Comment by zabzonk
1 day ago
I was once unemployed for a year when I was young (about 19) and I rather frighteningly read about one (probably 0.75) fairly serious novel a day (think Graham Greene sort of stuff). I have loads of time on my hands now (I'm 72) and thankfully could not get anywhere near that today.
I spent years reading a little in bed before falling asleep and I wish I had never started doing that. I've conditioned myself that reading leads to sleep and now it's very difficult for me to read for long because a few pages in I start to feel sleepy.
Same, but I don't think it's the conditioning itself, it's just being comfortable. I can't watch/listen to a video of a presentation either and struggle sitting in at presentations.
> and thankfully could not get anywhere near that today.
Because you're addicted to HN now and HN didn't exist by then?
I don't spend anywhere near the time on HN today that I used to spend reading books back then.
how scary is the decay of cognition? i'm 29 and i already noticed the amount of energy i had on my early 20s on everything, stamina to read, watch movies, exercise, recover from the exercise etc. compared to what i have now. guess it's a slow downhill till i mature to old age but still. shit. i hate the linear time
It's important to factor in lifestyle factors here.
By the time you hit 40, you've accumulated ~20 years of adult-life habits. For a lot of people, that lifestyle is very sedentary, missing most dietary recommendations (insufficient fiber intake, oversufficient saturated fat intake), poor sleep, frequent emotional stress etc.
As a young adult, you've spent most of your life being very active, sleeping ~10 hours a night (as a child), having plenty of downtime and playtime etc. It's why you can party hard, study hard and sleep a little; you're starting fresh.
The good news is that some of these habits are massive levers; biological age can drift decades (worst-to-best).
> The good news is that some of these habits are massive levers; biological age can drift decades (worst-to-best).
Do you have any good readings to recommend on this topic?
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43, I've never felt better or smarter, the wisdom vs intelligence ratio is real, and you learn to take better care of yourself over time. I am definitely old, but it's less in the brain than I would have expected when I was younger.
The other thing you gain is time contraction - a year now feels like a month when I was younger, so it's easier to plan long term and follow through on projects.
But I too am very interested in the perspective from closer to 80! I suspect, if I'm lucky enough to make it there, I'll consider present me the same kind of fool as I now consider younger me.
I'm in my mid 30s and I already feel the time contraction. I have noticed that weeks are going by incredibly quickly, and months and years have started to feel like they slip by faster and faster. I live a fairly busy life, and I enjoy it, so I am not walking around with regrets, but it is concerning sometimes that it seems like an entire season has gone by without me really realizing it.
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The regret is what infuriates me. If I knew in high school what I know now about how to take care of this specific body, I’d have been unstoppable.
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I find it a bit scary too - I simply cannot write programs anymore (mostly motivation, I think) though I'm not conscious of decay in my other mental functions. But I suppose those poor people that go wandering off into the night would say the same sort of thing.
So you think that it's mostly a lack of general "stamina" for actually doing things, over the lessening of abilities to do things ?
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My experience dating someone younger. She was still in college and I was already working full time. I noticed that if we stayed late night on the weekend, she would make the sleep back during the week, may be in short spans, here and there. But once you work full time, you cannot. At work, you have be up and ready all day. So you carry a sleep debt for a long time. Once, she started working full time, she was as tired as me.
I'm not the OP and I imagine all cases are different, but my dad was a software developer who had early cognitive decline in his 60s (he died of vascular dementia recently) and he used to talk about it a lot. He said it was like his tolerance for complexity kept closing in.
Where he could once hold an entire system and its details in his head (almost an essential skill in the 80s/90s), he could only instead focus on smaller pieces at a time. Any new tooling or approaches that came along, he was fascinated to hear about them, but no longer felt able to pick them up. He could still solve algorithmic problems and debug "in the small", but it was like he had to do math on a Post-it note where once he had a huge sheet of paper.
It's not a linear cognitive decline but more like hitting a wall (usually late 40s/early 50s). What's it like? Frustrating as Hell because you can remember your prior capabilities but have to deal with things like randomly forgetting words/names temporarily, decreased short-term memory abilities, etc.
Don't you feel an increase of abstraction level though? I became 2x slower at 30 but a lot of concepts started to click.
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