> Though the literature on this question is sparse, giftedness and achievements early in life do not appear to provide an insurance policy against suffering later on
ISTM it's more a guarantee of suffering later for a lot of reasons, aging out of wunderkind territory, a realization that there isn't enough time left to beat the unbeatable foe, and for the pro geeks our industry's rampant ageism.
The submitter used the document title of the article instead of the h1, which is fine in general. We've just updated it since the header seems a bit clearer.
Brutal and depressing. Might as well just end it all at 50. None of the spiritual mumbo jumbo resonated with me at all. What's the point of going on if you can't contribute?
In that context, it means nothing. However, I do not live in that context, I live in a society and inside my own head, and this is what generates an idea of contribution and happiness.
> We're on a rock flying through space.
I have never understood this phrase as anything more than a platitude to make people feel better. Anyway, don't mind me. It has been raining all week and I think it's affecting my mood.
> However, I do not live in that context, I live in a society and inside my own head, and this is what generates an idea of contribution and happiness.
Right. This just happens to coincide with a shift in my life, where all the old contexts from my youth are meaningless, and I need to find new contexts.
So if there is no such thing as contributing, then the contributing you used to do only mattered because of a context you (or I) constructed to find important.
I don't think the right answer is to say, "Nothing is important." I think the right answer is to relentlessly seek for a new context to find important, to give meaning to our own life.
If you zoom out to the time and space scales of the universe there is no meaning to be found. Humanity is merely a short lived aberration. None of that is relevant to our human lives on a daily basis. And this nihilistic appeal otherwise is just missing the point. It's an easy way out for people who'd rather not investigate the meaning of life more deeply.
We are infinity in the making. You are living at the peek of this entity.
This has always been true but take some account for it and where it might go.
Fist it wa the mountain peaks, then it was the continents next stop the ends of the galaxy.
You are either an engineer tryig to make money or one trying to advance mankind. Weather it be a js lib, curing cancer or building a rocket. We all have our part.
Maybe relatively speaking we are meaningless now but in time we will define our place in the universe together. Just like the molecules in your body work together to make meaning from a blank file.
The key insight is that "contribute" can mean different things, and it's worth broadening one's definition of "contribute". The J.S. Bach example really struck me in this regard.
Yeah, I guess. It just makes me upset that we have to change what we do and how we live in response to our physical and intellectual decline. What if I don't want to teach? What if what I do now is what makes me truly happy? I guess I am still young enough to be in denial that age will kick my ass.
But even if rejuvenation drugs are not ready in time for you it is not a reason to want to die sooner. The things you want to do now are mostly determined by your intellectual abilities, and if there was a way to enhance them you may find the things that interest you now boring, and yet that is not a reason for you to die now.
Also a great way to want to teach, is having grandchildren. There is a theory that evolutionary reason for humans and some other animals to stay alive after reaching the end of reproductive age is to take care of grandchildren.
> What's the point of going on if you can't contribute?
Because "peak" isn't required to contribute.
I strongly suspect I can't program like I can when I was 25 when I could hold a gazillion details in my head simultaneously--now I simply find a task that requires that to be distasteful.
I am, however, MUCH better at architecture and organization so that I don't have to hold a zillion details in my head. That also means that my programs are far easier for others to understand than the ones I wrote when I was 25.
Except for when you're on the same project. Then it's like canoeing with mediocre people. When the alligator comes, instead of paddling for one, you are paddling for two.
Yeah, I have this exact same opinion. I saved more than 50% of my take-home pay and retired when I was forty. I'm happier than ever, and can't figure out why my former colleagues didn't do the same and are still going to a cube every day.
Age comes faster than people expect. People say they will start saving later, turn around and they are already 35 (Or older) and later came sooner than they expected.
I'm 33 now and have been saving like you since I was 28, but I only had that realization of how fast time moves because until 27 I was trying to be a professional athlete. One day I woke up and realized it was too late for that dream and I didn't want the same thing to happen with retirement.
