Other than the potential of things yet undone and the ability to eat whatever I liked without gaining weight, there's not a hell of a lot I would want back from my 20s.
I love getting older. I always tell people that I don't think of birthdays as getting a year older, I think of them as leveling up.
I'm level 41 now, and I hope to earn enough experience points to make it all the way to level 80, or even level 90 one day.
Sure, I can't run quite as fast, but I still try to run. What's best, though, is that I get all the increased abilities that come from leveling up. More wisdom, more knowledge, more credibility, and maybe even a bigger kingdom if I do things well.
When I was 21, everything was hard. Talking to new people was hard, getting a job was hard, even getting taken seriously was hard. I paid those dues already, I have no interest in going backwards. I'd rather keep leveling up.
I'm also 41. The part I love most is that age and treachery own youth and enthusiasm.
Jokes aside, I've managed to live all of my life day by day, in the moment. I see many who don't, so I'm grateful. My code only ever gets better. And I do Krav Maga three times a week, so am as fit today as I was during the bush war in Angola in 1989.
Another cool thing about age is that it's inversely proportional to giving a shit.
TLDR - it provided the cold-war-era US and USSR an opportunity to fight a real war by proxy, at a time where they couldn't be seen to be fighting a real war.
I'm "level 41" as well - a big thrill for me now is that when I was growing up in the early 80s I thought the best thing in the world would be to work with computers for a living - and that's what I do, on devices that I couldn't even have imagined in 1983 or so. Since I clearly remember Apple IIs and TRS-80s, I still get a bit of a "wow I'm in the future!" thrill whenever I fire up a modern computer or mobile device.
Being a bit older helps me recall the amazingness of the modern world.
Several commenters have pointed out that levelling up means cutting off choices - but I managed to mostly follow what I enjoyed when I was younger, and I would much rather be a capable developer than an olympic athlete or a rock star. I MAKE THINGS. THAT CHANGE PEOPLE'S LIVES. EVERY DAY. Most 'successful' people my age can't say that, if they ever could. Middle management doesn't MAKE anything, unless you count meetings and memos - but I do.
Random advice for younger folks: making at least some kind of a living doing what you love and making a difference is way better than making big money doing something pointless that you hate.
Part of me still thinks that I'm 25, but another part of me is now old enough to reflect on the clueless jerk I occasionally was when I was 25. Growing up is a balance between who you were and who you are now, and especially in technology it's important to not forget your 25-year-old self while still keeping the 40-year-old as well. If you can be both 20-something and 40-something at the same time, it makes for a great combination of enthusiasm and perspective.
>>Why is it so bad to get old? Why do people try to avoid it so much? Personally, apart from having a slower metabolism and a back that aches a lot more than it used it, I don't mind being old. In fact, I like it. I was really stupid when I was young. And I'm still stupid. But I'm LESS stupid now. And I wouldn't want to be that younger person again.
I'm 27. Why? I personally just miss the feeling of having it all in front of you. Pft, a doctor? I can do that. A pro athlete? It's possible. Senator? I can do that. However unlikely those may have been from the beginning, they were at least possible. They definitely become less likely as you get older.
The only thing about growing old that makes me uneasy is seeing opportunities close. Sure, new ones open up, but seeing old ones close still hurts.
I guess also, certain things are experienced a certain way only the first time. The elation I felt the first time I was in live was absolutely crazy - I loved every bit of it.
Other than that, I agree with OP - it's very nice being less stupid. It does, however, rob life of suspense a bit as experience teaches you to expect a lot of things.
If you view it as 'leveling up' like others have mentioned, then you could just view this as a branching upgrade system where some choices preclude others.
Yeah, but that's where the analogy breaks down. If you screw up in a game, you can always start from scratch and choose better next time. Not really possible in real life.
Rather than denying that being old is a real thing, and that there are downsides to it, I like to try to identify what those possible problems of aging are and address the ones I can.
