There’s a kind of a cognitive malaise that can creep in as you get older. Not everyone experiences it—I am always reminded of my dissertation chair, and the day that this aging, already silver man who was clearly increasing in frailty, told me he still had so much to do, and so many ideas, and so much “energy” and so on—but I think I’ve seen it in most people, and I see it in myself.
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I think for most people, “so many ideas” is a condition of youth. This is often put down to cognitive decline, or preoccupation with family and bills. I think both play a part, but I also think physical decline plays a part in ways that often don’t get their due.
For example, at 47 things tire me more than they used to. When it’s 6:05 and I’m wrapping up a long workday, I now feel physically spent. Things are sore. Muscles don’t want to comply. It is legitimate effort to then step away and start a new project or attend to a new task or thought, in a way that wasn’t at all true when I was 17, or even 27. Then, at 6:05 pm, the real work was just about to begin. Whatever had occupied me all day, it was now time to dive into books and letters, or writing, or soldering, or coding, or driving, or whatever it is I was on about. I remember occasions when in the summertime darkness fell and I decided on a whim to drive to visit relatives in San Francisco, arriving at Golden Gate Park long after the sun had come up and feeling exhilarated.
Darkness falls now and I think to myself, “I really should go and buy dish soap,” but I don’t do it because having just worked all day, I feel on some days as though if I try I might faint or have a heart attack, and really I need to just rest and collect myself and gather some oxygen and maybe a few calories.
Similarly, there are sensory faculties. I have recently started to use reading glasses on the recommendation of an optometrist because, quite simply, I was getting to the point at which I had to not just hold text at arm’s length, but set it down and step backward in order to be able to read it. Upon starting to use reading glasses, I have been shocked by just how much the world is actually constant input when you can, in fact, see it as you go about your business. Everywhere around us is text, and everywhere around us are little details of life, and both of these tend to launch trains of thought and suggest associations. Only if you can’t actually make any of these out unless you explicitly set out to do so, your world is fundamentally less full of stimuli, and this can’t help but have an impact on ideation and cognition.
The urge to exclaim “problem solved” in this instance is misplaced, because the problem with reading glasses is that they’re inconvenient and you don’t really want to leave them on all the time. You can see near by wearing them, yes, but now you can’t see far, and sight across the room is actually more important for life than you would think. They also want to stay perpetually dirty and have a tendency to make your nose feel either uncomfortable or sore. So leaving them on at all times is not really an option.
I was previously aware of research correlating cognitive decline to gradual loss in hearing, and had worried about this because I know that my hearing isn’t what it used to be. But marry this to the eyesight thing, and to the faster-fatigue thing, and it’s easy to see how for many people, productivity and initiative fall off as you age.
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The role that seems to emerge to replace this is that of a kind of oracle.
You’re not quite as engaged with the world now as you once were, and you no longer start (or, frankly, finish) as many things as you used to, but during your time involved with such things, you accumulated a body of experience that young people don’t yet have.
So as you lose your ability to really be the go-getter, you instead seem to sit in one place and become a receiver-of-questions for which you more often than not, and quite shockingly to young people, have ready and often not-bad responses. You’re not gaining or doing much that’s new, but you are now a stationary quantity that can be consulted for nuggets of actionable insight and prediction.
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I mean, all of this is just conventional life cycle wisdom, but I guess when you live it and really reflect on your experience of living it, it’s different from just knowing about it.