Comment by AngryParsley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AngryParsley | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, it's blatant ageism. As much as we hate to admit it, our minds and bodies start to decline almost as soon as we reach maturity. Not only does raw intelligence drop as we age, but some personality traits change. Of the Big Five, openness to new experiences takes the biggest hit. See http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#aging and http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/www/external/labor/agin... for the scientific evidence.

Obviously these stats don't mean that old people are stupid and close-minded. Knowledge accumulates and helps offset many of the deficiencies. Still, this evidence does suggest that young people might want to change their behavior to benefit their future selves. This doesn't just mean making the most of the time you have. Exercise, continuous learning, and a few drugs can help to slow the decline. As an analogy, think of athletes. A 50 year-old is never going to win the Boston marathon. But with proper training, nutrition, and maybe a few performance-enhancing drugs, they can beat 95% of 25 year-olds.

Being open to new experiences, in my opinion, is much more a matter of the people you surround yourself with, than with physiology. Sure, your brain may change a little bit in your 20s and not so much in your 30s, but if you have the right friends, perhaps some younger friends, they will drag you into new things.

I have felt that palpably running my own company for the last 5 years. In the first few years, it was just my wife and I doing everything, writing the code and running the business. As we started to make enough money that we could hire people, I started to notice how set in our ways we became.

Since we had started writing iPhone apps near the beginning of the mobile revolution, our code was written to suit older devices. In places, we did things for performance reasons so our apps would work well on old phones. Also, we never adopted ARC, because that's just not how we did it. But as we started to hire people, our engineers pushed us to change our old ways, and as a result, our code became much better.

So, I say - don't fear the reaper. Just find some young friends (or employees). I turned 30 this year, so I have a few gray hairs, but working with people in their 20s really has changed my ideas on the right way to do things, and given me perspective on my own life.

reading this i thought you might be 40+ and was suprised you write "turned 30 this year". You make yourself much older than you are..i will turn 30 too in 2 months but i have never felt to need to "surround myself with younger people in their 20s"..Many of my friends are late 20s, mid 20s or even early 20s, still nobody feels that anyone of the other is "old" or "young", its just not much of a difference to be noticed anyway.

One thanksgiving I showed an 80 year old how to put a candle out with a hand gesture. He was really into it an in his words there are far fewer really new things at 80 than you might think. Which struck me as the core of a lot of ageism, when your young doing just about anything is a solid learning environment, but eventually it becomes tough to continue to develop new skills. Your job becomes all about leveraging what you already know not expanding you into new areas the same for your social circle and if your not careful hobby's.

>Of the Big Five, openness to new experiences takes the biggest hit.

Interesting links.

Perhaps I have some sort of Benjamin Button thing going on. I spent most of my "youth" being quite reserved. Up until my mid-20s I was primarily concerned with not screwing up what I believed to be precious, fragile success.

I've increasingly opened up as I've gotten older and at 33 feel decades "younger" than I did heading into my 20s for whatever that's worth.

I wonder what my chart would look like? Would I actually find myself rising in these regards relative to the average, only myself or not at all?

>Exercise, continuous learning, and a few drugs can help to slow the decline.

I could not agree more.

I credit frequent, intense exercise with at least a much benefit to my mind as my body and find boredom hard to fathom.

I'd put surrounding yourself and interacting with the right and likely ever-evolving set of people up there too. Complacency and conformity lead to mental atrophy.

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