Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the US presidential election has prompted me to write down a few thoughts about getting old and being old.
First up, I’m going to rant a bit (in classic old-person mode) about how much I loathe the various prissy euphemisms for “old” that appear just about everywhere: “older”, “aging”, “senior” and, worst of all, “elderly”. I am, of course, aging, as is everyone alive. Similarly, like everyone, I’m older than I was yesterday and older than people who are younger than me. What no one seems willing to say out loud is that, at age 68, I am old. As Black and queer people have already done, I want to reappropriate “old”.
It’s not hard to see why people are so timid when talking about getting, and being, old. It is, after all, a journey that has only one terminus. At one time, only a fortunate minority survived long enough to reach old age. But now, most people do, and it would be good if we talked more honestly about it.
As exemplified by Biden’s disastrous debate, growing old is like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy[1]. It happens two ways – gradually, then suddenly. The process of growing old gracefully involves extending the gradual phase as long as possible, while accepting that it’s happening.
For me, that means, in physical terms, that my running pace isn’t what it used to be, and that I need to do more exercise just to maintain a given level of fitness. And, I often need an afternoon nap if I am going to maintain the kind of program I need.
But for someone in the ideas business like me, the real concern about growing old is about what is happening mentally. The standard distinction here is between fluid intelligence (roughly, the ability to solve novel problems) and crystallised intelligence (the ability to solve problems through accumulated skills and knowledge). Fluid intelligence is said to peak in the 20s, as with young mathematical geniuses, while crystallised intelligence continues improving until the 60s.
Crystallisation has a more negative side, that of being stuck in mental frameworks acquired long ago, and no longer appropriate. This was less of a problem in traditional societies where nothing much changed over time, so that crystallised intelligence could roughly be translated as “wisdom”. Now, however, knowledge is changing all the time, and crystallised intelligence can easily become rigidity.
This has long been a hazard for academics, clinging to the ideas which they learned in their early career, and perhaps helped to form, with the result that they resist the inevitable challenges. As Max Planck put it “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it …” This observation has been summarised by the aphorism “Science proceeds one funeral at a time”.
I’ve seen plenty of instances of Planck’s principle, but there’s nothing inevitable about it. You don’t need lots of fluid intelligence to observe this process, and guard against it. Indeed, one of the benefits of being old is the experience of seeing new ideas arrive, some replacing the old orthodoxy and others revealing themselves as passing fads. One experience of this kind for me was the neoclassical counter-revolution against Keynesian economics in the 1970s. Lots of people who had appeared as unquestioning Keynesians a few years before suddenly became equally unquestioning believers in balanced budgets and rational expectations. The lesson I drew was the need to strike a balance between abandoning your ideas the first time something new comes along and sticking to them unquestioningly.
That’s enough for now. When and if I come back to this topic, I’ll try to write something about some the political and economic aspects of old age.
fn1. Until I checked, I had always misattributed this to F Scott Fitzgerald, who seems more apposite
{ 26 comments }
Betnie Goldbach 07.23.24 at 9:17 am
Would you accept the honorarium “Elder Blogger”?
John Q 07.23.24 at 10:45 am
Sure. 20 blog years is like 100 years in old media
Matt 07.23.24 at 11:17 am
” want to reappropriate “old”.”
I say we go for “aged”.
More seriously, though, I wonder how far the “gradually, then all at once” thing is at least partially a matter of perspective. Because I live a long way away from my parents, I see them rarely, and even talk w/ them only sometimes. Every time I see them, and often even when I talk with them, they seem much older, and a bit more worrisome, to me. My sibblings, on the other hand, live close by and see them all the time – at least once a week, often more. To them, they seem like they always have. I think it’s because the changes are happening to them just a tiny bit at time, while to me, it’s a jump each time, so it stands out more, as I don’t have the chance to get used to it bit by bit. No doubt there are cases where there are drastic and quick changes, but I suspect they are a bit less common than we might think.
engels 07.23.24 at 12:32 pm
68 is the new 57.
steven t johnson 07.23.24 at 12:57 pm
One of the other reasons for the rise of euphemisms for “old” so far as I can tell is the desire to raise retirement age. The implication that health care isn’t an expensive issue for striplings in their seventies seems to play a role too.
