Dietary restriction of isoleucine increases healthspan and lifespan of mice

We grow up young, inexperienced, eager to learn, eager to try things and fail, our metabolism is much higher than needed, in order to compensate for this frantic phase of our lives.

Then as we settle, and slow down, the best are selected and assigned positions of responsibility. As they carry out their tasks, they get set in their ways and learn less, and repeat more. Eventually they become outdated, and need to be replaced with the next generation, or they begin to stall progress by insisting their way is better.

It's not an issue of health, it's an issue of entropy. Our brains are not designed to learn forever. We do learn a bit to the day we die, but not deeply. To learn forever, the way you learned as you were young, means you constantly risk losing yourself. This is dangerous when you're in a position of power. You need to reduce mutability as you increase your leverage, to maintain a steady course into a known direction everyone can follow along with.

You can't be a careless child and an adult leader at the same time. Those are incompatible roles. They have the extreme opposite of requirements.

There's no such moment of "peak performance" that you can hold onto. It's a wave, an oscillation. You're born, you grow, you learn, you're selected, you give back, then you retire to be consulted by the next generation only when they need you.

If thousands of specialists die before they give what they found useful to the next generation, they've failed at their purpose.

To record knowledge, to replicate it, we have speech, spoken, written, visual media, telephony, internet, videos, media in general. We have everything we need.

But it's the role of the next generation to take this in and refract it through their always evolving understanding.

Nothing is static. Only immutable nothingness is static. Unchanging. To try to hold onto something forever, unchanging, to live forever, is the same as death.