Professional Decline Comes Sooner Than People Think

I think this is a bs pseudo-science article. Instead of saying it’s an age decline maybe just say that it’s very rare to do the same thing progressively better for more than 20 years. Therefore instead of viewing life in progressive terms, view it in cyclical terms. At some point you have to start over at the bottom. For some reason people at age 50 develop a snobbery that prohibits this — they must keep on doing the same thing they’ve always been doing or they would rather do nothing. That’s nonsense. Ask any entrepreneur who starts over — and they’ll tell you how they’ve done it so many times it’s as natural as walking. And by the way I bet those are the same people who are still active professionally well past their 60s. Telling people they can’t do something after a certain age is just a self fulfilling prophecy of psycho-babble. People already feel this way - so what is the point of perpetuating it?

A good reason to seek financial independence early - then at least you have some time to find what gives your life meaning and makes you happy.

> Though the literature on this question is sparse, giftedness and achievements early in life do not appear to provide an insurance policy against suffering later on

ISTM it's more a guarantee of suffering later for a lot of reasons, aging out of wunderkind territory, a realization that there isn't enough time left to beat the unbeatable foe, and for the pro geeks our industry's rampant ageism.

In the 1950's, they were telling us cigarettes are good for us (not me, I came to be in 1979) because n doctors are also smoking it, etc etc. Check the ads from that era and you will find their persuasive arguments to be similar to what we have nowadays for certain other things.

Then also before this was Pasteur and his flawed germ theory. So they began boiling milk until it turned into something useless if not downright harmful. (Milk stops being milk when you boil past 70 Celsius).

Fastforward to early 80's: they began telling us fat is bad for us (it is not, check Eric Berg on EWEtube). So sheep that most people are who need to be told what is good or not, they wrongly assumed sugar was safe, since nobody said sugar was bad. That is also why you have low-fat milk and other such nonsense.

Further down the historic line, various fads appeared. Sexy girls wrote books on how meat is dangerous and persuaded the gullible that since the cattle are being pumped all sortsa chem, so being a vegan is the right healthy thing to do.. (flaw: just cuz there is bad meat doesn't mean all meat is bad or veganism good, check the death rates of young Vegans dropping like flies on catwalks).

So my point is that along come so many experts and tell us so many false things, that it becomes difficult to navigate the noise and latch on to useful signals. One such noise is the article, which extrapolates an anecdotal or Personal observation as true for all people.

To make it sound scary, they even add "professional" decline, with all the menacing undertones it carries. I know there is nothing wrong in preparing for older age, and for some it can be faster than for others due to so many factors (such as aluminum consumption which causes dementia and doesn't exit the body--good ole Al lodges in the brain cells).

What is wrong with this article is scare-mongering and becoming a cry-wolf story rather than an intellectually valid, science-backed article.

But then what do you expect of some journos. (No offense to ALL journalists). They get paid to scare us, so that our Amygdala shrinks and we make hasty and wrong decisions, or simply freeze our brain's plasticity. Even if what I just assumed is unintentional, it still just as harmful.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with using scare as a tactic as long as a positive side is presented so that the brain sees a balance and the Amygdala doesn't shrink. But merely scaring people is unfair. It may even work as a Placebo and cause people to decline faster given that the newspaper already primed them for it. Smh.

An entire article about mental and physical decline with age that didn't mention exercise, nutrition, or diet is just a fluff piece. We all know that age will eventually slow us down, but 1) we want to know why and 2) what can we do to slow that process down.

Check out Peter Attia sometime for someone who is thinking about this topic and working on actual strategies. https://peterattiamd.com

I'm 21 and I still hated this article

I enjoy how it is thinking constructively about planning a life after the 'peak' times. The football player becoming a coach or referee rather than simply sinking into obscurity. My only criticism is that the messaging seems a little dire. It's not like your brain disappears at 50.

Eric Schmidt recently tweeted this article https://twitter.com/ericschmidt/status/1143904558663389184

Brutal and depressing. Might as well just end it all at 50. None of the spiritual mumbo jumbo resonated with me at all. What's the point of going on if you can't contribute?

The title has been changed from the original. The original title is "Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think"