This is sweet news. I'm over 40. I enrolled at my local university in January and I'm studying (literally right now) for my linear algebra midterm [0] which is in 45 minutes! I'm on HN to calm my nerves.
I graduated high school in the early 2000s and graduated college with major in computer science and a minor in math. My goal is 5-8 more classes for a second degree in math (major).
I went to the University of Texas but I took summer courses in Houston Community College (calculus II, physics II, and more -- those classes were SO bad at UT).
It was insane how much better the courses were in the community college. Tiny class of 15. $300 or something. Amazing professor that you could ask questions to like you could in high school. Normal 20-30 question textbook homework where you just work basic problems and build confidence that you know the material.
Meanwhile UT was the opposite. I think I paid $1400/class/semester (and that's a bargain). Lecture halls where you couldn't possibly ask a question. Weird math/physics homework that was like 3-5 super hard questions that I often couldn't figure out, demoralizing. Often a TA that could barely speak English. It's actually quite insulting.
I sometimes think about enrolling in a local college for fun, the experience was that good.
> Weird math/physics homework that was like 3-5 super hard questions that I often couldn't figure out, demoralizing
Had this experience at an elite uni as well for math courses. At the time I felt like it pushed me to really grow, and it was absolutely necessary to do well in that specific course (tests often had questions that ~required you to know how to do all the uber-hard homework problems), but I wonder what the research actually says about this sort of homework vs your more standard variety.
Large universities are focused on research, and they incur a lot of expenses due to administrators' egos (build build build), the number of administrators, and the range of microstate services offered, like their own health care system and mental health counseling (a major thing in universities now). Community colleges are focused on teaching.
I had a similar experience -- took physics at a community college when I was in high school. The 'up-side' of the overproduction of PhDs is that many people from elite backgrounds end up teaching at community colleges.
The only negative for me was that the students were pretty checked out.
> The only negative for me was that the students were pretty checked out.
I didn't put a lot of thought into where I went to school but if I could do it over again this is something I would have considered when I applied. The school I ended up at did not have many serious students. It was a night and day difference taking courses with even one or two students who were similarly engaged with the material, but most of those students ended up transferring to better schools after a year or two.
You also run into the issue later on that the people you went to school with wash out of industry (or never work in it to begin with) at much higher rates in comparison to those who went to more serious schools.
I hope it went well! I am in my fifties and enrolled in a master degree program for pure mathematics about 2 years ago (I don't need the degree, so I"m just taking all the classes they offer, so not about to graduate). It definitely took some time to get my brain sharper, but I am better each semester.
I hope people don't take away the negative side of the article, brain slows down, but the positive side: brain gets better with usage. Its uncomfortable, I can churn out programs as complex as programs I've already written and go to review meetings and planning meetings without much effort. But being able to solve PDEs reasonably quickly and accurately, I cannot, or have not without a great deal of practise. It's unconfortable in some weird mental but physical sense. But I'm sharper in everything else I do.
One interesting thing about software as career followed by math classes is that there's no compiler - you can type any janky thought into LaTeX and if you don't detect that it's bogus, nothing will, until you show it to a professor.
Also, the information density of maths notation is way higher than (good) code. We want code to be readable by some that doesn't know it; a lot of math seems to be readable when you sort of 80% already are familiar with all the prereqs. So no just skimming and then hitting compile/test/run (whatever validation you do). It's typing letter by letter and taking the mental effort to actually see and decipher the letter (at least, for me in my current stage; I'm trying to do novel research, but my demonstrated understanding of the details of the previous research is embarrassing low).
Also, weirdly, I still have the same fear of professors that I did as a young person. I manage it better with my decades of maturity (really) but it is still a part of my social interactions.
The information density is incredible. A 2x2 matrix (Jordan constants) containing enough information to produce a slice of a hyperbolic paraboloid. Leaves me mesmerized...
It's funny, at the end of each lecture I just want to yell... "NO! Don't stop! I must see how this ends!"
Very similar to when I stop our children's movie and tell them to go take a bath.
Good luck! You can do it! I started doing statistics classes three years ago when I was 45, continued doing a MSc degree, which I finished successfully a few months ago. I am now looking into doing a PhD. This is more fun than I ever imagined (fair enough: I was a teenager when imagining it).