Plus the rules of advertising have always promoted a general push for smooth and easy over candid and concise.
nastywoman 07.23.24 at 2:42 pm
“Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five.”
Ben Franklin
neal 07.23.24 at 3:01 pm
I was chatting with an older woman after I complimented her on her grey-white hair, which I happen to like. She said “We have to embrace our old age!” I replied “Yes! It’s sure as hell embracing us!”
CJColucci 07.23.24 at 3:21 pm
At 71, I can see the gradual ebbing of the kinds of powers I need to maintain an active trial practice and can anticipate a “normal” level of decline at which point I’ll need to hang it up. But I often practice before judges in their 80’s and 90’s who, while not as quick on the uptake as they used to be, face different challenges than advocates do. They can continue to do their jobs well based on long experience and, dare I say it, wisdom even as certain other powers decline.
If trial court judges are stuck in the past and less intellectually flexible, as they probably are, it is less of a problem than it is with appellate and Supreme Court judges. Trial judges generally run things according to established procedures, have the parties hash things out according to known methods, and apply rules made by legislatures or higher-ranking judges. Higher-ranking judges mired in the past are, however, in the business of making rules, for which intellectual staleness and inflexibility is a genuine problem.
bekabot 07.23.24 at 3:59 pm
“68 is the new 57”
The number of traitors in the State Department can only go in one direction.
Cheryl Rofer 07.23.24 at 4:30 pm
As an Old, I am fine with “old.”
engels 07.23.24 at 5:33 pm
Croak it once and croak it loud…
I think there’s a Trotsky quote that supports the “all at once” idea but it’s time for my nap.
politicalfootball 07.23.24 at 5:42 pm
I tend to think of this as actual intelligence vs. the ability you acquire over time to bluff your way through.
Maybe the difference between rigid old people and fluid old people comes down to humility: You either spend your life learning how to avoid being contradicted, or you learn how small and ignorant you are in a vast universe.
Anyway, I’m only 64, so none of this stuff about old people applies to me.
steven t johnson 07.23.24 at 8:12 pm
The ability to solve novel problems like a new musical composition or a new mystery or a performance as Lear or a painting or for that matter speak new sentences don’t seem closely correlated with youth.
The notion of “novel problems” and “solving” are doing a little more work than commonly acknowledged perhaps.
Not clear if the standard distinction between fluid and crystallized is very distinct from “g” and “s.”
It seems likely that a fine grain studies of the proposal of new problems and the acceptance of solutions to them tend to find the people who find both are those who have more familiarity and experience.
The difficulties in creating AI may stem from a model of natural intelligence (NI?) that accepts some abstract fluid/g intelligence that is too undefined to serve?
Cheez Whiz 07.23.24 at 10:25 pm
I’m 71, and can tell you it is a big drop from 61 in terms of stamna and general body strength and balance (nobody warns you that balance is going to be a thing you come to care about very much), though I was never athletic, so there you go. I have friends in their 80’s and it looks a lot like another drop, though you’ve had 10 years to come to terms with the 1st one, which was a bit of a shock. I suspect these windows vary greatly based on health, athletic activity, and yes, genetics, but they exist and are waiting for us who make it that far.
SamChevre 07.24.24 at 12:29 am
It does seem to me that the “older”/”old” distinction is intended to capture a real phenomenon.
My mother (in her mid-70’s) is “older”; she tires more easily, recovers from sickness less quickly, and so on. But her mother (102) is “old”; walking more than 100 yards is tiring for her, some days she can remember what all her grandchildren are doing and some days she has trouble remembering what she had for lunch.
Those are very different states.
John Q 07.24.24 at 4:26 am
SamChevre @15 I think “old” and “very old” do what you want here. And we can, if we feel the need subdivide “middle aged” by distinguishing early and late middle age.
CheezWhiz @14 I’ve been paying attention to balance for a few years now. I’ve taken up stand-up paddleboard, which is a real challenge in this respect.
