"To remain young one must change"
About this Quote
Youth, in Alexander Chase's telling, isn't a number you defend; it's a posture you practice. "To remain young one must change" flips the usual nostalgia script on its head. We tend to treat youth like a possession that time steals. Chase treats it like a verb: something sustained through motion, risk, and recalibration. The line works because it smuggles an uncomfortable claim into a deceptively upbeat aphorism: stasis is what actually ages you.
The intent feels less like self-help cheerleading than a warning aimed at the adulthood trap. "Remain young" signals more than smooth skin; it gestures at permeability - the willingness to be corrected, to revise your taste, your politics, your friendships, your sense of what's possible. The subtext is pointed: the people most obsessed with "staying young" often chase surfaces (fashion, slang, procedures), while the deeper maintenance is internal. Change is not cosmetic here; it's cognitive and moral.
Context matters. Chase writes across mid-century America, a period where "change" was both promise and threat: postwar prosperity, suburban routines, the churn of mass media, then cultural upheaval. In that world, "settling down" became the respectable endpoint - and, quietly, a kind of social embalming. Chase's maxim reads as an antidote to that embalming. It suggests youthfulness is the byproduct of staying in contact with the present tense, not retreating into the story of who you used to be.
It's a compact argument for flexibility as vitality: adapt, or calcify.
The intent feels less like self-help cheerleading than a warning aimed at the adulthood trap. "Remain young" signals more than smooth skin; it gestures at permeability - the willingness to be corrected, to revise your taste, your politics, your friendships, your sense of what's possible. The subtext is pointed: the people most obsessed with "staying young" often chase surfaces (fashion, slang, procedures), while the deeper maintenance is internal. Change is not cosmetic here; it's cognitive and moral.
Context matters. Chase writes across mid-century America, a period where "change" was both promise and threat: postwar prosperity, suburban routines, the churn of mass media, then cultural upheaval. In that world, "settling down" became the respectable endpoint - and, quietly, a kind of social embalming. Chase's maxim reads as an antidote to that embalming. It suggests youthfulness is the byproduct of staying in contact with the present tense, not retreating into the story of who you used to be.
It's a compact argument for flexibility as vitality: adapt, or calcify.
Quote Details
| Topic | Embrace Change |
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