These are all just my own personal musings on such matters, the age of souls and the personality types of people bearing such souls. I have never studied such things in any religion or philosophy, so my ideas may be fairly original or very old, I've no idea. I don't know how much stock I put in any of this, anyway, but it does feel rather right to me, at times. I suppose it's not really too important, but I just thought I'd mention these thoughts, anyway. Actually, I incorporated this into a story once, y'know, aliens and all that. I don't like the story much and don't suppose you'd be interested in it. And I really hated the ending, besides which I thought it should be longer, like a book or something. But if I'm not happy with it, that just seems pointless and stupid. But anyway.... At least I'll salvage these ideas....

Young Souls (stage 1)

During the first stage of a soul's life (the first 1000 years or so), most people bearing such souls will be fairly childlike, happy, free, artistic, wild, playful lovers of life and all its infinite possibilities. Of course, eventually, after many lifetimes, a soul will have to grow up, and become aware that life's possibilities are not always so infinite as they first seem....

Adult Souls (stage 2)

During the second stage of a soul's life (usually 1000-2000 years), most people bearing such souls will be freshly disillusioned about life. Of course, no matter the age of one's soul, there may be personal disappointment and disillusionment, but souls are far longer-lived than the people they inhabit. As such, it takes longer for a soul to become disillusioned about the world, especially given the odds that some of the lifetimes they experience will be better than others. But eventually, most souls will come to realize there is, on average, more suffering in life than joy. By this point, such souls will have become really rather pissed off at the world, will fight back fiercely against injustice. Some will become heroes, while others will be all the more strenuously ostracized by the younger souls of the world. Young souls are in the majority, of course, because not all souls will live to reach maturity. At least not on this mortal plane (they may move to another plane of existence, or simply stop being reborn, I'm not quite sure). So... in the first stage of a soul's adulthood, the futility of its efforts to fight injustice will often drive the bearer of the soul insane.

Middle-Aged Souls (stage 3)

During the third stage of a soul's life (2000-3000 years), most people bearing such souls will tend to struggle passively for change. This stage produces great teachers, philosophers, and theologians. Pacifists. After a thousand years of having been beaten down by life after life of pain, hopelessness, futility, madness, and scorn from others, despite such souls' best efforts to change the world for the better... they'll just be tired. Also more mature and wiser, ready to try a different tactic. Yes, they will see all that is wrong with the world, but also what is right with the world. And they will see that the younger adult souls have often contributed some of the suffering and wrongs to the world, even if unintentionally, even if it wasn't really their fault. During this stage, the passion of youth will have finally died away a bit, and they will hope cooler heads, reason, patience, and decency will prevail. Some bearers of such souls will actually have some luck with their efforts, but others will continue to fail.

Elder Souls (stage 4)

Very, very few souls reach this stage (3000-4000 years). If they do, the bearer of such souls will generally have elements of the previous three stages. They may have the wild, free, creative, childlike nature of the Young Souls, and love much about life. This stage often tends to produce great, though usually unrecognized, artists of various kinds. They will also be disaffected as are the young Adult Souls, and disheartened by the knowledge that no matter what you do, how hard you try, however much or little success you may have with your efforts, the world will never be quite as it should. This will drive the souls mad, make them want to rage against the unfairness of life, but having already tried that, they will know better. They will also have very little energy left, even less than do the Middle-Aged Souls. They will often feel that even passive efforts to change the world will likely meet with little success. Experience will have taught them that there isn't much to be done about the ills of the world, so they'll just try to live their lives, hope to do some little good, and not leave the world any worse than they found it. Bearers of these souls often, though not always, end up killing themselves. Of course, people of any other soul-age may also do so, but in smaller percentages than the 4th stage souls.

Special Souls

It is not clear to me whether any souls live much beyond 4000 years, and I find it very difficult to believe that they would. Such souls would be very rare and special, and not much can be said of them. You may take everything I say on this page with more than a grain of salt, but this entry especially... seems rather fantastic to me. I should think such souls would be reborn into special individuals, life after life, the sort of people you hear of in myths, legends, fantasy, sci-fi, comic books, stuff like that. Timeless heroes and heroines... realistically non-existent characters like vampire slayers, or something. You might also say someone real like the Dalai Lama, but even that soul I would put in the third stage, rather than this one. Of course, I don't even really know how old the world is, how many generations there have been of humanity for souls to be reborn from and into. It might not be much more than 4000 years, it might be 100 thousand, it might be millions or billions. So really, I wouldn't put much credence in the notion of a fifth stage of soul-lives.