+1. Started on this journey of financial independence 10+ years ago. Have essentially achieved it (7 figure net worth, could sustain ongoing expenses for decades at least), but continue to work remote for a Santa Clara based company. I live with a wife and two kids in a relatively low cost of living city (we live in a 1900 sqft 4 br that costed $270K, worth ~$310K now).
I got into software development out of passion --I did it for fun and for my own purposes starting at age 10. I am 33 now. I don't see myself being an employee forever. While I feel like I am just as good a programmer as ever, I am less willing to be exploited by employers. Earlier in my career, I gave way too much of my time, focus, and energy to my employers. This newfound moderation may seem like a decline in performance, skill, and ability --but it is deliberate.
Still, I feel it would be very foolish to be fully dependent on any kind of career.
Jimminy sufferin Crickets; Arthur Brooks is human refuse. His "peak" means "peak shilling for oligarchs and foreign moneybags trying to foment useless wars." Really, his time has passed because we (left and right) are done with your neocon bullshit.
Reading the actual article (not necessary, but I suffer for you): he mentions ... athletes, who of course mostly peak early, Darwin (who has no comparison class; gee, sorry he didn't think of his theory after he was 50), Dirac, Bach, poets... and how we should meditate on death.
What this is is typical Brooks oligarch shilling. Be happy with less, peasant; your value declines as you age. One of the other weasels at AEI will doubtless write something about how young employees are similarly worthless.
It is entirely appropriate to use such language regarding the swine who ran AEI for 11 years. Kick me off your platform if it's inappropriate to call a war mongering oligarch suck-up "human refuse." It's what he is. Arthur Brooks has no redeeming qualities.
This isn't some left wing versus right wing thing: this is the human race versus monsters.
Thank you for writing this glowing review. I had not heard of Arthur Brooks, but spurred by your words I had devoted a tidbit of time to research him. AND I LOVE HIM. I have already ordered his last two books off of Amazon.com. I even used his referral code. Thanks!
An entire article about mental and physical decline with age that didn't mention exercise, nutrition, or diet is just a fluff piece. We all know that age will eventually slow us down, but 1) we want to know why and 2) what can we do to slow that process down.
Check out Peter Attia sometime for someone who is thinking about this topic and working on actual strategies. https://peterattiamd.com
Eat healthy, get adequate sleep, and regularly exercise? There's also things like wearing sunscreen, but that's more to prevent premature aging, not regular aging.
Specifics matter. Better to do aerobic workouts before you do cognitive work and heavy weightlifting at night because heavy weights help you sleep better. Nutrition for cognition is a tricky business too and there are a few dozen other important factors in sleep.
If I do an ample amount of physical exercise -- whether it's weight training or cardio-focused -- I tend to find I sleep well at night, whether the physical exercise is done earlier or later in the day. Not to say your suggestions aren't more optimal, but at some point, you reach diminishing returns.
If you're getting 8 hours of sleep, and eating lots of fruit/vegetables and exercising 4-5 times a week, 30 minutes each time, there is only so much more you can do for maximizing your wellness.
I enjoy how it is thinking constructively about planning a life after the 'peak' times. The football player becoming a coach or referee rather than simply sinking into obscurity. My only criticism is that the messaging seems a little dire. It's not like your brain disappears at 50.
I think this is a bs pseudo-science article. Instead of saying it’s an age decline maybe just say that it’s very rare to do the same thing progressively better for more than 20 years. Therefore instead of viewing life in progressive terms, view it in cyclical terms. At some point you have to start over at the bottom. For some reason people at age 50 develop a snobbery that prohibits this — they must keep on doing the same thing they’ve always been doing or they would rather do nothing. That’s nonsense. Ask any entrepreneur who starts over — and they’ll tell you how they’ve done it so many times it’s as natural as walking. And by the way I bet those are the same people who are still active professionally well past their 60s. Telling people they can’t do something after a certain age is just a self fulfilling prophecy of psycho-babble. People already feel this way - so what is the point of perpetuating it?
