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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6526472" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm having a hard time even believing you have to ask.What?  None of those are cultural artifacts of the lifespan of a creature.  What I mean is that in every aspect of our culture that is an aspect of our lifespan, we have profoundly changed from 150 years ago, completely inventing new patterns of human behavior.  I probably could fill a whole thread with examples if this was something I studied extensively, but just off the top of my head we have invented a whole new category or stage of human life - adolescence.  And this stage of life has such a profound impact on who we are that we have a whole subculture around it rites around it and we even do scientific studies proving that indeed physically and mentally this is a distinct stage of life, and yet prior to 150 years ago no one had even heard of it.  Most societies accepted a person as an adult by 13, and indeed if by age 10 you hadn't established yourself in a some sort of productive economic role (as an apprentice or domestic servant) then you were greatly at risk of starvation in the reasonably likely event you would find yourself in the next few years orphaned.  Most women were married by 13 or 14, and yet today, having invented this new category of life we are as appalled at the morality of an adult - here meaning someone above 21 or so - engaging in sexual relations with someone of say 14.   Yet my own grandmother married my 22 year old grandfather when she was 16.  I've had modern persons call that "sick" and "despicable" and treat that as a violation of a major taboo, yet merely a few generations ago that was normal.Or consider the normal social structure.  Back when people needed to marry at 15, extended families almost always lived together as a single communal unit.  You might have 5 generations of the family living under the same roof or within walking distance of each other.  Party yes, this is the outcome of increased wealth and mobility, but its also the fact that a 15 year old girls mother, the grandmother of her child, might have been 30.  To part for a few years might well be permanent.  There was a much greater continuity between generations and greater sharing between them.  The entire 'youth revolt against the older generation' thing we treat as normal would have been basically impossible at an earlier time when you were entering adulthood at 13 and into a job at 10.  Again, my grandmother was continually sending me letters about what a terrible hardship it must be for me to be separated from family, and my father grew up in a household where his oldest sister had a baby the exact same age he was.   That sort of mingling of generations was normal.Culturally we keep pushing back the age of adulthood even further.   There is some evidence we are pushing now for a second adolescence of some sort up until 25 or 29, and then you enter adulthood.  A mere 3 or 4 generations ago, a child of 10 could not wait to assume the mantle and trappings of adulthood.  Now, a man or woman of 20 fears them and often desires to postpone them as long as possible.  Culturally this is bizarre and alien from the perspective of almost every human that has ever lived.  And yet I think it is but a tiny shadow of how bizarre to us a race that actually lived 1000 years would be.  One hundred years ago we could divide life in to 2 or 3 distinct stages - youth, adulthood, infirmary (bracketed by birth and death).  Now, we have at least 4, and think of each as involving a significant rite of passage and change of perspective.   Imagine how many someone that lived for 1000 years might have.  We don't even have the vocabulary for it.   We can't even discuss it without inventing a language.  And consider that with human lifespans, lots of things seem permanent to us that we unconsciously think of as unchanging - rock formations, trees, rivers, nations, etc. persist basically unchanged for human lifetimes.   We know intellectually that they aren't permanent but rarely do we get to observe it.  To an elf, even most trees are passing things, rivers change their course visibly over lifetimes.   The elf has very visible evidence of the impermanent and changing nature of just about everything.  It's not just that you are living longer compared to humans.  It's that you are living longer compared to everything.  The human impulse is to try to fix nature into place and leave it unchanging - say channelize the Mississippi - because well, with our short lives its only natural to want some degree of constancy.  With a long life, you know its pointless.</blockquote>

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