Alan White 07.24.24 at 5:38 am
At 71 I consider myself older by some kind of colloquial nomenclature. I still am fortunate that I can walk 5 miles a day, do many other exercises, and just last year published a co-authored anthology in my field (philosophy). And, I can say that while in my 60s I came to realize that an approach to one of my specialties–free will–changed radically, moving from compatibilism to a fully pragmatic view. That’s after a long career that rejected pragmatism entirely as some sort of evasion of what I thought were objective hard truths. But after I saw that argumentative blather resulted in nothing but loggerhead positions based on immovable grounds that had no resort to real justification, we are just left with what we can do in actionable terms. So here’s a reformed realist about truth having taken a long life to realize what utter crap that is. (To be clear, I think that truth in many instances can be grounded well enough in pragmatic terms to be considered acceptable as fact–I am by no means some sort of relativist about much empirical truth. But in cases of important controversy that have no hope of science’s rescue–like free will–pragmatic justifications of value–yeah, like maybe something utilitarian–hold sway.) FWIW.
Tm 07.24.24 at 7:52 am
CJColucci: “I often practice before judges in their 80’s and 90’s”
Seriously, this is totally bizarre and shouldn’t be happening.
“Higher-ranking judges mired in the past are, however, in the business of making rules, for which intellectual staleness and inflexibility is a genuine problem.”
To be fair, the right wing radicals now dominating the US judicial system cannt be accused of a lack of intellectual flexibility, if that is the right word, regardless of their age. And many of them are rather young anyway, alas, which doesn’t prevent them from being mired in the past.
Doug Hainline 07.24.24 at 10:37 am
Re. Engels’ (not the famous one) reference above: The Trotsky quote is ““Old age is the most unexpected of all things that can happen to a man.” And he was just in his late fifties! But then — contrary to Trotsky’s prognosis at the time — capitalism (i.e. the superstructure of scientific advance which rests upon it) has made great strides, something else which he didn’t expect.
J-D 07.24.24 at 11:50 am
I decided years ago that when I turned sixty I would start describing myself as old. It happened last week and I have followed through on that decision.
There is an alternative to growing older, as Humpty Dumpty obliquely points out to Alice in Chapter 6 of Through The Looking-Glass (so obliquely that I didn’t get it until I read Martin Gardner’s annotation). Alice’s response is to change the subject.
David in Tokyo 07.24.24 at 3:58 pm
I just turned 72, and they still haven’t taken away all of my toys. I (naively, perhaps) think I’m fine until 80.
More particularly, I see my 70s as my last chance to nerd out, and that if I stick to said nerding, my 80s will be pleasantly fun using the stuff I’m learning now. 90s, who knows…
This plan was devised when I retired (at 67) and while progressing (I was watching a news video of a 45-year old hydrofoil that broke down in the Pacific with 116 passengers on board, and the announcer said “The Coast Guard is “eikou”-ing the boat back”, and eikou is the marine tech term for towing (the character used for the “ei” part is outside the set that the Japanese government says you are supposed to limit oneself to using, but the announcer blythely said “eikou”. Go figure.). Dunno why it got into my vocab list, but it did. (My previous favorite obscure word was the word for “run in one’s stockings”).), it isn’t going quite as fast as I’d like.
And it’s amazing how much cruft there is in life that needs doing (shopping, GP visits (Japan doesn’t do refils, so you have to see your GP every month), guitar lessons, personal trainer (I pulled a muscle or two or seven in my back 15 years or so ago and need to carefully and without fail do appropriate stretches and excercises), dentist, eye doc. And each of these requires collecting the stuff you need and then putting that stuff all away when you are back. Sheesh.
But it seems to me that I shopuld be able to keep improving on guitar (standards and bebop as the leader not just the rhythm player), Go (I ought to be able to win against any human with a 4-stone handicap and any computer with 5 stones), and enough more Japanese to deal comforably with writing from the period 1880 to 1940 or so, rather than just the recent stuff, most of which I can read comfortably, if maybe not quite as fast as I’d like, then those will be usable from 80 on.