Good luck! You should check out Math Academy, it's more effective/efficient/cheaper but also a good supplement since it's accredited.
I recently turned 40 myself and I'm working through their Foundations courses (made to help adults catch up) before tackling the Machine Learning and other uni courses.
I'll tell you my experience as someone who's been using Math Academy for past 6 months.
Math Academy does what every good application or service does. Make things convenient. That's it. No juggling heavy books or multiple tabs of PDFs. Each problem comes with detailed solution so getting them wrong doesn't mean looking around on the internet for a hint about your mistake (this is pre ChatGPT era of course, where not getting something correct meant putting down MathJax on stackexchange).
> better than just prompting ChatGPT/Claude/etc
The convenience means you are doing the most important part of learning maths with most ease: problem solving and practice. That is something an LLM will not be able to help you with. For me, solving problems is pretty much the only way to mostly wrap my head around the topic.
I say mostly because LLMs are amazing at complementing Math Academy. Any time I hit a conceptual snag, I run off to ChatGPT to get more clarity. And it works great.
So in my opinion, Math Academy alone is pretty good. Even great for school level maths I'd say. Coupled with ChatGPT the package becomes a pretty solid teaching medium.
Yes, much better. ChatGPT/Claude/etc. are useful the times I want extra explanation to help connect the dots, but Math Academy incorporates spaced repetition, interleaving, etc. the way a dedicated tutor would, but in a better structured environment/UI.
Their marketing website leaves a lot to be desired (a perk since they are all math nerds focused on the product), but here are two references on their site that explain their approach:
They also did a really good interview last week that goes in depth about their process with Dr. Alex Smith (Director of Curriculum) and Justin Skycak (Director of Analytics) from Math Academy: https://chalkandtalkpodcast.podbean.com/e/math-academy-optim...
Given my ChatGPT and friends experience has been one of overwhelming frustration due to incorrect information, I would say Math Academy is in an entirely different galaxy. ChatGPT is great if you want to learn that pi is equal to 4.
b-b-b-but the next supercalifragilistic ChatGPT version will be able to tell you that pi is between 3.1 and 3.2. that will be a Quantum improvement, asymptotically close to AGI.
at least, i think i heard alt samman say so.
you plebs and proles better shell out the $50 a month, increasing by $10 per day, to keep dis honest billionaires able to keep on buying deir multi-million dollar yachts and personal jets.
be grateful for the valuable crumbs we toss to you, serfs.
Math is something that should be taught in an opinionated way with an eye toward pedagogy. Self study with GPT is an excellent tool in math, but only for those who have enough perspective to know which directions to set out on. I don’t think anybody who doesn’t know linear algebra should be guiding their studies themselves.
Not OP, but I have found MathAcademy to be infinitely better. I really liked the assessment portion which levels you and gives you an idea of where you are are at the present. As someone who graduated with an engineering degree a while ago, there were things I realized I didn’t know as well as I thought I did and I probably would not have prompted an LLM to review.
Keep making those pushes! I was a non-traditional graduate student because around 10 years I got very serious about going for my doctorate. I literally scheduled times with my friends to watch Khan Academy videos on upper level maths and spent time practicing those skills. Then grad school is just one intensive learning session.
Years of martial arts ingrained that sense of being a life-long learner. I was taught the mantra of "Progress comes to those who train" and "Practice makes permanent" and even though those phrases were focused on learning to beat someone up, I've carried them on into other parts of my life.
Congrats! It is never too late to be doing this type of study and work.
I'm doing something similar: I just turned 50 and have been taking graduate ML classes where I work (at Carnegie Mellon). When I finish the graduate certificate program in generative AI and LLMs that I am enrolled in, I will be only two semesters away from earning a full masters degree.
> graduated college with major in computer science and a minor in math.
Me too. High five!
> My goal is 5-8 more classes for a second degree in math (major).
But why? Wouldn't it make more sense to go for a master in computer science? Are you going to use it for work. Otherwise, aren't you going to "lose it" anyways? Also, is your job paying for the degree or are you paying out of pocket?
