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Comment by gmfawcett | Hacker News Reader

This is a much more compelling argument than the article's.

This is my impression as well. Old people who have settled in a routine can tell what year and month it is, but probably have a harder time telling the day or weekday. For them, all days are weekends.

You don't even need to be old to feel this. I've had vacations where I mostly played JRPGs, and those vacations certainly felt considerably shorter.

JRPGs, as well as the Civ games, are time compressors. You blink and 5 hours have passed.

Commuting / driving.

Games like factorio must be 'super compressors'.

And Kerbal Space Program.

Why are those birds cheeping? Oh, it's the dawn chorus. Again.

So if you grow the factory big enough, time and space take on new relative dimensions, and the Doctor shows up? Or do you become the Doctor?

God, really? I can't take those for more than 1h at a time usually. Except Chrono Trigger I guess. Any recommendations?

JRPGs? The Persona series is quite interesting, good story telling; Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and 2 are both very good; NieR Automata is a great action RPG set in a dystopic future; the old school Zeldas, the original Phantasy Star...

I admit, they're all an acquired taste in many ways but once you get into it and stop minding the complexity in some of them, they can suck you in and move you out of time.

Chrono Trigger is an excellent game! Maybe Chrono Cross (PS1) if you want to play a sequel.

Other classics are Dragon Warrior IV for the NES, and Phantasy star IV for the Sega Genesis. No need to play the previous ones.

My other recommendation is using an emulator to give you unlimited money and experience. The gameplay is ruined, but the storytelling is more fluid, and you'll save many hours.

You might correct that to "people who don't work" instead of "old people".

Not necessarily. People who don't work aren't necessarily living boring lives.

Just pointing out a bit of inadvertent ageism.

And I definitely wasn't implying they live boring lives. My spouse for example doesn't work, and in fact is quite busy with an impressive garden landscape. She doesn't always know what day it is, because it doesn't usually matter.

I think I was unintentionally ageist, sorry. I'm fifty myself, it wasn't deliberate.

Also, a routine doesn't necessarily gets boring, you're right. I was thinking of a university friend of mine. He didn't work, only studied for finals, and had a very interesting life with little money. Somehow he didn't flunk.

You weren't being "ageist". It's normal to assume that old people live at home and aren't out doing many things. It's also normal to assume that 16 year olds get acne.

Please don't let someone censor you for acting rationally.

> It's normal to assume that old people live at home and aren't out doing many things

No, it's not normal. Not at all. I hope for all that's good it's not your life when you're old, or if you're old it's not your life.

I think you are misinterpreting OP's comment. They didn't say that old people aren't out doing many things, they said that it was normal to assume that old people aren't out doing many things. There is a difference.

I still think that OP is incorrect that this is evidence that previous comment is not ageist. Just because most people hold the same prejudice doesn't stop it being prejudice.

Back in the 1920's it would have been quite normal for white people to assume that black people (like myself) were inferior. Just because it was normal doesn't mean it wasn't racist.

>Back in the 1920's it would have been quite normal for white people to assume that black people (like myself) were inferior. Just because it was normal doesn't mean it wasn't racist.

Not the same. You can't measure inferiority. You can measure activities, time and age.

I am right.

No. It's 100% normal.

>I hope for all that's good it's not your life when you're old, or if you're old it's not your life.

I have no idea what you mean here.

I stand corrected. My main point was that people whose days are more or less identical tend to forget what day it is. The second part of my original comment even shows that it can happen to young people, so age is not the main cause.

Exactly. Young people can lose their teeth in one instant too, but that shouldn't stop us assuming that older people have less teeth. Heck, even teeth don't care how old you are and can be lost at any age.

I'm 60. I'm learning to be sensitive about it, while also being aware that there are those that are younger who have insights I don't.

It's a partnership, and it works better when one tries to understand that roles evolve over time - for one's self and for others. Also understand that stereotypes of age (and many other things) are not a great way to go through life.

It's not ageism to recognise the negatives of age... jesus christ.

That's fine as long as it's ok to point out the negatives of youth.

But even that's not fine. Better to recognize we're all different, whether it be age, race, creed, orientation, cilantro/no-cilantro, whatever. VI vs EMACS tho - 'nother story.

No, that's fine.

Recognising that we're different is fine. That comes with recognising that some of us are the same.

I mean, it's not age-ist. Age-related? Age-correlated? Age-esque? Yes, for sure. But "age-ist" brings with it a connotation of being derisive which is definitely not part of this conversation.

I've seen a different explanation. When you are 10 years old, a year of your life is 1/10th of your life. Relatively, it's a large portion. When you are 50 years old, a year of your life is a much smaller 1/50th portion of total memory, experiences, etc.

This is more intuitive, but I don't know that it makes it more compelling for me. I find the article's hypothesis a bit more interesting, since it's not exactly what one would expect.

Both can be true in their own way though.

Yes, I agree, the article is very bad and I don't know how it got upvoted so highly here.

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