What Old Age Is Really Like | Hacker News Reader

What Old Age Is Really Like

newyorker.com

59 pointswerber30 comments

That's a lot of words to say not much besides the obvious fact that old people are just like us, trying to get by, still doing, for the most part, what they have been doing all along.

My parents are both 84 and behave like everyone else; they use technology just like teenagers do, my father texting constantly with his grand children and my mother using her phone to take pictures of everything and anything. They each have their own computer and share files with Dropbox. They go on holidays. The set up wifi in their country home by themselves when they get there.

As for the "reading list", may I suggest Saint-Simon? This contemporary of Louis XIV, born in 1675, wrote all his life but started his masterpiece, his Memoirs, when he was 65 (in 1740) and finished 10 years later at 75, having produced the amazing total of around 3 million words (for reference, the 7 books of Harry Potter are under 1 million words; the King James bible around 750k words).

Creating in old age isn't something that happened miraculously in the 21st century.

> That's a lot of words to say not much besides...

That's why I read less and less magazines articles. Lots of efforts put into the form rather than the content, that read like a school exercise (intro-thesis-conclusion). Would rather spend my time reading informal but to-the-point blog pieces.

Bah, you can level that kind of critique at any writing.

To Kill a Mockingbird? Just a lot of words for saying racism is bad.

Lors of the Flies? Just a lot of words for saying people suck.

The piece is about illuminating misconceptions about old age by illustrating them and then refuting them, while simultaneously examining why these stereotypes exist and are harmful.

Which is a lot of words for saying there's more to it than your pithy summation.

I liked the sentence:

""" She says that the biggest problem for many older people is “ageism, rather than the process of aging itself.” """

When I nowadays apply for jobs (I am 50), I start to experience this already. Kids interview me and I ask myself: where are the companies, where others like me work, so I don't have to answer silly questions about failing memory and hurting backs anymore. Mine doesn't hurt and my memory is crystal clear - like the one of my 86 year old mother.

Don't want to know what happens in 30 years from now. What I do experience: When I need an appointment with my doctor, I am asked, when I want to come. My mother who needs to see the doctor much more urgently, has to wait for 4-5 weeks.

I'm not 50 yet but seriously, where do developers work as we age. It seems like I see fewer and fewer of us past 30.

As far as I can tell after serious study of this†:

You work in a field that doesn't care about or can respect age, embedded and especially jobs requiring security clearances (which are expensive to get for the very first org that hires you), you become a consultant or otherwise self-employ, you work directly for the government, you get very lucky, or you find another line of work.

†I first became aware of this in a particular job search when in my mid-late '30s, I got a clue, scrubbed my resume of all indications of how old I am, and then got a massive increase in responses. Started following the issue closely since then.

I hear its very bad in the Bay Area, but, oh, based on an acquaintance in the Boise, Idaho region after HP laid off a bunch of older guys like himself and replaced them with H-1Bs, it's bad in many places (after consulting for a while he had to settle for a state government job, helping to rescue a bunch of Java done by a literally criminal body shop).

It's a slog, but in the end, it delivers.

I rather like how John Scalzi handles it in Old Man's War and sequels. I also like the old people in perpetually young bodies that Vernor Vinge, Greg Egan, Charles Stross, etc go on about. It's too bad that I'll be dead before any of that is possible. So it goes.

My mentor used to say that no big change happens when you age, you have the same thoughts and desires as you did when you were a child and you wouldn't remember you were old if various body parts didn't hurt periodically.

Your capacity for learning new physical skills seriously diminishes. This seems to happen in your late 20s early 30s. If you don't develop the physical conditioning or body awareness as a child, there are things you may never be able to learn.

This is certainly true, but observing some of my peers, I now have the distinct feeling that the desire to learn new things, both physically and intellectually, diminishes much more quickly that the actual ability.

I think some of this comes down to the fact that after a long time working you see what look like the same problems appearing and being solved, and then they appear again and a new solution comes along, and then again and again...

It may partly be a failure of pattern recognition, where the problem being solved seems to be similar to what has been done before, but actually it is different enough that a new solution is warranted.

Or it may be frustration at the fact that the problem was never really solved in the first place.

Or it could be you look at a solution and think, this is just like a previous solution with some minor changes, nothing new to learn.

What kind of skills?

Nunchuk skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills...

My personal interests at the moment are handstands and improving flexibility.

