A story for a story. My father had children from the age of 19 to 55. Born in the 1930s, passed in his 80s, he had a good life. As the youngest of many brothers by different mothers, our paths have diverged massively as we experience the world separated by decades.

And yet the commonality of genetics lays down a pattern of personality that is striking to see. We share the same baseline, the same personality flaws, the same basic interests manifest in different ways. We are in so many ways variation on a theme that is my father. And seeing all these examples of the same pattern aging, each person slowly becomes poorly fit for the world that evolves around them. We learn as children, grow into men, and eventually become rigid in our patterns. I expect this is reflected in basic biology of the brain.

The one thing that this has convinced me of, seeing these patterns far beyond what I can control, is that one day it will be my time to die, and this will be a good thing. I can pass on what I've done, the important lessons I've learned, but eventually I must make way for a new variations of genes, a new attempt at learning, a new crack at adapting to a changing world.

An individual dying is not an end, but part of a cycle of change, which is the core of what life is. Everything must die in the end, because to become static and unchanging is the real death, the real dragon that we should fear.