
An age-old question - AndrewDucker
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/11/symptoms-of-ageing.html
======
japhyr
I will turn 42 this week.

This summer, I bought my first boat. It was a deeply humbling experience - I
was quite happy not to take out a row of boat motors when trying to get out of
the harbor for the first time. I didn't make it out of the harbor the first
time I tried - I got to a corner, decided I wasn't quite ready to make that
corner at mid-tide, and returned to try again at high tide. I'm reasonably
competent now in mild weather, but I was scared those first few times out in a
way I haven't been scared in a long time.

I am really appreciative of having found something that takes me back to those
formative experiences of my late teens and early twenties - new adventures
that shape the soul. Getting out on the ocean on a regular basis is renewing
as well.

I watched my parents stop living when my brother and I graduated high school
and left home. They stopped going out as much, they stopped trying new things,
and in general they grew more fearful of the world as it changed around them.
I vowed to never give in like this, and now that I'm at the age where I saw
them stop living, I always check in and make sure I'm learning new things, and
taking appropriate new risks.

I'll never be 20 again, and I don't want to be. But I'll be a 40 year old
who's living each day with a similar outlook and enthusiasm as I had in my
20's.

~~~
mhurron
> I bought my first boat

The two greatest times in a mans life, when he buys a boat, and when he sells
it.

~~~
falcor84
I wasn't aware of this nice saying, so I googled and found this nice page:
[http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/the_...](http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/the_two_happiest_days_of_a_mans_lifethe_day_he_bought_the_boat_and_the_day)

Not very surprisingly, that page says that this was originally applied to
being married and to holding political office.

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codingdave
If we truly had new frontiers in longevity, this would not be a difficult
problem to resolve. It would quickly be established that people need to change
their lives every 20 years or so, try new things, keep engaged with the world.
People would no longer say that they are too old to go back to school and try
a new career. On the contrary, instead of saving for retirement, you would
save for your next iteration of schooling and doing something new for a few
decades. And the awareness of the cyclical nature of the world would become a
way to gain insights into how to innovate at a societal level to a much
greater extent than we do now.

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rsync
A few things ...

First, I'm not worried much about the integration of memory and experience of
an extra 50-100 years of life into ones day to day life. If you compare the
nuance and complexity of daily urban life in 2014 to, say, daily peasant life
in the 15th century, it's a much, much more dramatic enlargement of "scope"
than simply adding more years of current experience. I think we have every
reason to suspect people will handle it just fine.

What we _should_ worry about, or at least own up to, is that an extra 50-100
years of life is about as revolutionary to us as our current health and food
security is to those 15th century peasants. Which is to say, a 15th century
peasant could have had the same fantastical questions about "what in the world
will people do when they have all the food they could ever want and never go
hungry?".

And as we know, the answer is that most of them will just slowly eat
themselves to death in front of the (tv or tv equivalent).

So perhaps we can extrapolate from there ... some small number will experience
a golden age of speaking italian and learning to play harpsichord, but most
will be bloated and stationary with a VR headset on.

~~~
c22
Funny thing, most of them are actually still just starving...

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Xcelerate
I feel the same way he does, but I'm only 24. I'm a lot more short-tempered
than I used to be, my short-term memory is quite horrible, and I take anti-
inflammatories daily (mine are due to injuries from competing in track
though).

I also eschew the news because it all sounds the same to me, and I don't find
it particularly entertaining; on the contrary, my mood is significantly worse
after reading about current events. I didn't even know what the Ferguson case
_was_ until my family started talking about it. I figure if there's something
really important that's happening, it will show up in my newsfeed on Facebook.

But I definitely try to avoid routine. My family is always trying to get me to
settle into one -- a predictable pattern that's followed every day -- but I'm
actively trying to avoid doing that. I recall reading once that having a
(boring) daily routine is the quickest way to make your life fly by. I'm not
sure if it's true or not, but I've found that it seems pretty accurate for
myself.

In addition to not having a routine, I try hard to stay open-minded. I've
noticed that as most people become older, they become very opposed to anything
that doesn't fit the worldview they've developed over the decades. It's almost
disturbing to them on a psychological level if you challenge some strongly
held notion about the way the world/reality works (and I've mainly quit
trying. Is there _really_ a good reason to convince an 84 year old that global
warming is real?).

~~~
jacobolus
Your symptoms sound like sleep deprivation to me.

