It's not just having people around either, it's shared goals and shared responsibilities. I'm more productive when I know others need my work. We could be collaborating on a game at a game jam where the game designer needs me to add some new settings they can tweak and the artist needs a way to get some new data in the game and iterate. That pressure is very motivating for me.
But, for me at least, it's both the feeling of wanting to provide solutions for other team members, the feeling of a shared goal, and the feeling of camaraderie I get from actually being with people (vs being remote)
I've been lucky the majority of projects I worked on were things I wanted to work on and see succeed. I can imagine lots of projects where I wouldn't feel that.
For me that would be travelling, hiking, and generally being in nature - but this requires at least OKish health for the age, which might or might not be there later. Reality is, we mostly don't know how things (and us) will turn up later in life, and if we end up in good spot it will be mostly by sheer luck.
Perhaps this study gives some merit to this premise, at least for cognitive use, if there's really any relationship at all and it's not purely genetic/age related (past data conflicts with some of these findings).
I find myself far more intellectually stimulated doing activities outside work than during work because people don't want to pay me enough for the things I find alluring, so I often compromise and do some bit of what people will pay me to do.
The commenter isn't advocating one way or another, only pointing out that there are people that exist who are content with work as their self-perceived life meaning.
I can absolutely see how this can be true for people in the sciences. There are many academics who devote their entire career - and often their life - to finding the answer to extremely difficult problems. For those people, I imagine they must feel their work as more of a life mission rather than a regular job necessary to pay the bills.
There are a lot of people who find significant meaning in their work (perhaps greater meaning in their work than they've been able to find outside of it). That doesn't necessarily mean it's bad or unhealthy.
These type of people may be few and far between. But they exist.
As you pointed out, the people who share this sentiment are a minority - I'm less convinced it's tiny, what I've read suggests it's a sixth to a third, depending on how satisfied we mean. But that group is heavily weighted towards high-status professions.
As a result, a high-status minority is actively opposed to any social reforms that would increase leisure time, and I do believe we all suffer as a result. I don't think we can really put a price on Albert Einstein staying in that patent office, but I think it's very high and I think we all pay it. That's what I associate with comments like the grandparent - such a person is in a good situation, and good on them for recognizing it. But they often generalize their experience to a majority of the population where that is actually very much the wrong conclusion to draw.
Or maybe it's that with trades you have a direct connection to the work you do and the effect it has on the world.
Either way I think we could learn something from them. White collar types seem to want to avoid work at all costs. Work isn't to be avoided. In fact if you measure your life by how much it affects others, it's probably the most important part of your life.
I can see why tradesmen may have better job satisfaction. You can directly improve the life of someone else.
However, my perspective has evolved somewhat, or changed might be the better word.
Just because something is productive and rewarded by society doesn't mean it can't be addictive. And just because something is rewarding and meaningful doesn't mean you're fully enjoying your life as the present. It can be easy to get caught up in always working for the future as life passes you by.
A life algorithm that's always focused on improving future moments, but that never takes the time to enjoy them when future arrives and they become present moments… it's almost like some sort of tragic Greek myth.
Considering a large definition of work, when you are cooking, cleaning your house, taking care of your children or grandchildren, maintaining your free software or participating in your association in your "free time", you are still working, only perhaps with less strings attached for some of these things, and unpaid for that (note that you can see your retirement leave as an indirect payment).
And that is very comforting to me: you can still work as a retired, on things meaningful to you, without anyone telling you what to do.
And sure, you may have the chance to pick a (paid, employed, founder's) job that is meaningful to you. Best to ensure that you'll still be able to achieve meaningful things to you (on your own) after you leave that job if this is important to you.
As for cooking, cleaning etc one can optimise those activities to do them almost mindlesly I imagine.
But I understand how someone might find fiddling around with photography or home software projects frivolous if they could instead contribute to projects they find significant-but are of a nature that they really need to work on more or less full time.
Hobbies I hate. By definition I'm an amateur and I don't perform well. At my job, I get to exercise the skills I'm best at.
I can't do any old job though. I have to be able to trace at least a thin line from what I'm doing to the broader society.
I know this isn't a common opinion, but I encourage you to at least consider that work—while not fun—is at least a fulfilling way to spend your time. This should be the case regardless of what you do or how much you make.
Depends. If no one else is doing that particular thing, then by definition you're the world expert. It doesn't matter if there are other people who could hypothetically do it better; they're not in the game.
I have a current hobby that most able-bodied technically minded people could do better than me (genetic joint condition), but as far as I can tell I'm accomplishing things no one else has.
Doing it as a hobby just means that you don't do it for money, not that you aren't good at it. For example often your hobbies overlap with your work. I program games as a hobby and program/design extremely performance sensitive things at my job, they overlap quite a lot.
