I don't think that's selfish. We've of course discussed this before, but maybe part of getting older is accepting the inevitability that we're not as unique as we thought when we were younger, and because of this we find that we have less and less to learn from the outside world.

I think about the idea of raising a child, and one thing that's on my mind about it is that there is nothing new you can teach that child - sure, it'll all be new for her or him, but all you can do is spend the first 20 years or so catching them up with what the rest of the world already knows. So from the child's perspective - which in this case is us - as we get older we realize this, and so tend to turn inwards as we age as the world is no longer as fresh and new as it once seemed.

For myself, at least concerning my reading habits, I've found that over the past year or so I take a lot more pleasure in fiction than I used to. I think it's a combination of two things - one, I think I find comfort in seeing a subjective experience of the world that I can relate to - even if it's fictional it's still been conceived and written by a real person. Secondly, I find that I can't concentrate on non-fiction, history, politics like I used to. While they're all interesting and important, at the age of 31 I'm already seeing the world around me repeat itself, and that gets frustrating. As part of getting older, maybe I'm also finding stories more engaging than events, and that the individual is more interesting than the collective. More important? I'll have to think about that one.