This college requires something like taking 30 credits from the institution to award a degree. That's somewhere between 7-10 classes (mix of 3/4 credits each).
It’s been twenty years so my opinion is skewed and my memory is quite faded, however, I’ve got opinions on the guide and class in general.
The main thing is there are no surprises or tricks. The exams are straightforward and EXHAUSTIVE. I do all the assigned homework twice. Once when we cover the material and again before the exam. Let’s hope that strategy pays off again.
Yes, through admissions. Getting a degree in math, maybe... depends on how much stress this adds to my life. If I were retired I'd just take a full load, but raising a family and running my business I can only take it one class at a time.
I didn't ace it, but knew immediately what I had done wrong as I rode my bicycle home. I kept checking my linear transformation matrix and the Eigen values didn't compute... Looked again at the TI-89 when I got home and realized I swapped the orientation on the Jordan constants. I wrote all the equations out, so maybe my professor will have mercy on me. Oh well, another case of elevator wit - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier
I'd like to see a study on how the acute stress of living in survival mode for a lifetime affects the brain by using it too much for the wrong tasks.
The last 25 years have been particularly painful for people like me who favor academia and pure research over profit-driven innovation that tends to reinvent the wheel. When I look around at the sheer computing power available to us, I'm saddened that people with wealth, power and influence tend to point to their own success as reason to perpetuate the status quo. When we could have had basic resources like energy, water, some staple foods and shelter provided for free (or nearly free) through automation. So that we could focus on getting real work done in the sciences for example, instead of just making rent.
I've been living like someone from movies like In Time and The Pursuit of Happyness for so many decades without a win that my subconscious no longer believes that the future will be better. I have to overcome tremendous spidey sense warning signs from my gut in order to begin working each day. The starting friction is intense. To the point where I'm not sure how much longer I can continue doing this to myself, and I'm "only" in my mid-40s. After a lifetime of negative reinforcement, I'm not sure that I can adopt new innovations like AI into my workflows.
It's a hollow feeling to have so much experience in solving any problem, when problem solving itself will soon be solved/marginalized to the point that nobody wants to pay for it because AI can do it. I feel rather strongly that within 3 years, mass-layoffs will start sweeping the world with no help coming from our elected officials or private industry. Nobody will be safe from being rendered obsolete, not even you the reader.
So I have my faculties, I have potential, but I've never felt dumber or more ineffectual than I do right now.
>I'd like to see a study on how the acute stress of living in survival mode for a lifetime affects the brain by using it too much for the wrong tasks. The last 25 years have been particularly painful for people like me who favor academia and pure research over profit-driven innovation that tends to reinvent the wheel.
I suspected something very different based off the first sentence. Like someone living in a high crime area and trying not to get dragged into it. Or constantly struggling with poverty, food insecurity, etc.
You're not the only one that has had those kind of feelings, and I really relate to the movies you referenced.
Try to remember, AI is a tool, not a solution, and there will always be new problems. There's a strong case that unlike every other time people said that technology will kill all the jobs, this time it actually will. But a helpful framework comes from Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Solution (not the much more famous Innovator's Dilemma) - whereas a business has well defined needs that can be satisfied by improving products, customers (i.e. people) have ever evolving needs that will never be met. So while specific skills may lose value, there will always be a demand for the ability to recognize and provide value and solutions.
What makes a labor market for agents that recognize problems and provide solutions special or different from markets for other kinds of labor? If AIs get to a point where they dramatically outperform humans in other forms of labor, why not in this one?
I think some humans will be doing it well enough to keep themselves afloat the rest of our lifetime, and some will get fabulously rich building products as a one-man operation leveraging AIs. But there will be far more people failing at it. It will be like Youtube creators or Instagram influencers where there are few winners who take virtually all the rewards.
compared to the broadcast era aren't there way more winners -- with a smaller pieces of the pie -- nowadays?
it's still a Pareto distribution, I'm sure, but mega-stardom kinda died and was replaced by all these mini-stars, as far as I can tell. I'm not sure it supports your hypothesis.
I'm not really in touch with other genres, but I like to watch chess videos/streams on Youtube and Twitch. The vast, vast majority of views and revenue are captured by about ten people.