If you love doing something (which is the origin of the word "amateur"), you're likely to be good at it. If you're a professional, it just means you get paid.
Amateurs care primarily about the pursuit itself, while professionals care primarily about their paychecks.
I don't think they're mutually exclusive views. I think it's possible to do meaningful and impactful work outside of your job and career, like volunteering or running a side business as a passion project or even creating artwork, and I can imagine that kind of work being the kind of thing you never retire from.
Building some software prototypes for ideas I have, that I count as a hobby. Reading all the books I do, however more time I spend on it than some work activities, I still think of as a hobby.
The external motivation is not succumbing to dementia.
I’ve seen people suffer from dementia. At the moment I’d rather have the option of euthanasia rather than live like that.
> So he has no doubt that he would get all these things done if he didn't have to work? "Absolutely none. If I didn't have the job, I would be out there living the dream."
Suppose that the guy cashes in his investments and does retire. What do we find? He is waking up at 9:30 am, surfing the Web, sorting out the cable TV bill, watching DVDs, talking about going to the gym, eating Doritos, and maybe accomplishing one of his stated goals.
> Retirement forces you to stop thinking that it is your job that holds you back. For most people the depressing truth is that they aren't that organized, disciplined, or motivated.
https://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/
This was so true for me, anyway. I've always had beer tastes on a decent income, so I was financially free five years into working. Now I have all the free time in the world and it's killing me. I do have so many interests but no motivation or discipline to do them.
You do meet the odd creative and intelligent senior but they are the minority. I hope I fall into that category when I retire!
Also, I will say, I wish the US was more like Europe in giving people the ability to full-time type work but part-time. I think a lot of older people would jump at the chance to work 40-60% and make full time hourly pay.
I really hope to shift down from 5 days / 40 hours a week to something that allows me to start pursuing my dreams long before I retire. It should help me develop the habit instead of being paralyzed by the sudden shock at an older age.
Actually the thought of having to wait to retire & be an old fart before you can get really started on the things you always wanted to do sounds very very depressing. (Unless you're making FU money and retire early, which I'm not)
I also want to make music, and possibly do other arts.
I have been looking to transition to a 4 day week so I can surf and go back country trekking using the extra day.
Having a small garden as well would be wonderful, but I tend to be pretty lazy when it comes to routine chores...
Best of luck!
Learning a new language was my gateway drug into trying different things for a change.
Retirement for me is merely a financial milestone abstraction. The point where monetary wealth throws off sufficient income to meet opex and reasonable capex requirements for the foreseeable future. The Banksian phrase "money is a sign of poverty" operates here though, so that milestone is just a temporary, necessary means to an end.
Like many others in this thread, retirement enables me to go tinker my interests, fueled by an >10K line Emacs Org Mode "curiuoser-and-curiuoser" list. A lot of it is redneck tinkering to be sure ("What would happen if I attached heat sinks to Tesla solar roof tiles that ran a non-corrosive, thermally-efficient carrier liquid through the body of the heat sinks into a heat exchanger in my hot water supply? Damifino, fire up the CAD/CAM-linked CNC and let's go find out!"). Some is of a more serious philosophical/research bent ("What precise factors move the Coasean Boundary of an organization?"). Some of it is of more pedestrian ambitions (learn blue water sailing and open source my findings to extend boat design along Steve Dashew's philosophies). Some is for pure utility (build a bi-fold door shipping container that is a giant toolbox that extends with another into a climate-controlled workshop). Nearly all of it requires finding allies and co-conspirators if only to share and compare notes with, so they are intrinsically highly social activities.
That list goes fractal, too. Every time I tinker around adding to my notes to scratch my itch for one curiosity, I find other avenues I hadn't initially considered, and yet more curiosities are added. Makes me want to upload my mind into a computing substrate with physical world manipulators and clone myself.
I'm never going to approach even a tiny fraction of my curiosities, but fellow co-conspirators and I are going to have a hell of a lot of fun along the way!
Perhaps there's some threshold of 'vegging' that isn't obtained if one has enough hobbies.
People used to know how to type a url into an address bar. If they didnt type it correctly it didnt work. They knew how to type an email address. Now for the life of people, its actually uncomfortable to type example.com without a space into an address bar and go directly to a site and not to google. They purposely put a space between the words because they only know how to search for terms. (This could also be a semi-unconscious learned safety behavior to avoid typos in domains.) The same applies to autocomplete in the TO field of email programs. If a name doesnt autopopulate, "well that email must not exist, because autocomplete isnt suggesting their name."
As fields started thinking more for us, and the raw structure of paths has become more and more hidden (websites to apps, chrome overall shrinking and hiding protocols), I dont think its fair to attribute "well I cant find the url" to cognitive decline. Our interfaces are purpose hiding this stuff and making us depend more and more on fuzzy representations of structure.
