
Professional Decline Comes Sooner Than People Think - occamschainsaw
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/work-peak-professional-decline/590650/
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mattrp
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?

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fooblitzky
A good reason to seek financial independence early - then at least you have
some time to find what gives your life meaning and makes you happy.

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siberianbear
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.

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imesh
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.

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howard941
> 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.

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logari
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.

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matwood
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](https://peterattiamd.com)

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JMTQp8lwXL
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.

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pretendscholar
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.

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JMTQp8lwXL
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.

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nullbyte
I'm 21 and I still hated this article

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copperx
I'm 37 and I found it had an optimistic tone, not a dire one.

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johngalt
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.

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sidcool
Eric Schmidt recently tweeted this article
[https://twitter.com/ericschmidt/status/1143904558663389184](https://twitter.com/ericschmidt/status/1143904558663389184)

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cptroot
The title has been changed from the original. The original title is "Your
Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think"

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sctb
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.

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biohax2015
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?

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cujic9
We're on a rock flying through space. In that context, what does contributing
even mean?

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biohax2015
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.

~~~
cujic9
> 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.