In the 1950's, they were telling us cigarettes are good for us (not me, I came to be in 1979) because n doctors are also smoking it, etc etc. Check the ads from that era and you will find their persuasive arguments to be similar to what we have nowadays for certain other things.
Then also before this was Pasteur and his flawed germ theory. So they began boiling milk until it turned into something useless if not downright harmful. (Milk stops being milk when you boil past 70 Celsius).
Fastforward to early 80's: they began telling us fat is bad for us (it is not, check Eric Berg on EWEtube). So sheep that most people are who need to be told what is good or not, they wrongly assumed sugar was safe, since nobody said sugar was bad. That is also why you have low-fat milk and other such nonsense.
Further down the historic line, various fads appeared. Sexy girls wrote books on how meat is dangerous and persuaded the gullible that since the cattle are being pumped all sortsa chem, so being a vegan is the right healthy thing to do.. (flaw: just cuz there is bad meat doesn't mean all meat is bad or veganism good, check the death rates of young Vegans dropping like flies on catwalks).
So my point is that along come so many experts and tell us so many false things, that it becomes difficult to navigate the noise and latch on to useful signals. One such noise is the article, which extrapolates an anecdotal or Personal observation as true for all people.
To make it sound scary, they even add "professional" decline, with all the menacing undertones it carries. I know there is nothing wrong in preparing for older age, and for some it can be faster than for others due to so many factors (such as aluminum consumption which causes dementia and doesn't exit the body--good ole Al lodges in the brain cells).
What is wrong with this article is scare-mongering and becoming a cry-wolf story rather than an intellectually valid, science-backed article.
But then what do you expect of some journos. (No offense to ALL journalists). They get paid to scare us, so that our Amygdala shrinks and we make hasty and wrong decisions, or simply freeze our brain's plasticity. Even if what I just assumed is unintentional, it still just as harmful.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with using scare as a tactic as long as a positive side is presented so that the brain sees a balance and the Amygdala doesn't shrink. But merely scaring people is unfair. It may even work as a Placebo and cause people to decline faster given that the newspaper already primed them for it. Smh.
46 comments
[ 63.1 ms ] story [ 905 ms ] threadISTM it's more a guarantee of suffering later for a lot of reasons, aging out of wunderkind territory, a realization that there isn't enough time left to beat the unbeatable foe, and for the pro geeks our industry's rampant ageism.
> We're on a rock flying through space.
I have never understood this phrase as anything more than a platitude to make people feel better. Anyway, don't mind me. It has been raining all week and I think it's affecting my mood.
> I have never understood this phrase as anything more than a platitude to make people feel better.
It's more than a platitude. Check out this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoW8Tf7hTGA
Still, nothing better than a rainy day on earth.
Right. This just happens to coincide with a shift in my life, where all the old contexts from my youth are meaningless, and I need to find new contexts.
So if there is no such thing as contributing, then the contributing you used to do only mattered because of a context you (or I) constructed to find important.
I don't think the right answer is to say, "Nothing is important." I think the right answer is to relentlessly seek for a new context to find important, to give meaning to our own life.
This has always been true but take some account for it and where it might go.
Fist it wa the mountain peaks, then it was the continents next stop the ends of the galaxy.
You are either an engineer tryig to make money or one trying to advance mankind. Weather it be a js lib, curing cancer or building a rocket. We all have our part.
Maybe relatively speaking we are meaningless now but in time we will define our place in the universe together. Just like the molecules in your body work together to make meaning from a blank file.
But even if rejuvenation drugs are not ready in time for you it is not a reason to want to die sooner. The things you want to do now are mostly determined by your intellectual abilities, and if there was a way to enhance them you may find the things that interest you now boring, and yet that is not a reason for you to die now.
Also a great way to want to teach, is having grandchildren. There is a theory that evolutionary reason for humans and some other animals to stay alive after reaching the end of reproductive age is to take care of grandchildren.
Because "peak" isn't required to contribute.
I strongly suspect I can't program like I can when I was 25 when I could hold a gazillion details in my head simultaneously--now I simply find a task that requires that to be distasteful.