That’s the first thing you teach kids when the start browsing by themselves.
Google provides a security layer over the brand-domain pair.
Google profits handsomely from this service but it is invaluable nonetheless.
But the question shouldn't be, "are new interfaces making us dumber?", it should be "what are we doing with this cognitive surplus?"
If you aren't putting that surplus energy somewhere then it'll begin to go away, retired or not.
People used to know how to write in cursive too. Some skills just get obsolete.
I heard this few times. Is it actually a thing that people don't know how to write cursive? Natural writing (cursive) has been a part of primary education in most(perhaps all) countries since the beginning. Did they actually remove it recently? That would be insane. How one is supposed to be able to write quickly, as in when taking notes, without cursive?
One usually types said notes into their phone or speaks them into their watch. Or just writes them quickly the typical way, since there aren't likely to be cases where that wouldn't be sufficient.
Of course. Cursive writing is a use-it-or-lose-it kind of skill, and almost no one uses it any more. It has been replaced by typing. When was the last time you received a letter written in cursive? When was the last time you wrote one?
On the other hand there are kids today that aren't taught proper typing and they can manage 30 words per minute at best while I can do 140 because I type constantly.
if you actually think "fast hand-written note taking" is a critical skill you should advocate for teaching shorthand. I'm not convinced cursive is actually faster and the science on that is hardly clear. http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/cursive-handwriting-and-o...
Since most software development isn't anywhere near nobel or turing-class difficulty, age discrimination policies in hiring and firing make more sense in the context of other factors such as a desire for cheaper workers, trying to avoid retraining costs, and a desire for workers with minimal family or outside commitments (and no interest in work-life balance) as well as fewer health issues.
> researchers have discovered that Alzheimer’s Disease is preceded by DECADES of gradually worsening glucose hypometabolism.
> Brain glucose metabolism can be reduced by as much as 25% long before any memory problems become obvious. As a psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of college students, I find it positively chilling that scientists have found evidence of glucose hypometabolism in the brains of women as young as 24 years old
- https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/diagnosis-diet/201...
Various forms of intelligence by age: https://miro.medium.com/max/1038/1*ccb0bgIqgebwJWTdMGMXXQ.pn...
If this correlation isn't causation, then I'm not sure what is.
As to why old people, higher skill levels in many cases.
People between 40-60 tend to have things they care about outside of work at higher rates.
Before I started, I was pretty concerned about whether I would be able to do this even. Most of my peers are in their 20s and 30s, though it was surprising to me when I started this program that I am not the oldest candidate and there are a couple of us in the higher age ranges. Anyway, I had wondered if I would be able to keep up with the youngsters. In fact, I don't think it has been an issue at all. I think that I am performing at least at as high of or possibly a higher level today than during my first run at graduate education.
I think there are certain factors that I, as an older, more settled, less let's-start-living-life(!) person have as an advantage over my young peers. Many of them still focus a lot of time on socializing, whereas I have my spouse and kids and old friends whom I don't have to see every weekend (the old friends--I see my spouse and kids every day). My younger colleagues do a lot of dumb things still, ones that I sure did also when I was that age and have gotten out of my system.
I would say that there were certain advantages to doing graduate work when I was young, and certain advantages now. I find it impossible to say which is better, but it is at least no worse now than then.
Increasing age and increasing decline can't mean that age causes decline, it shows one or more of: processes which cause decline keep happening, repair processes either don't happen or get worse, new generation either doesn't happen or gets worse.
(If worms were eating your brain, your brain volume would go down and your intelligence would go down as time passed and your age increased, it wouldn't prove that age caused your intelligence loss. Correlation isn't causation).
There is a lot of science to back this up. That getting married and/or having kids is what marks a man's decline in innovative output, because they no longer have to impress potential mates.
But it's also correlative and not causative, and assumes most men make the breakthroughs, which has been traditionally true but almost certainly because of some other factor than just gender.
Testesterone decline begins at 30, regardless of the marital status. https://www.menshormonalhealth.com/normal-testosterone-level... This corroborates (in the correlational sense) my original statement.
To those who silently downvoted it: is it politically incorrect to talk about cognitive decline at any age in general, or only starting from a particular age? If 40 was too early, what is the allowed age? 65? 85?
E.g. I remember my first CS classes, and how I during my algorithm classes "invented" thing after thing just to read on to the next chapter and see my "inventions" covered. But now and again someone will come up with a genuine invention to a problem that is novel and important in part because they've not yet come to learn what the "right solution" to that problem is.
As you learn more, you tend to focus on the perceived narrow gaps of uncharted territories or at adding more at the peaks, where making progress is a massive slog.
From a different perspective, having done multiple startups, I think one of the advantages I had in terms of willingness to jump into something new when I was younger, was lack of knowledge.