Decrepitude I address by running regularly and trying to curb my over-eating. It's a cliche but I really am in better shape at 33 than I was in my 20's. This is mostly because I didn't take care of myself at all until I was 30, but most people can improve their eating and exercise habits.
Another problem is your mind and/or memory fading. Well it's been shown that this can be staved off by playing games and staying mentally challenged. As a developer this isn't a problem so far, I still play games every day.
What about social isolation, and losing friends and family until you're alone? I've always been a bit of a curmudgeon, so this is one I need to watch out for. I have to make sure to maintain a healthy group of friends as I get older. So far, so good. It helps that I have a lot of younger siblings, and it's unlikely they'll all die before me.
How about getting out of touch with modern society, arts and music? I don't like Lady Gaga or Nicki Minaj, but there's still new bands and new albums coming out that I do enjoy, and I stay aware of even the things I don't like and can understand why other people do. I may shake my fist and say "You kids today have no taste!" but at least I know why it is that I feel that way, and there's never been a time where I liked all new music anyway. Same goes for movies and TV.
It also goes for technology; I don't cling tightly to the tools I use today or used yesterday. I keep abreast of new technology and am ready to move to new platforms, languages, etc. when something better comes along. I'm not going to be caught with an obsolete skill-set because even for things I don't use every day at work (Ruby, Node.js), I stay at least familiar with them. And this is easier and easier to do the more disparate technologies you have under your belt.
So yeah, aging is a thing that can suck. But you can do what you can to minimize the bad parts.
And there's still more good than bad if you're doing what you want in an environment that rewards you.
We should do further: eliminate aging so that we don't degrade in youth or mind performance.
However, that means adults who are hundred years old have a vast advantage over you, assuming he is able to keep and integrate the experiences of the last several hundred years.
We should even better than that and create an artificial intelligence for us that can eliminate aging and that eliminate any need to do work, and also upload our minds to it see we can live until the heat death of the universe with every luxury.
That old adage that you can stave off memory loss and general degeneration of cognitive ability by keeping your mind active always seems strikingly obvious to me, and I think it's pretty much true for people at any age. And anyway, what the heck are you doing if you're not keeping your mind active anyway? Watching paint dry ;-)
As far as I'm aware, to stave off cognitive decay you need to keep your mind active in ways that are different from the way you usually keep it active. Studies show that sudoku prevents brain decay, but only in people who don't play sudoku or games like it.
So if you're a programmer, learning new programming skills might help your career but it probably won't help your brain. Learn a new language or a musical instrument or something else completely different.
How about getting out of touch with modern society, arts and music? I don't like Lady Gaga or Nicki Minaj, but there's still new bands and new albums coming out that I do enjoy
I know that this is neither here nor there, but check out Marina and the Diamonds' album "The Family Jewels". I had pretty much given up on any new intelligent pop music being made in this millennium until I heard this album.
Oh yeah, and Spotify is an incredible thing for being able to easily check out what's going in the world of music.
You might enjoy this broadcast that we (the radio show I work for) did last year on aging, the feeling of a lack of purpose, and what to do about it. It's mainly geared towards those about to retire, but it can also be relevant to others.
That old adage that you can stave off memory loss and general degeneration of cognitive ability by keeping your mind active always seems strikingly obvious to me, and I think it's pretty much true for people at any age. And anyway, what the heck are you doing if you're not keeping your mind active anyway? Watching paint dry? ;-)
Aging is a much easier pill to swallow for nerdy guys- you get smarter as you age, and dont get that much worse looking, at least for a while. For athletes, models etc, your raison d'etre might not have anything to do with intellect or wisdom. Its got to be tougher in that case.
As an athlete, you usually end up teaching younger athletes. (Well, at least most of the ones I know do). It is an interesting experience, since your view shifts.
