Going to Seed

One phrase I remember from being in the garden with my grandparents is “going to seed”. Plants produce new growth but eventually they go to seed - stop producing new leaves, roots, and fruits - and die.

Going to seed was always talked about as negative. In the garden it’s important to prune and to continuously harvest to encourage new growth and prevent plants from going to seed. Doing so creates a larger harvest by encouraging the plant to produce fruit throughout the whole season. Collins Dictionary includes this description of the phrase’s colloquial meaning:

If you say that someone or something has gone to seed or has run to seed, you mean that they have become much less attractive, healthy, or efficient.

But when a plant goes to seed and dies, it prepares the ground for a new generation. It both leaves behind the seeds that carry with them the potential for new life, and its in-place decomposition nourishes the soil with the sacrifice of its own body.

American culture is individualistic and embedded in this is a preoccupation with personal growth and potential. But there is no such thing as unlimited growth; not in the economy nor for ourselves. Rather, we must allow for the fact that at some point our own growth will slow and instead turn to nurturing those coming up in our wake. Those who find themselves in their 70s and 80s refusing to retire because there’s “no one to pass the mantle to”… that represents a catastrophic failure on their part. Having had a decades long career but spending none of that time mentoring junior colleagues is no more than a waste of time.

I think about this because I find myself at an intersection of a few different currents. First, I’m writing this in the autumn at the end of this year’s harvest season, and so I’ve spent a number of weekends among plants that have literally run to seed. Second, Philosophy Tube’s excellent video on the subject of death, where she encourages an orientation towards death that de-emphasizes legacy building “hero projects” and emphasizes preparing to die, including an embrace of the material reality of death. Third, being promoted into a role with management responsibilities, and having spent the summer supervising an internship. On the one hand this is a step up for me professionally and an avenue for my own growth, but I also can’t help but feel that it’s the start of me running to seed career-wise. Lastly, the 2024 United States election, which was nearly a battle between two 80 year old men in obvious mental decline.