Set in Our Ways: Why change is so hard after our 20s | Hacker News Reader

Set in Our Ways: Why change is so hard after our 20s

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39 pointsmakimaki20 comments

Is it that odd? Think of it like this: your 20s are like that new program in Rails. Nothing holding you back. No legacy structures to support. Just wonderful. But as life goes on, it starts looking more like that Java program with jars everywhere, weird structures no one knows why they were made, requirements that no longer make any sense. Eventually, you build up enough cruft that you have Cobol programmers picking over lines just to keep you running.

I'm in my 20s, but kinda lame so I'm already thinking about a house, what city I'll end up in, planning for my retirement. Every one of these decisions locks me into something. As I put money into retirement accounts, I become less agreeable to changes in the tax code. For example, I'm not as for wonderful new national pension since I've already locked money away for retirement. As I lock myself into a city/area, I become less amenable to things like market competition. For example, if I moved to Seattle for the long haul, I would want the government to defend Boeing since its downfall would really hurt the place I've invested myself in.

We achieve more ownership in the world as we age. It ties us into the decisions of our past. Most importantly, at that point, a lot of change becomes negative. One of my professors from college is teaching a course to state Cobol programmers to teach them Java. They hate it. They just want to hang on and not loose something rather than compete with young Java programmers in a language they just learned.

We make changes as a society. Change is often very beneficial. It's often opposed by those who have ownership before the change. Maybe we should take into consideration how change adversely affects people and help them through it - like the course teaching Cobol programmers Java so that they're still skilled for modern systems. Yes, they're not so happy with the training, but it keeps them relevant rather than simply letting them become skill-less as Cobol programs get retired.

Good post. Increasing investment in the status quo is a nice way to look at this.

A long time ago someone made the point, which stuck in my mind, that all of this is an argument in favor of death. If people didn't die, stuff wouldn't change.

I think the habit-forming nature of human consciousness goes far deeper than we've yet admitted. That might also explain why people change less as they age - they've been around longer so habits have had longer to form. Gene Clark had a great line, "The longer you're in one place, the harder it gets to leave."

I recall a quote: 'Progress is made one death at a time.' but I can't remember who said it.

There's also a famous line from Max Born (or was it Planck) who said: New ideas are accepted in science not because anyone changes his mind, but because old scientists die. (I'm paraphrasing.)

If people knew they would live for millions of years, I'm confident some of them would get around to changing their policies a bit to allow for some gradual changes.

I think you're underestimating the force of habit.

Also, when you do the same thing for a long time, time itself changes. A million years relative to our psychology would not be anything like a million years relative to million-year-beings'.

We only need 0.01% of the population to make changes, and not very fast, and they will eventually transform the world to the point it's hard for others to ignore.

We're working with very different models, I must say!

Don't waste your time like I did. I'll summarize it for you:

People don't change as much after 30 because like maybe it's because they have more responsibilities?

Turning vague scientific studies into overpromising articles is a habit many writers find hard to change.

Somehow they all find jobs at Scientific American

And New Scientist!

I recommend everyone see the Seven Up series (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Up!) as it is one of the best documentaries ever made. In it, Michael Apted interviews a group of British children from a variety of backgrounds every 7 years, from the time they are 7 until (currently) they are 49.

It is quite striking to see how people change and progress as they age, and you can definitely see how little they change after their 20s in the series.

I think a lot of being "set in our ways" has to do with not accepting that we might be wrong about something, or that we might not fully understand something. As we age, we like to believe we know things and feel certain of the way things are. As an infant, we quickly learn about gravity and come to accept that it pulls things to the ground. We put our life in the hands of that belief when we learn to walk. When we start making decisions in life, we like to believe that we know enough to understand everything involved.

The older we age, the more we seem to be driven to find answers to things we don't understand. When we find answers that seem to fit we find comfort in locking them in place as pure fact, since they make future decisions that much easier. Children know they don't know, and therefore are more open to learning, growing, and changing. Keeping this process going as we age involves looking objectively at everything and never accepting one answer as the only answer.

I've already noticed myself being locked into a particular way: I've been anti-social my entire life and I grew to accept that. I was happy with it, and it didn't bother me. But recently I realized that the one thing I'm not good at should be the thing I work hardest at improving, otherwise how can I continue to grow in life? Children are playful because they're constantly curious, constantly asking questions. Hackers maintain this curiosity, this questioning mentality, which is exactly why they're the ones at the frontier of so many emerging technologies.

I'm only 26, so I'll just have to wait and see if my thinking is correct. :)

I think that mdasen's comment is much closer to the truth. It isn't arrogance or excessive confidence that makes people more conservative as they get older, it's the investment, responsibilities, and ties they develop to the status quo. These are the same reasons that people will keep trudging along in a job that they know that they hate -- the devil you know is better than the one you've yet to meet.

Personally, I'm not becoming more arrogant or confident about what I know as I get older; if anything, I'm less sure about most things. I certainly hedge a lot more of my bets. The only bits of knowledge that I'll stridently defend are really just higher-order patterns: happiness is more important than wealth; hard work doesn't guarantee success; fads are fickle, etc.

In my world, you are wrong. When I was young, I knew with absolute certainty that I was right. Things were black and white. I thought I knew everything.

As I grew older, I realised that there are no absolutes. Things are hardly ever true, there is no perfect way to do things. Everything is just a truth by tendency of mass, and that is fundamentally fluid.

I think that's the most important thing I've learned in my life. That whenever I think I know something, all I know is either how to do something, or what I think about something. Which is different from actually knowing the thing.

The title's accounting is a bit off:

"They found that openness increased modestly up to age 30 and then declined slowly in both men and women. The survey results suggest that men begin adulthood slightly more open to new experiences than women but decline in openness during their 30s at a faster rate than women."

This puts 30 at the peak of openness and suggests that people may be as open to change in their 30s as in their 20s.

Deleted comment

> I've gone through more change in the last 2-3 years than most of my life (I'm now 21). I would not even understand who I was 2 years ago, let alone last year.

I've noticed this as well and I think it might be a good indicator of how "set in our ways" we are becoming. Myself, I always feel like I'm so much smarter and more experienced than the "me" of 1 year, 1 month, and even 1 week ago. (When I read posts on my blog from years ago, I feel like I'm reading a stranger's blog!)

I continue to feel this way, so I take it as an indication that I'm still growing, learning, and understanding new things and seeing things from new perspectives. If I felt like I was no smarter or different than I was a year ago, I'd think something was seriously wrong!

This hasn't been true for me at all. For me, leaving my 20s has been a great motivator to try/do all kinds of new and different things.

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