“People saying things like, I think Kojima has about three more games left in him. And I'm like, no, don't say that.”
Kojima said the habit that gave him a fear of ageing is treating life like a marathon: on the outbound leg everything is fear of the unknown, but after the turnaround point you recognise the route and can start to calculate how much remains — ten years? twenty? He now checks a creator’s age when they appear in the news: previously the success of younger people depressed him; now he sees someone of 25 and thinks they can continue, someone of 80 and thinks they have little time left, and with peers he wonders how many more things they will be able to do. He notices the same on Twitter, where people speculate about how many works he has left and he objects to that framing. He says directors he speaks with make the same calculation about how many films remain, whether to work on this or that project or to stop and travel. He says he wants to keep making things forever.
“If it were a marathon, I've already passed the turnaround point at the halfway marker. […] I used to get depressed when I saw successful people who were younger than me. […] And then I see it on Twitter too. People saying things like, I think Kojima has about three more games left in him. […] I want to keep making things forever.”