Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else. — Ogden Nash

Middle age is when you've met so many people that every new person you meet reminds you of someone else.

Author: Ogden Nash

Insight: There's something both funny and melancholy about recognizing this pattern in yourself. You meet someone new and within minutes your brain is already filing them away: "Oh, she's got that same energy as my old coworker" or "He reminds me of my uncle." It feels like a shortcut, a way your mind is trying to make sense of the world efficiently. But there's a cost hidden in that efficiency—you're sort of meeting a ghost of someone else instead of actually meeting them. What's interesting is that this doesn't just happen because you're old. It happens because you've accumulated enough experience to see patterns, which sounds wise until you realize it might be keeping you from genuine surprise. New friendships, unexpected connections, the shock of encountering someone genuinely different from anyone you've known—these become rarer when your mental filing system is too complete. You start relating to people through comparison instead of discovery. The antidote isn't to pretend you don't see the patterns. It's to notice them and then deliberately set them aside, at least for a conversation or two. The person in front of you probably isn't mostly like someone else. They're probably mostly like themselves, which is what makes them worth knowing in the first place.

Source: Let's Not Climb the Washington Monument Tonight - Versus, 1949