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Comment by interfixus | Hacker News Reader

I'm ancient (late fifties), but even so, I'm struck by the somewhat creakingly defensive tone of several comments in this thread - stolid narratives on the virtues of middle age experience and perspective. Fourty years younger me would be shaking my head. Present day me still is, a little bit.

I try to keep up. I am not necessarily very good at it, but I try. I have sort of given up on quite a few of my contemporary friends who seem to have sort of given up on trying. But all too clearly, ideas and crazy angles just aren't coming the way they used to. I was probably at my creative peak when I was sixteen. Didn't really know shit about anything, but my writings and drawings from that time are still holding up, as fresh and inspired as anything I ever did.

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Replying to you is quite arbitrary. But, at some point, I have to at least raise my point.

I'm a cardiologist. I see patients every day. Anyone below 70, to me, is young. It's important to me that they feel the same way: it's easy to get old if you feel old. There's nothing factual or evidence based here. It's just my view.

I understand that the running joke in the Valley is that you're old if you're out of your 20s. But, in my reality, 50s is extremely young.

I am in my 50's and I find the vast majority of adult I know at this age range are very uncreative in their thinking. Not sure why, maybe corporate life has beat it out of them.

If you look really closely at the 20 to 30 age group, much of their creativity is a rehash of old ideas, many of which were shown to be lacking when they first came up. They are successful now not because they are good ideas but because those who support them don't know their history and the consequences thereof. In addition many in that age group has less creativity than those who are older.

Following trends and fashions is a common failure amongst people. Just because something has become fashionable doesn't mean that it is good.

You see? It really isn't all that easy even to sound not old.

Lol, problem with being old is seeing people make the same mistakes over and over again!

Companies don't do the research needed, people take ideas that have been around for years, give them a new label and wala, new idea!

voila

thx ;-)

> maybe corporate life has beat it out of them

Good point. I see a lot (most?) of people whose life revolves around their job and their family obligations, with very little time for anything else. Even with a fulfilling job, I speculate this is detrimental to creativity.

If I did not have creativity in my life, I would wither and die.

You know you're on your way out when the cardiologist won't offer to perform surgery because they don't believe the cost–benefit analysis adds up.

The idea here is to die at the age of 92 by being hit by a bus while you were out for a jog, not because the cardiologists called it.

Get off your horse. You're a kid in your late fifties. Ancient my foot. It's this kind of thinking that allows the little children in their 20's and 30's to think that they know it all.

I'm in my late fifties and will not stop learning and thinking about new things (which are often old things in a different guise), new applications for old technology and how to think about the physical underpinnings of the universe. I teach the young (in their teens, tweens and thirties) to think outside of the box when looking at the universe.

I was taught to think this way in my late twenties by a young lady in her late seventies about always staying young. One's body may get aged but one's mind and spirit shouldn't. One should gain wisdom and yet stay in youthful wonder all of one's days.

I am 51. The last few years I studied Pali Suttas, Stoic writings and Christian Church Fathers. That leads all the way up to Frege, Wittgenstein and NAND Gates. The overlaps were astounding. It filled in just tons of historical explanatory blanks in my view of the world.

> I'm ancient (late fifties), but even so, I'm struck by the somewhat creakingly defensive tone of several comments in this thread

Nobody likes the idea that they are growing older and slowly breaking down mentally/physically. So we lie to ourselves ( 50 is the new 20 and 60 is the new 30 ) and naturally get defensive when people hold up a mirror to us.

> But all too clearly, ideas and crazy angles just aren't coming the way they used to.

Not only that, as we age, we get more conservative and risk averse. Especially as we hit retirement age and you have to live on fixed income.

And as you grow older, you become more cynical with life because you see how the world really is. All the naive idealism and optimism and vigor of youth just fades away.

You can notice this on social media. As the demographics gets older, the creativity and "edginess" and coolness fades and things get more plain, dull and boring. People clamor for more censorship and more moderation and the more mundane. And all the new/hip/creative things are happening on younger platforms with younger people.

People clamor for more censorship

It's the 20-somethings that are doing this, the 40- and 50-somethings I know are generally horrified. But those are old enough to remember the Internet before it retreated into walled gardens, the old days of Usenet.

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