The most interesting part? As you're less and less invested in actually being brilliant in what you do, you gain a deeper understanding of the underlying principles. (I used to be a professional dancer. Many things that were hard to grok when I did them on a day-to-day basis are now entirely obvious. And I can easily demonstrate them, or spot the mistakes. I just can't do them hundreds of times, day-in, day-out :)
Some sports you can actually still improve with age. For example with fencing, I've been whipped by more 90 year olds in wheel chairs than you would believe. They're past the age where they'll make the olympics, but they can still hope to best 95% of semi-competitive fencers.
Of course, these tend to be the nerdy sports like fencing that involve a lot of mental coordination.
i've found it really hard to find older mentors. people who are "like me" - that are like many HNers - seem rare, and the ones who become successful tend to be SO successful that they're busy, hard to meet on purpose - and i don't feel comfortable with cold calls like Warren Buffet did.
so I'm 26, and on accident I've met one or two people "like me" plus 10 years. By active community participation, and deliberately doing things to stand out, i am gradually meeting a few more. They love to do lunch with people "like them", but they're inevitably busy, and they have other relationships as well, and I don't have a lot of value to them other than as an employee - so I don't get to interact on a regular basis unless I literally go and change employers. which is sort of like dumping the current mentor. It sucks.
I've never met someone "like me" but 20 years older, or 30, or 40. That would be incredible. The current strategy is to continue developing myself and meet people as life takes its course, like a leaf on the wind. I wish there was a way to accelerate this - who knows, by the time I've found a mentor who is 66, retired, who gives a shit about me in the midst of all the other people who want to interact with him - I'll be 56, not 26.
Stop looking for mentors and start looking for people you're interested in? Develop friendships instead of mentorships?
If I don't know you from the next guy, why would I be interested in mentoring specifically you? I might as well spend that time to share my experience in ways that reach a broader audience.
However, as I get to know you, I will start to care about you. (Or cut you out of my life ;). As I take an interest in you as a person, I'm more willing to spend my time mentoring you, because I help somebody I know and like.
If there's no personal connection, there's not much of an incentive to invest time.
So, always build a connection first, then do the ask.
yes, of course, i totally agree with you, therein lies the problem. mentorships aren't explicit - they are, as you say, friendships. the rub is that there is a set of people i have access to where i can begin building relationships - and this set of people tends to be the 25-40yo hacker crowd. over the course of months or years of developing relationships, i can gain access to their mentors - the 40-60yo crowd, but i am wondering if some out-of-the-box thinking can put me in a position to develop relationships with these people on a more direct manner.
as an example: i want to build relationships with the 25-40 crowd, so i get real active in the community, give killer lightning talks, etc: giving lightning talks is a "hack" to gain access to people that i want to build relationships with, to make them interested in building a relationship with me. i'm wondering what channels i might leverage to do similar things to make other classes of people interested in building a relationship with me.
i say "i want" a lot in this post, but as you point out its a "we want", these relationships are clearly mutual.
1) Who are the people you'd _like_ to meet? (There's a lot of us old fogeys out there ;)
2) What would you like from them?
3) What are they interested in?
4) What can you offer?
Take a look at those 4 questions, and you should be able to identify people that you _should_ contact. I realize that's not the question, directly, but unless you prep for success, it's hard to be successful.
So next, how do you meet those people? At this point, you're down to individuals, not a nebulous class. So, volunteer with their charity. Attend classes organized by their employers. If at all possible, do something that gets you into physical proximity. (Uh, please in a non-creepy way. Just saying ;)
But even if you're not in physical proximity - then you ask. Ideally, you get an intro from somebody they know. That opens way more doors than anything else. If you don't know anybody who knows them - cold call. Write a nice e-mail explaining that you know they probably are very busy, but you're really interested in XYZ, and you'd love to pick their brain over coffee, if they have time.
And then wait and see what happens.
In recap: Don't meet "classes of people". Find interesting people and meet the person.
I've noticed that Asian cultures celebrate growing older much more.
A friend of mine in her 20s went hiking in Japan and most of the hikers were grandparents. They cautioned her against the hike, saying her muscles were too underdeveloped.