I was going to say much the same. As I have gotten older (46yo currently), I've come to realize that my thoughts are generally the same as when I was a teenager. It was a rather enlightening moment when I discovered it was true for a great many people that I would consider old.

Sure, I know more things, but forgotten others. I like to think the former outnumber the latter. Perhaps I'm wiser. Perhaps not.

But, for the most part, I still have the same thoughts as before, be they wonder, delight, dirty, sad. Hopefully I will express the correct ones at the proper times, but probably won't.

I found it fascinating when I realized that most others are in the same boat. The guy standing next to me at the bank might be 73 but he is obviously enthralled with the pretty teller behind the window, and I'm sure that if I told him a dirty joke, or even one that disparages someone's race, gender, or religion, we would both laugh because we are too old to care about political correctness, and besides, we are thinking like the teenagers we feel we are, anyway.

And we'll laugh without guilt because we understand that a joke can be funny and still not lower our respect of those that resemble the characters in our jokes, and I hope others are telling equally funny jokes with characters bearing a striking resemblance to myself.

And this is why aging should be cured.

Read his post again. There is nothing there to suggest any diseased thinking in need of curing. If anything, it is as humble in its honesty as it is hope-giving for a world beside itself with anxiety about aging.

Not diseased thinking. Diseased body, as there's a healthy mind in an ailing body. That's how I read it, anyway.

That's how i meant it.

I said nothing about diseased thinking. The fact that old people are like young people, only in failing bodies is why aging should be cured. There is nothing positive about aging, contrary to what some people like to insist.

That’s an awfully awful defense of bigotry. So unaware, so unempathic, so awful through and through.

I really hope that I will never think that way, no matter how old I am.

Ok.

Well done attempting to show an example of perceived bigotry by displaying proper bigotry.

But don't worry, as you age, if you are as lucky as the OP has been and as many other aging folks have for years ... nothing should change!

>That’s an awfully awful defense of bigotry. So unaware, so unempathic, so awful through and through.

Did you use his simple remark as an excuse to have an outlet for your own hatred?

There are far greater injusticies in the world to be so furius about than two old people laughing (and betweem themselves too) with a "culturally insensitive" or even racist joke.

The one's who can't stand such things, are the ancestors of the very countries that perpetuated the worst racist crimes. So a lot of this PC fervor can be ascribed to guilt, or as an outlet for the same puritan and prudish thinking that made those cultures consider blacks as inferior (immoral, lustful, etc) in the first place.

In the 7 billion-something world (and I've been to most of it), regular people enjoy what you'd call a "racist" joke, INCLUDING for themselves and their own cultures. It's a way to laughs at one's neighbors but at one's self too.

You are obviously using this context to make a personal point. Not everyone gets lazy about being sensitive as they get older.

It's hard to get lazy about a habit that you never possessed.

I think it's a pretty common experience for people, as they age, to have something akin to the "impostor syndrome" and not really feel that they are older.

I'm only 30, but I certainly don't feel much different than at, say, 20, except for life situation.

The problem is the idea that you should feel older. You somehow think you should feel differently, and you don't, so you think you're an impostor.

I stopped feeling very different from year to year after age 25. I'm now 30 and of course I change, but not dramatically every year. The prefrontal cortex doesn't fully form until 25.

I think it was when I stopped making excuses for my grandfather and started admitting he is a racist, lecherous, inconsiderate asshole (promoted by all the stores the other old folk would reminisce over him being exactly that his entire life, like it's all just a lark), that I stopped seeing old people as "otherly".

Being "set in your ways" is not endearing, and certainly not acceptable. "It was a different time" is bullshit. No, it wasn't. There is no demarcation line between now and then. There weren't any different issues, everyone had the same problems. We are all products of the same past. Time is continuous. Playing this game of "you get a pass because you're gonna die soon anyway" is infecting future generations with the idea that we can tolerate intolerance if the intolerant person is particularly stubborn enough.

Barring straight up senility, the persons your elders are now we're the people they've always been. If they don't get technology today, it's because they have always been unable to easily learn new things. If they say racist shit today, it's because they lived through the civil rights movement of the 60s--as well as all of the other movements we've gotten to live through ourselves--and said "yep, that's not for me". If they act like your opinion can't possibly be right or important, it is because they were always a sociopath.

Age doesn't make you an asshole. If anything, I've seen it mellow people out. You will be you, just slower.

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