To all those programmers out there, do remember to take care of your bodies:
eat a balanced diet, get some sunshine, exercise regularly, and please, please
get enough sleep.

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orasis
The antidote to this mental calcification is meditation. As I've become more
skilled at meditation, I view things less through my old filters and more as
they are, in this moment.

~~~
jonawesomegreen
Any advice for someone getting started with meditation, or resources you have
found helpful?

~~~
wanderingstan
I'm by no means an expert, but "Mindfulness in Plain English" was the most
helpful text in getting me started. There are several places to read it free
online or download a PDF. E.g.
[http://www.mindfulvalley.org/files/books/mindfulness_plain_e...](http://www.mindfulvalley.org/files/books/mindfulness_plain_english.pdf)

To the original poster, I'm not so sure meditation would be the cure-all for
all of the problems mentioned. I could see it helping with calming a mind
overflowing with ancient "context". But the author indicated that this
manifests more as slowness than with anxiety.

------
geographomics
That was a very interesting read - but is there any evidence that the
cognitive deficits of middle age are due to having to perform more data
processing on incoming information?

~~~
ridgeguy
There might be. This paper (1) indicates that the apparent decline with age
exhibited on certain vocabulary processing decision speed tests is consistent
with older subjects having richer data sets to evaluate, rather than a
degradation of processing capacity. This result seems like a specific instance
of what Stross discussed in his blog post.

(1) [http://www.sfs.uni-
tuebingen.de/~hbaayen/publications/Ramsca...](http://www.sfs.uni-
tuebingen.de/~hbaayen/publications/RamscarEtAlMentLex2013.pdf)

------
ggreer
It will be nice to have this problem. Several years ago, Eliezer Yudkowsky
asked Aubrey de Grey about brains filling up as they age.[1] Aubrey's answer
was:

AdG: "I'm not too worried about the brain getting saturated. And the main
reason I'm not worried is because I'm pretty sure that even by our age, we're
already forgetting old information at pretty much the same rate that we are
learning new information."

EY: "What a wonderful and consoling person you are!"

AdG: "I think that's fine. I think there are ways, of course, in which we can
train our brains to store more information. I'm not even sure it's a
worthwhile thing to do because we have so many extracorporeal ways of storing
information these days."

He goes on to back his view up with evidence such as the reminiscence bump.[2]

1\.
[http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/1903?in=35:23](http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/1903?in=35:23)
(The HTML5 video is broken. Only flash seems to work.)

2\.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscence_bump](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reminiscence_bump)

------
eli_gottlieb
Huh. Funny thought. I was a bitter old git in my teens and find myself
mentally aging backwards: the older I get, the more I find the holes where my
beliefs don't match the world, the more surprised I can enjoy being. My temper
was monstrous as a little child and has mellowed out to be _almost_ difficult
to detect now.

I'm only 25 now, but in 30 years I hope to enjoy seeing all the crazy stuff I
won't have successfully predicted, as well as having perpetrated some
craziness myself.

>As Terry Pratchett put it, "inside every old man is an eight year old
wondering bewilderedly what just happened to him."

Damn straight. Honestly, if I hit 70 or 80 without getting killed off by heart
disease, stroke, cancer, or any of that stuff, and they've started
reengineering human beings, I'm going to start just outright asking to be
given the rough emotional and intellectual plasticity of a 10-year-old, just
to feel properly comfortable again.

------
marincounty
"Examples: getting worked up about people obstructing a sidewalk in front of
me, or carelessly blowing smoke over their shoulder and into my face, walking
while texting ... you know the drill."

Personally, I have found these gripes more due to socioeconomic factors rather
than age. Poor people don't "sweat" the small things in life--eating and
shelter become the things they worry about. As to the incessenant texting, and
the smart phone stare; I think young and old find it irritating?

------
sireat
I not as optimistic as the original poster about reversing/slowing aging
within our lifetimes. It is almost Singularity like thinking ala Kurzweil.

Stopping telomere shortening without cure for the deluge of cancers that would
follow seems unlikely.

It may happen eventually for some portion of populace(think Altered Carbon
like split of haves and have nots) but not within our lifetimes.

Meanwhile, I have to come to grips with my mortality as a 40+ year old who
knows he will not get good at anything where he has to start from a scratch.

------
sxcurry
Very interesting and thought provoking read. Having seen one parent die
recently at 94 and the other fading at 94, I've observed that they were/are
both really done with life. Not in a bad way, but they had lived long full
lives and were ready to move on. I agree that any advances in extending
physical youth will not necessarily change this natural evolution of the mind.

------
Madmallard
What about getting destroyed by antibiotics and already having the joints and
tendons of a 50+ year old but being 24 :(