I like those people too, but I've also watched a lot of smaller acts, even some amateur players not much stronger than me. So I get those recommendations, and I see their view counts. They aren't making anything at all.
There are other people who have some followers, but even 50,000 followers would be a dream for most people doing it and they will make next to nothing from that. I'd guess there are at least 30x the number of strong, titled players in the 50k group as there are in the 1MM+ group. These are all people who were chess prodigies as kids, won every scholastic tournament in their state, took gap years or went to colleges that let them basically major in chess, travelled the world for tournaments, with awe-inspiring skills, and they are not making anywhere close enough to live on.
And the thing is, I think software might even be tougher in twenty years. Its hard to get people to change from a system they use to another thing, much harder than recommending a new face on Youtbue.
Maybe someday they will. But the current run of LLMs are fantastic at regurgitating and synthesizing existing knowledge, and getting better all the time, but not so good at coming up with new ideas. As long as you keep to the realm of what is known, they can seem incredibly intelligent, but as soon as you cross that boundary there's a clear change - often to just meaningless bullshit. So, I personally don't think we're going to be outsourcing idea generation to LLMs (or AI in general) anytime soon. Though to be fair, I'm only about 75% confident in that, and even so, it doesn't mean they won't be hugely transformative anyway.
AI didn't really mesh seamlessly with my work until I used Claude, I highly recommend it. If your current workflow involves googling, reading documentation and examples on github until you can put together a solution then AI should slot into your work nicely. It just does all those things but faster and can often surface what I want in 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes of research.
I wouldn't worry though, if the last 4 years are any indicator, we will continue to see LLMs refined as better and better tools at a logarithmic rate, but I don't really see them making the jump to replacing engineers entirely unless some monumental leap happens. If AI ever gets that good it will have replaced vast swathes of white collar workers before us.
I am somewhat optimistic, tech adoption is only going to go up, and the number of students pouring into CS programs is cooling off now that there aren't $100k jobs waiting for anyone who can open up an IDE. My ideal future is people who really love tech are still here in 10 years, and we will have crazy output because the tooling is so good, and all the opportunistic money seekers will have been shaken out.
> When we could have had basic resources like energy, water, some staple foods and shelter provided for free (or nearly free) through automation.
I was inspired to get into programming by Star Trek in the early 2000s because I thought I could contribute to automation that would lead towards that kind of society; much like you've stated here. Some will say we're naive and unrealistic, but all the ingredients for having society function in this way are attainable with a bit of a cultural shift. I was fine with the idea that society could take baby steps towards it, but it seems the last 25 years have been a mixture of regressing and small incremental improvements to things that don't contribute towards that goal. Just like you, my expectations have been utterly destroyed and my outlook for the future is grim.
In Star Trek money exists but there isn't much use for it because technology has made material abundance cost approximately nothing.
Star Trek doesn't show the 50 billion landwhales watching Netflix all day, because it makes for bad television. It shows the 1% who still work even when they don't have to, who work because they want to.
The Star Trek future does seem out of reach. On the other hand canonically they only got to fully automated luxury space communism after fighting a global nuclear war against eugenisists.
I'd travel the world, taking in diverse centers of culture, history, and nature. I'd try to learn new languages. I'd do more track days, karting, and Ultimate. I'd buy a shell and try to get back into rowing. I'd play more computer games. I'd play ping-pong, foosball, and board games with my kids. I'd coach kids' sports. I'd go to more plays and concerts. Even movies. I'd volunteer.
Of course I wouldn't do ALL of that, since even without work there are only so many hours in the day. But I certainly wouldn't want for things to do!
Some people do all that and still work, you probably just need better time management. You could study a language before work in the morning, and then go row for a bit. Then go to work. Then you could play computer games from 5 to 6, play ping pong with kids from 6 to 6:30, eat a dinner, coach kids soccer from 7 to 8, volunteer open source from 8:30 to 9:30, catch a movie at 10.
I think if you let your imagination wander and you end up seeing the scale of potential we have and what we could really achieve, stuff like paying for rent and groceries starts to feel archaic and wasteful, or as some kind of artificial constraint holding us back as a species.