Do Asian HN readers have a different attitude here?
Yeah hikers in Japan are mostly seniors and they are way more experienced than youngsters. Everytime I go for a hike there are the usual grandparents who hike in groups, and who overtake you on a climb with the blink of an eye. They are way fitter than most 20s years old.
Those old Japanese hikers are awesome. While we were in Japan we did the obligatory "climb Fuji at night to see the stars and the sunrise from the top".
We didn't get started as early as we hoped, so we had to push hard to reach the top in time. 100 ft from the top I collapsed with a very painful cramp in my calf. So without a word this old Japanese guy gives me this incredible 30 second massage and I limp to the top.
The sunrise? Complete letdown. Prairie sunrises are much more spectacular, and the star view is comparable. But the climb was awesome.
I did the Fuji climb a few years ago too, and this is a quite ugly mountain when you climb. But I did find that the view, looking down watching at hundred of hikers climbing with lights at night, was quite charming.
The worst bit about my first climb up Half Dome was being passed by the senior citizen couple, with walking sticks, whom I had passed an hour before...
Did anyone find anything insightful, interesting, or entertaining about this article? To those that upvoted it - why? I ask because I think I must be missing a kernel of wisdom that you may have observed.
In this case the article is only there as a prompt for conversation.The comments have been quite interesting to me.
One of the points the article did make though (well, along the same theme anyway) is that interest in ageing will wax and wane as you go through life. As a 28 year old, soon to be married ageing is on my mind more now than it was 3 years ago. I went through a similar stage when I finished University. Between the two though I may well have skipped past this story.
> If I could go back to being 20 again, but stay the person I am, I would. But if going back to being 20 meant going back to being the person I was when I was 20, there's no way I would do that.
I'm not even 30 yet, but this is an always true statement. Thanks for sharing it.
I don't know if it's just me, but I tend to shy away from reading these sorts of articles here. On HN I'm able to recapture some of that child-like joy that goes along with building things, so it feels extra-painful to be reminded of my mortality.
That's perfectly understandable. Death is terrible, the debilitating effects of aging are arguably even worse, and it's natural to want to avoid thinking about them. The problem is when that avoidance impulse becomes so strong that it prevents people from seriously considering solutions, instead rejecting them with thought-free soundbites like "death is part of life".
We're the first generation that actually has a chance to do something about the annihilation of billions of sentient beings, and the immense suffering caused by the physical and mental effects of aging. But in order to solve the problem, we have to be willing to acknowledge that there is one.
And now that I'm sufficiently inspired, it's time for another SENS donation.
People should be taught to accept mortality, instead of the opposite. We'd have a lot more happy people.
Death is natural. It happens, that's all. It's not a bad or good thing. It's just part of everything else. If you know that before hand, you don't have to "deal around it" or feel any pain.
It's no more a "bad thing" than gravity being "bad" because I tripped and fell down instead of floating. It is what it is, and the sooner you accept the current realities the better off you are.
You also ignore the obvious results of death, one of which is reproduction and birth of new life and the resultant new thought patterns that emerge from a divorce from the constraints of past experience.
No one in good health looks forward to death but the lack of it means that we aren't commenting on HN, we're all at best simple eukaryotes swimming in the paradise of primordial ooze until we consume all non-organic resources and then suffer an eternity of starvation.
Sheesh... come on, think about what you are saying. Firstly you say that "if something exists, it cannot be judged to be bad"...? Second, death is necessary for new thought patterns...?
Sorry, it is YOU who needs to accept the current reality: death IS bad. Unfortunately we feel so powerless about this right now that people think up justifications to cope with the fact.
Me, I'm in favor of acknowledging death as a problem and spending significant resources to try and solve it.
Instead of spending billions of dollars on finding new ways to bring it about.
We are now living in the age of biopolitics, claims University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Jonathan Moreno in his new book The Body Politic: The Battle Over Science in America. “Biopolitics is the nonviolent struggle for control over the actual and imagined achievements of the new biology and the new world it symbolizes,” he writes. “The stakes are about as big as they can get.”