~~~
regecks
Me too (well, similar anyway). Gives me a real sense of dread when thinking
about how I will have to cope in the future.

~~~
Madmallard
What'd you take and what happened?

------
lmg643
why wouldn't any rejuvenation techniques we develop also apply to the brain?
I'm sure we will have ways to maintain neuroplasticity and I think cognitively
alive people with 70-100 years of experience will be able to make huge
contributions.

~~~
dsjoerg
perhaps, or perhaps even a healthy but normal mind behaves like an "old" one
simply from the weight of memory and experience.

------
dennisgorelik
Fixing senescence problem in 20 years is an extremely optimistic forecast.

There are no signs of that happening.

With every year of technical progress, life expectancy of old people is not
moving up even 1 year.

Still, the read was very interesting.

------
exratione
First, nice to think it'll happen in time for you personally. But it won't
unless a lot more people support the right lines of research over the next ten
years. That means those based on repair of causes of aging, the well-cataloged
and uncontroversial forms of cellular and molecular damage that distinguish
old tissue from young tissue. SENS programs are the exemplar, but a lot of
stem cell work and cancer offshoot research (such as senescent cell ablation)
falls into the same bucket. Most present research aimed at slowing aging by
altering the way in which metabolism works (such as calorie restriction
mimetic drug development) is not in any way likely to lead to large extensions
of healthy life span, and especially not for those people already old when it
is introduced. Most research aimed at the genetics of human longevity won't do
much either, as it is just more of the same road to a hard, slow, expensive
re-egineering of metabolism to obtain very tiny benefits. You can't add
decades to healthy human life spans in the near term without damage repair as
your primary approach. It isn't hard to see why: you can repair damage or slow
it down, and the former of those approaches is very much better than the
latter in terms of benefits delivered and guesstimated cost of producing
treatments.

Secondly, there is presently no real reason to suppose that any of the
demonstrated limits to human cognitive function are caused by anything other
damage: loss of neurogenesis, build up of amyloid and other waste products,
progressive demyelination due to a variety of processes, white matter damage
from microstrokes resulting from vascular dysfunction, and onward for dozens
of other types of harm. Every aspect of memory and executive function is
slowed and degraded. The detailed maps of connections between damage and
dysfunction are in most cases sketches or unproven or unknown or exceedingly
complicated and open to debate. But there is so much damage that it would be
going out on a limb to suggest that a periodically repaired brain wouldn't
just keep on going, losing the old memories and generating new ones, not
filling up.

There are bodily systems that do "fill up" and where we can make good
arguments that they have structural issues with long-term operation and would
fall over even if every component part worked fine perpetually. The immune
system, for example, in its continual assignment of memory cells for
herpesviruses such as CMV, may be working as evolved but nonetheless gradually
destroying its own effectiveness. That can be argued reasonably, versus it all
being the consequences of damage.

But there's no reason to think that any of the brain's processes are in the
same boat at this stage. There is every reason to think that dysfunction is
all damage until proven otherwise.

Lastly, having the opportunity to be in good health and wrestling with a
century of memories while deciding what to do next? That beats the
alternatives. High class problem.

~~~
tempestn
Also, even if this sort of neurological deterioration, like the deterioration
of the immune system you mentioned, _isn 't_ the result of damage, that
doesn't mean similar techniques couldn't be used to prevent it.

------
lucio
Accelerando is a really really good tech novel.
[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/fiction/accelera...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html)

~~~
guard-of-terra
To counter, I quit after reading a few dozen pages. The whole thing seemed
like applying Markov chain to Slashdot archive.

I waited to see if there would be any narrative, then switched to something
more nutricious.

~~~
lucio
This comment is relevant: ("Lobsters" is one of the interconnected short
stories)

>>In my spare time, I wrote "Lobsters". Emailed it to a friend; "this is
really great, but you'll never sell it — the audience would have to have been
overdosing on slashdot for six months before they got it!"

[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/who_am_i/autobio-all-
redacte...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/who_am_i/autobio-all-
redacted.html)

------
grndn
+1 for mentioning Lene Lovich!