> I'm saddened that people with wealth, power and influence tend to point to their own success as reason to perpetuate the status quo. When we could have had basic resources like energy, water, some staple foods and shelter provided for free (or nearly free) through automation
What you stated is true, but my disappointing observation is that the people with wealth/power are only marginally smarter than the rest of us on the topic you mentioned. And then I suspect that even if one had a rich benefactor, pulling that off is not easy. It takes a threshold number people who have a holistic view of things to pull of what you mentions i.e nearly free basics of life. Check my profile etc. - some of what I wrote may strike a chord with you.
Also the proponents on Technocracy (Hubbert etc.) about a 100 years back, essentially touched on the subject you state. Note: The word technocracy today has a different connotation.
I think (from personal experience) talking with a good mental health professional would really help with your current state of mind and the pressure you’re feeling.
Cognitive Behavior Therapy can help with a wide range of issues. If there are worries that are not productive for you, that you can't get out of your head, a therapist can teach you how to use some basic tools to control that. And you'll probably only need a few visits. You can also read books, but given what you've stated I think you should start with a human.
My son went to a few sessions and completely got his OCD under control. He doesn't have to go anymore. I used similar technique to quit smoking 30 years ago after at least a half-dozen serious tries by other means failed. Still off them. It applies to all kinds of issues though, its also very effective for depression. According to the literature studies I did twenty years ago, it was the only technique that actually showed sustained benefit for depression other than medication.
My depression comes from super severe learned helplessness. I have been extremely stupid with money and career choices and nowadays things got hard, I have several chronic health conditions and the difficulty got up not by 2x, more like 20x. I just can't muster the will to even do one job interview, financial reserves are dwindling fast and, you get the picture.
I have zero faith any therapist can help me. They'll likely start with "but it's for your own good!" and I'll just say "yeah yeah, like 200 other things I have been told and zero of them turned out to be true". That's how I imagine it.
I am not against paying professionals. Obviously. I just don't believe in therapy at all.
What would you do to start with, with a guy like me? (I am aware you are not a therapist yourself.)
To try to complement what other replies already said...
I think an important result of successful intervention is to awaken (or reawaken) the mind to the idea that thoughts and perceptions are internal and not always accurate representation of an objective, external world. Much psychological stress comes from these internal experiences, and subtle shifts in your mental posture can change this environment.
That's not to say that real stressors and stimuli don't exist. It's just that often times a person can spiral in a way that makes their internal reactions counterproductive and harmful to well being.
Another important result is learning better coping and adaptation strategies, so you can start to shift your mental posture or even change lifestyle and environment to reduce chronic stress.
It's not always easy, not magic, and not perfect. But, it can help...
I think its important to understand that CBT is a system, a set of tools for managing your thought patterns. Therapists who specialize in it are largely in the business of educating their clients, not having them lie on a couch and talk to the ceiling about their childhood. I'm not saying you won't have generic "talk-therapy" kind of conversations - those are still necessary for them to understand the specific issues you need to work on - but its not just someone helping you find insights that don't change anything.
If you are completely against meeting with a therapist though, you can start with books. I wish I could recommend one that I've used, but this is an example of one that looks really promising to me, with a practical approach: https://www.amazon.com/Retrain-Your-Brain-Behavioral-Depress...
I am also not a therapist but I am a former tech founder turned executive coach so I do talk to people who are facing what feels like overwhelming challenges, risk, and uncertainty.
Even in the language you used "severe learned helplessness" and "extremely stupid", you are revealing a state of mind (cynicism, self-flagellation) that is not oriented to improving your condition.
You know you have a strong bias against therapists—given your seeming lack of knowledge about them, where do you think that bias came from? Fundamentally, we are a social species and evolved to live with strong connections to small groups.
Our society is no longer set up like that. So professionals like therapists and coaches provide the essential value of a caring, supportive, and helpful relationship that we lack. Like getting an essential nutrient that your diet lacks.
Do you have health insurance? Many of them cover mental health—the site Headway can help you find one that takes insurance. Try a few and gather some first-party data before writing them off fully. The downside is a few hundred dollars. The upside is a much brighter and materially better future.
Trust me, us Europeans are not exempt from the "everyone should see a psychologist" trope blasting social media the last decade. We are not blind to every Hollywood actor having a personal therapist either.