I am, however, MUCH better at architecture and organization so that I don't have to hold a zillion details in my head. That also means that my programs are far easier for others to understand than the ones I wrote when I was 25.
Which one is the better "contribution"?
If you don't work it out, then you will find yourself sitting on a plane wishing you could just die with your wife asking you to stop saying that.
I'm in a similar position - bounced around careers, approaching 50, and currently lost in the woods and pissing my wife off.
Unless you are extremely self-motivated, I think it might be better to be 80% financially independent than 100%.
Having forces acting on you to get you out of bed and be useful might be the best thing for you.
Yes, by all means, don't live paycheck to paycheck or have to work in a demeaning way.
But there have been studies showing that mortality goes up for people who have retired.
I got into software development out of passion --I did it for fun and for my own purposes starting at age 10. I am 33 now. I don't see myself being an employee forever. While I feel like I am just as good a programmer as ever, I am less willing to be exploited by employers. Earlier in my career, I gave way too much of my time, focus, and energy to my employers. This newfound moderation may seem like a decline in performance, skill, and ability --but it is deliberate.
Still, I feel it would be very foolish to be fully dependent on any kind of career.
I’d personally rather not struggle for an uncertainty. And I’d like to find what matters to me sooner rather than later.
Reading the actual article (not necessary, but I suffer for you): he mentions ... athletes, who of course mostly peak early, Darwin (who has no comparison class; gee, sorry he didn't think of his theory after he was 50), Dirac, Bach, poets... and how we should meditate on death.
What this is is typical Brooks oligarch shilling. Be happy with less, peasant; your value declines as you age. One of the other weasels at AEI will doubtless write something about how young employees are similarly worthless.
This is not an appropriate thing to say on this site. Could you please post more thoughtfully and substantively?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This isn't some left wing versus right wing thing: this is the human race versus monsters.
The tone police are here, so signal boosting while I can
Check out Peter Attia sometime for someone who is thinking about this topic and working on actual strategies. https://peterattiamd.com
If you're getting 8 hours of sleep, and eating lots of fruit/vegetables and exercising 4-5 times a week, 30 minutes each time, there is only so much more you can do for maximizing your wellness.
Then also before this was Pasteur and his flawed germ theory. So they began boiling milk until it turned into something useless if not downright harmful. (Milk stops being milk when you boil past 70 Celsius).
Fastforward to early 80's: they began telling us fat is bad for us (it is not, check Eric Berg on EWEtube). So sheep that most people are who need to be told what is good or not, they wrongly assumed sugar was safe, since nobody said sugar was bad. That is also why you have low-fat milk and other such nonsense.
Further down the historic line, various fads appeared. Sexy girls wrote books on how meat is dangerous and persuaded the gullible that since the cattle are being pumped all sortsa chem, so being a vegan is the right healthy thing to do.. (flaw: just cuz there is bad meat doesn't mean all meat is bad or veganism good, check the death rates of young Vegans dropping like flies on catwalks).
So my point is that along come so many experts and tell us so many false things, that it becomes difficult to navigate the noise and latch on to useful signals. One such noise is the article, which extrapolates an anecdotal or Personal observation as true for all people.
To make it sound scary, they even add "professional" decline, with all the menacing undertones it carries. I know there is nothing wrong in preparing for older age, and for some it can be faster than for others due to so many factors (such as aluminum consumption which causes dementia and doesn't exit the body--good ole Al lodges in the brain cells).
What is wrong with this article is scare-mongering and becoming a cry-wolf story rather than an intellectually valid, science-backed article.
But then what do you expect of some journos. (No offense to ALL journalists). They get paid to scare us, so that our Amygdala shrinks and we make hasty and wrong decisions, or simply freeze our brain's plasticity. Even if what I just assumed is unintentional, it still just as harmful.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with using scare as a tactic as long as a positive side is presented so that the brain sees a balance and the Amygdala doesn't shrink. But merely scaring people is unfair. It may even work as a Placebo and cause people to decline faster given that the newspaper already primed them for it. Smh.