I went head first into starting and ISP without knowing either the business side, or the technical side of it - I had enough knowledge to know where to start figuring it out, but not enough to know why it would be hard. And so I did it. We weren't tremendously successful, but we learned a hell of a lot, and in the end it kickstarted my career.
Today, it's far easier for me to look at an idea and think up a hundred reasons why it will probably fail because I know more. While that probably saves me a lot of misery, I've also been through enough startups to know that a lot of the objections people raise that looks fatal can be easily overcome; it's very hard to know which flaws will actually be a problem and which will not, and some even turns out to be advantages (e.g. you find a way past them but your competitors don't). In a sense it is frustrating, and I sometimes wish I could look at an idea and ignore the obvious flaws the way I would have at 20...
Another advantage was being less risk averse even when I did see the risks and flaws. I had far less to lose:
No career to ruin; no house to lose; no child I was responsible for, more time to do something else if I got nowhere.
So when we then look at breakthroughs, to determine if it is down to cognitive differences, we also need to consider how large a proportion at different ages are willing to take those risks and put in that level of effort.
My first startup was planned in a couple of weeks; we got seed funding from some random person one of us met in a bar (...); the following week I moved out from parents into a room in our new office.
I'd never be willing to move that fast today, nor live in the office, because my priorities are different. And while I strongly believe I am more likely to be successful at the things I try today, I am also a lot more cautious about the attempts I make. In the end I'm probably less likely to end up with a stratospheric success due to less willingness to take huge risks and fewer attempts, but I'm also less likely (I think, at least) to end up crashing and burning. Startups are obviously different from e.g. success in science, but I'd suggest similar mechanisms are at play - you build a reputation that depends on certain things that are easier if you stay "safe" in a niche you know you can keep publishing in than if you go for something of totally uncertain payoff; you get comfortable in a working pattern that fits your life etc.
Of course that does not rule out cognitive decline as part of the explanation as well.
When you are twenty, doing anything will teach you a lot.
There's something prescient here. I can't count how many times a day just being surrounded other people I've seen them do or use something slightly more efficient than the way I would do it, and have integrated it into my workflow.
Isolation may be a factor in cognitive decline, we absorb a ton through fleeting social interactions.
Personally I think part of why I've learned a lot of what I know is because as an introvert I often notice that I'm willing to put in a lot of effort into figuring things out myself to avoid asking someone.
As a child I was blind to my motivations, and sometimes it made me miserable because I'd stress out over how to do something that I could have trivially asked about and where figuring out the solution was a lot of effort, but learning the skill of figuring out "anything" on my own has been incredibly valuable.
Today I'm aware of this tendency, and will often force myself to pick the social interaction based on a conscious trade-off of the relative pain of asking vs. doing, but I will still often choose to find a way to learn how to do something on my own rather than ask even when asking would be "less painful", both because it often teaches me more and because maintaining the skill of learning on my own is something I value in itself.
Are you positive that for the 15 years he spent using a computer at work he just wasn't constantly asking younger people in the office to do stuff for him and never learned because computers are scary?
I've seen it before from people who have been using computers at work for decades.
This progression took about 12 years.
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Coxet...
It does different things in different contexts. I can see how this could be confusing.
vs.
Right click > copy; right click > paste
ctrl / cmd -c; ctrl / cmd -v
Which, in my experience, are (almost?) universal.
If your a keyboard native like me, you probably find text entry and editing on mobile fucking sucks.
To be fair though, expecting anyone to be consistent from one moment to the next is a pretty tall order ;)
There are a couple of problems with that. One is that now instead of coordinating one finger you have to coordinate three, which may not be as easy for someone older. To be fair I think all of the gestures do have a simpler secondary alternative somewhere, but that brings the next issue.
iOS (and everyone else) quit documenting stuff a long time ago aside from in help snippets, over the idea that everything was "discoverable."
Aside from the core issue of expecting a user to "discover" complex and rarely-used gestures with no affordances, what happens when you "discover" they don't work anymore?
I guess you get to discover the help entry via Google, or find it in a Tom's Guide "35 things you didn't know you could do..." type article...once you finally realize they changed and that it isn't just you screwing it up.
We really need to create the equivalent of CUA for phone interfaces. Prior to that being broadly adopted, we had to deal with all kinds of variant menu structures and shortcuts in DOS-based and early GUI apps. After that, it was easy to move between things and (eliminating the entire freaking menu bar aside) things have stayed pretty stable since.
Wait hold up. I've been on iOS13 for months now and been super frustrated with what I thought was a buggy copy/paste.
Are you telling me I was just doing it wrong?!
Afraid so, but there you go. Only reason I found out earlier is I lucked across it in my news feed so don't feel too bad. It's pretty obnoxious they didn't have a transition period where both sets of gestures worked.