Longevity Leads to "Balkanized" Relationships

this culture’s structure of feeling could also be called balkanized. Gender therapy and speciation were both parts of the longevity project, and the combination of the three created a new structure of feeling that is often characterized as fractured, compartmentalized, bulkheaded, firewalled. Usually longevity itself is identified as the primary force driving this; until now, no one has had to integrate a personality in its second century (or more), and often it is experienced as an existential crisis. The super-elderly have had so many experiences, gone through so many phases, lost so many companions to death or simply time that they have grown distanced from other people. Spacers, mobile over huge distances, especially bold in trying all the augmented abilities, often live as isolatoes, in a solipsistic narrative or performance of their own

people in space enact a kind of nonattachment. A common opinion expressed is that to keep relationships lasting a long time one shouldn’t see too much of a person, or create too intense of a relationship, or it will burn out. Paced for the long haul, one spreads oneself out among a network of acquaintances and new friends, and moves on when

love famously has different definitions within cultures, between cultures, and in different historical periods. “Balkanized love” refers to a situation in which affection, child rearing, sex, lust, cohabitation, family, and friendship have all been delinked from each other and reconfigured as affect states, just as individuals and societies have been

So many experiences and knowing so many people leads to feelings of alienation.