I think the main difference (speaking as a northern European) is that when you Americans speak of therapy you seem to mean the stereotypical "talk therapy" where as basically every therapy here is cognitive behavioral therapy.
Can cognitive behavioral therapy help someone who has a bit of existential dread about his tech job? Maybe. I don't think it's silly on it's face though to say "really?" if the poster's life is in order otherwise.
That's the toxic stuff you get from society, which leads to you hiring mental health professionals that can teach you healthy, effective ways of dealing with stress.
Perhaps your life is on the easy setting? Hungry people work really hard. Fearing destroying an entire family by losing my job allows me to find strength and courage.
I'm very sympathetic to your experience and agree with most of what you say, but as someone who has spend half his life in academia and half outside, "who favor academia and pure research over profit-driven innovation that tends to reinvent the wheel", I must say that 'reinventing the wheel' is at least as prevalent in academia than it is in business.
As a researcher who changed career paths to teaching at a community college, I empathize. Twenty years ago when I graduated from high school, I was inspired by the stories I’ve read about Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and early Apple and Microsoft. I wanted to be a researcher, and I wanted to do interesting, impactful work.
Over the years I’ve become disappointed and disillusioned. We have nothing like the Bell Labs and Xerox PARC of old, where researchers were given the freedom to pursue their interests without having to worry about short-term results. Industrial research these days is not curiosity-driven, instead driven by finding immediate solutions to business problems. Life at research universities isn’t much better, with the constant “publish-or-perish” and fundraising pressures. Since the latter half of January this year, the funding situation for US scientists has gotten much worse, with disruptions to the NIH and NSF. If these disruptions are permanent, who is going to fund medium- and long-term research that cannot be monetized immediately?
I have resigned myself to the situation, and I now pursue research as a hobby instead of as a paid profession. My role is strictly a teaching one, with no research obligations. I do research during the summer months and whenever else I find spare time.
Maybe it's time for me (40+) to go back to college. I want to pick up Mathematics and Physics up to the point of General Relativity. Since it's "use it or lose it", I better start reading now.
But I don't really have any time. There are so many things to do, to learn. Younger people who happen to stumble upon this reply, please please prioritize financial freedom if you don't have a clear objective in mind -- and from my observation many people don't have a clear objective when they are in their 20s! If you can retire around 35-40, you have ample time to pursuit any project you want for the rest of the life.
Putting in a plug for MIT OCW 8.962 [1]. I also had this itch, and was able to find time during the pandemic to work through the course (at about 1/2 speed). But true to what others are saying, life intruded for the last few lectures, so still have some items on my todo list. I thought Scott Hughes laid out the math with terrific clarity, with just the right amount of joviality. It is not for everyone, but if you have a suitable background it may turn "scratch an itch" into the obsession that it has done to me.
And to make the obligatory on-topic comment: I'm 61yo. Now get off my lawn.
Thanks! Yeah I planned to use MIT OCW for my education, at least the first 3-4 pre-requisite courses, before I even consider registering in an independent program in some University.
BTW I hope you are going to get more free time in a few years so that you can come back and enjoy the education again.
I've always toyed with the idea of studying Computer Science since I taught myself how to code.
Hell of a lot more difficult now when I need to work and don't really have the same amount of time to dedicate to studying. Hell of a lot easier when you're younger, your whole life basically revolves around the education, and any job you have generally fits around your school life rather than the other way round.
Yeah it was really a surprise to me when I realized that my energy declined to the point that I couldn't work on my side projects for the down days. Then I counted how many days I have for the rest of my life (up to 75) and this dreaded me a lot.
And it got worse after my son was born a few years ago. I would count the number of weeks available, not the days, because there has been whole weeks that I couldn't do anything. After all those are two full-time jobs.
As for your CS education, I'd recommend getting into some side projects and explore from there. If you go to a school, it's going to take too many courses.
