Since dragons are often depicted as long lived yet flawed, I was thinking… Following the trend that age and experience corrode the mind, certainly it makes sense for one to eventually try to completely “burn away” their old life.
Now, I can’t speak for a dragon, and neither for an old human, but I can guess.
Since time adds experience and “stability” to the mind, it only takes a bit of wisdom and absence of denial to realize why one would prefer a younger existence should their mind be filled with a lot of junk, with experiences and feelings that only drag one down.
In fact, with the world changing and the body diminishing, bringing down the mind with it in a seemingly inevitable decline, I would argue that the volatile and impressionable nature of youth, even if it is a double edged sword and requires forgetting a good part of who you are, would be desirable should one thinks life is worth living.
While it makes things stranger and maybe creepy, a “soul” continuously change as it lives, which means its mind can’t hold perfectly and forever to anything, at least not in a simple, straightforward way. Hence relationships with things and people need to be maintained and evolve through time, just like the drive to live.
So a dragon can change as much as they want, yet if they always find a way to want to live, then their life is worth living no matter how chaotic, disjoint and even contradictory it might be.
But now, for the “burn away” part…
Should enough experiences fill the mind in a way that greatly spoil a dragon’s life, and should there be no definitive solution in sight because harmful connections to the past persist, said dragon might fuel resentment toward until they snap, attempting to disconnect from anything related to their past if not lashing out, wanting to destroy what they now perceive as the main source of their misfortune.
But outside of negative, painful memories and connections, there is another kind of these that might contribute just as much to that decay of the mind if not more. Perhaps I can’t prove it for a dragon, but I can prove it for humans.
Just know that, once I realized what makes an experience truly fulfilling, I started doubting if some people were truly living and planing to be, or if they just went along with whatever simply satisfied/entertained them and only tried their best to avoid the bad.
To never really grow, to never be fully allowed to change and develop, to live a life where, perhaps, acts of everyone were genuine even if small, but never amounting to anything. And they would behave as such, again, and again, and again…
In that world, to call others friend and family and more… is lying to sustain the image of a real life you don’t have. You and your peers are neither children nor adults, but something else, something far lesser that doesn’t belong to any of stage life that fits your ideals. And that is why, when asked if you wanted to live even a single day longer, your heart could never answer yes.
So, is it that much of a stretch to imagine someone wanting to burn away their life? To travel far, far away from everything that kept them down and might as well continue to do so until their end? Destroy it if it keeps coming back?