The reminders will come, sooner or later. As (I believe) Steve Yegge put it: I've got a limited number of 5-year projects in me. As I've got less of those, it becomes more important to choose which one you pick.
When you're twenty, it feels like you can tackle everything. As you grow older, you realize that you can't even begin to learn enough to know all the things you'd like to tackle :)
There was a post on HN a while back about this. Apparently most of the studies that demonstrated mental slowdown with age where flawed to the point of being completely worthless.
Or with NoScript running in Firefox. Is requiring Javascript to read a directly-linked blog post a new blogspot thing? Hard to figure why it's necessary to just read some text.
Perhaps you already know this, adding ?v=0 to the end of the URL to see the older version. I even drafted a quick Greasemonkey script for this, but it would need to run on all domains, as some of those blogs have their own domain name outside of blogspot.com
Thanks for the tip! I let myself get miffed at the "grow up" message and forgot one of the prime rules of the intertubes: there are probably smart people out there who have already solved your problem, you just have to remember to look for them.
it gets worse, my work browser (ff 3.6.24 w/various filters and proxies between me and the real world) won't even render the warning, so i have to view source to even figure out the ?v=0 trick.
If we cure aging abruptly, it may halt the accellerating returns of technology. Notice that the time it takes for a retarded idea to go away is the time it takes the community to train the kids the right way, and for the stubborn old folks (who don't need training) with all the money and power to hand off the reigns to the fresh mind. A cornerstone of our American explosive progress is that old people and old ways get the hell out of the way by losing their ability to think straight. If people never die, we will have to create a new system to preserve this creative destruction cycle. A simulated turnover of power from the old to the new. A scary thought: the popular world religions/delusions during the time aging was cured will be the religions that remain with us for a thousand years.
A lot of that unwillingness to change is not having the energy or mental capacity to do adapt to those changes. 80 year olds with the bodies and minds of 22 year old athletes will be very different than the 80 year olds of today.
That's just false. Technological and societal progress was immensely faster when average lifespan skyrocketed in the 20th century that the ancient times when people died at 50
How many people over 100 years old helped spark the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, the computer revolution. If we cure aging, 90% of customers will be this group, voting, writing legislation, these people don't need no stinkin inter tube or whatever you call it. Im not talking about 50 to 80 old. Im talking about the entire world consisting of people who have the mental age of over 100, with no ability or desire to replace the slide rule with a calculator, or a calculator with a computer program. If we cure aging, hopefully we can motivate the elderly to start startups on tech that came out 5 years ago.
retarded idea to go away is the time it takes the community to train the kids the right way
Uh. As you age, you'll notice that an awful lot of "progress" is circular, and the people most often talking about the new, "right way" are the people who stand to benefit.
A cornerstone of our American explosive progress is that old people and old ways get the hell out of the way
Interesting. And here I thought that America's explosive progress was a combination of pioneer spirit, massive resources, and a whole bunch of very lucky historical confluences.
the popular world religions/delusions during the time aging was cured will be the religions that remain with us for a thousand years.
I think your views are very short-sighted. First off, people change quite a lot over their lives. I've seen devout believers become atheists in a few short years.
Additionally, consider the time spans we're talking about. If a person is immortal, he or she will eventually forget virtually everything at least once.
I love getting older. I always tell people that I don't think of birthdays as getting a year older, I think of them as leveling up.
I'm level 41 now, and I hope to earn enough experience points to make it all the way to level 80, or even level 90 one day.
Sure, I can't run quite as fast, but I still try to run. What's best, though, is that I get all the increased abilities that come from leveling up. More wisdom, more knowledge, more credibility, and maybe even a bigger kingdom if I do things well.
When I was 21, everything was hard. Talking to new people was hard, getting a job was hard, even getting taken seriously was hard. I paid those dues already, I have no interest in going backwards. I'd rather keep leveling up.