Of course, the problem with advancing age is that each year sees an increased probability of something unexpected going wrong. My SO was just womped with inner ear problems, completely putting her out of action for a week, I had a cold that persisted three weeks a couple of months ago (although it allowed me finish a 600-page schlock novel by a current popular author), to say nothing of truly nasty diseases…
Lee A Arnold 07.24.24 at 6:32 pm
I’m not usually one to push food supplements, but you might want to look at the research on NAD+ boosters like nicotinamide riboside
KT2 07.25.24 at 3:35 am
David in Tokyo “My SO was just womped with inner ear problems, completely putting her out of action for a week, ”
Just a heads up. NOT medical advice!
My Mum, in rude health at 90, (could still read a telephone book sans glasses at 88 – basic gardening, fully atgumentative if necessary!) started having “late onset vertigo” – standing from kitchen table then completely losing balance, falling over and … symptoms comensurate w immidiate total loss of balance. Not pretty.
After 2 years of repeated problems, a combination of expanded aorta and inner ear w crystals in fluid – was fitted wiith a pace maker. Instant fix. Mum remained fully cognizant til the day she died at 98.5. She went into a nursing home at 97. The food in the nursing home imo finished her off with divaticulitis.
I became a single parent at 50. I’m only 11. I just add the digits of age to arrive at 11.
I hope I’ll reach 1. -:)
CJColucci 07.25.24 at 1:54 pm
TM:
I’d be interested in knowing the basis in experience or other knowledge that prompts to you say with such conviction that judges conducting trials in their 80s or 90s is bizarre and should not be happening.
I practice in New York State, where state judges must, with minor exceptions, retire at the end of the year in which they turn 70. (They have long-ish fixed terms– judges on our highest court, for example, serve 14-year terms, subject to the 70-year cap — rather than life tenure or even age-limited life tenure.) Every year a handful of judges have to retire while they still have plenty to offer, and the bar as a whole is quite unhappy when that happens. On a more personal note, at 71 I am no longer eligible to serve as a state court judge no matter that I have plenty of energy and experience to do that sort of work even as my ability to maintain an active trial practice winds down. Well, I had little chance at the job anyway.
On the federal side, judges have life tenure, though they tend to take senior status around their 70th year, sometimes waiting strategically to see whether they approve of the President who would replace them. When they take senior status, their former position opens up for a new judge, increasing the number of judges available. The senior judges have the ability to limit their caseloads in various ways, but most of them manage substantial, if not quite full, dockets. Many of them serve with distinction for a long time after 70. One highly-respected federal trial judge that I often appeared before had neurological workups every year before deciding whether to continue. He retired at 98 without having shown any signs that — though he was not what he used to be — he was a worse than average federal judge.
Appellate judges, as I mentioned, raise different issues. Unlike trial judges, they spend a lot of their time deciding issues of policy and very old judges, having had formative experiences very long ago, are often out of touch with present realities. Lewis Powell, who wrote an opinion upholding criminal laws against same-sex sex, had never, so far as he knew, known a gay person. Like many people from that era, he was wrong about this; he knew plenty of them, including one of his clerks in that term. He just didn’t know he knew them, and his ignorance doubtless colored his understanding of the issue. There are proposals out there to limit Supreme Court justices to 18-year terms rather than life tenure, which would help ensure that the justices have some connection to current reality.
KT2 07.27.24 at 10:15 am
I agree…
24 July 2024
“Memory for music doesn’t diminish with age
Eighty-year-olds are able to identify familiar tunes just as well as teenagers can.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02369-7
And L-dendrites – not n – increase… ???
mw 07.27.24 at 11:49 am
With Biden, it seems not to be a matter of mere aging, but of age-related disease (Parkinson’s disease has been suggested) that has caused the mental and physical decline. And the apparent suddenness, in his case, is perhaps more of a factor of it being covered up and denied for some time until he was in a situation (a live debate late in the day) where it could not help but be fully exposed. But some people of his age are, obviously, still far more capable. Mick Jagger, for example, also just turned 81. One of the cruelties of aging and age-related disease are that they hit so unevenly.
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