’s something quietly brutal about that idea. You don’t suddenly “fall off” one day. It starts when you stop looking forward and start living mostly in what already happened. Then, over time, even those memories get recycled and older, and you’re just looping the same stories instead of creating new ones.