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Comment by pazimzadeh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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