Peeling the onion (blame Ibsen for this metaphor)
Riffing off at a tangent from something I read this morning, have been thinking about the difficulty people have in imagining a state of being deprived of certain things they consider intrinsic to their identity.
I suppose it's a bit of a cliche that the young can't imagine how older people can bear to be old (for really quite junior degrees of oldness), and that life will surely be more or less over by some very near date. The concept that older people may have enjoyments and pleasures different from those they relished at, say, fifteen, or even twenty-five, is something that somehow, many people only start to appreciate once they have got there.
(This is probably as good a place as any to insert a link to this article from yesterday's Guardian G2 Women: Surveys show that women in their 40s are having the best sex of their lives, says Joanna Moorhead. But is this down to self-esteem, hormones - or affairs? - and don't women need the former to embark on the latter??)
So, people think that life would not be worth living if they were no longer young and beautiful/thin/married/in possession of certain physical or mental capabilities/employed/financially well-off.
But, in fact, people who are not those things cope and may even have agreeable lives.
And even if you've had those things and lost them, while not be gushingly Pollyannaish about it, you may not merely cope and learn to adapt but may even find compensations and unsuspected benefits.
I suppose, maybe, there's an issue of what we think people value us for, and whether if we were no longer X thing, would they still. Which is perhaps more what it's about?
I know I have fears in certain areas about 'suppose I couldn't/wasn't...' and what that might mean.