I'm in my late 40s and I've found that my desire for working on side projects after work is affected by how engaged I am mentally at work. When I'm building new features/products from scratch and I'm having to figure out architecture and learn more about whatever language I'm coding in, I get more amped to do side projects at home. When I'm bored and just bug fixing and dealing with more mundane things, I have no desire to do any more coding after work. Something about being more engaged gets my brain in a state that I can keep going for the rest of the day until I need to pull myself away from the computer because it's 2am and I should have been asleep hours ago. I should note that I don't have children so the only "obligation" I have is to spend time with my partner and eat dinner, which I enjoy doing, of course. She usually starts getting ready for bed around 10pm and that's when I start coding. I do have some bad sleep patterns though, doesn't matter if I'm coding or not, which is probably not healthy. I have that revenge nighttime procrastination thing real bad.
Have you considered doing your side projects before work?
It takes me one call in the morning, of me saying for the hundreth time in the past 8 months that the integration is still missing data, to get me off the rails for the day. I know at 10AM that I won't touch anything else after work.
Been contemplating starting early and dedicating "the best hours" to myself.
That absolutely works for me! I play multiple instruments and have found that the early morning is the best time mentally for me to devote uninterrupted time to practice and playing. I’m also fortunate enough to have a basement with another floor between my cacophony and my sleeping family
That was something I have considered for a while, but then figured out it is unrealistic because I have a kid. But original replier probably can do if he/she doesn't have one.
I realized that frustration from work usually spills over to other parts of my life, not surprising as work is usually the first big thing we do during a day. I'm exactly like you -- when I have a lot of frustration from work, then I wouldn't want to work on side projects. It has nothing to do with how many hours I have.
I also have some bad sleep patterns as I only sleep about 5-6 hours every night most of the time.
I think, it might be useful to learn some mental skills to compartment one's mental state. If I could somehow put that frustration from work into a separate space without it spilling all over the ship, it would definitely help a lot. But so far I don't know how to do it -- plus I have a kid so I can't chill down after work until late night.
Plugging Georgia Tech's online masters program - I did it over the course of 4 years while working - can take 1 class a semester - and it's very cheap for a high quality masters
I'm over 40 and even though I mostly manage/lead now I have time to do programming and plenty of math. I still see improvement mentally (not so much physically anymore), but also a lot of improvement in skills I neglected when I was younger like interpersonal skills and sales. I'm also learning a new language and read more than ever. Sometimes I feel like I'm less sharp, but I wonder if that's because I'm doing so much more.
My tricks that I don't always follow, is work out every day, get enough sleep, and stay off of most short form social media. I realized when I was on short form social it would zap a lot of time and kill any focus I had.
Achieving financial independence and early retirement does not mean one no longer needs any advice about life. Indeed, because those people have a longer retirement, they might ponder things like the meaning of life much more than someone who's living paycheck to paycheck and has to devote all brain cycles to survival. And there are so many options for those who retire at 40 that they genuinely need advice about what to do, how to find what matters most to them, and how to go about doing the things they had always wanted to do but couldn't.
These people have succeeded in making money and that's all. But life is so much more than just making money.
Thanks. I did read that but found it to be too broad. I set a very narrow target and hopefully everything can be wrapped up in 8-10 Math/Physics courses.
I often ponder if I have the energy to go back to school. I am employed by MIT at one of the labs where I do research for embedded security. As a consequence, they offer free classes you can pick up. I am yet to actually take advantage of that yet but your comment has me thinking the same thing. I turn 36 in a couple days!
This advice could really backfire badly if taken literally by young people.
Optimizing for financial reward early in your career could be the surest way to end up in a dead end from a mission/purpose/domain/skills perspective.
20 years later, you realize you burned two precious decades accumulating money that, honestly, does not help you at all make sense or use of the next two.
> 20 years later, you realize you burned two precious decades accumulating money that, honestly, does not help you at all make sense or use of the next two.
Ah, but it does. Speaking as someone approaching fifty, you feel every penny. Everything about your financial situation weighs into your decision-making, makes different options possible or impossible. It changes which jobs you can take, and which jobs you can turn down. It affects how much time you can take between jobs. It affects how much energy you pour into keeping your job or chasing a promotion versus investing your energy in education or other things you find satisfying.
People worry that they will accidentally pursue money with such single-minded focus that they turn off every other part of their soul, and miss out on what they "really" want to do. But I don't think that's possible. Replace money with anything else: fame, family, intellectual achievement, hedonism. If you try to dedicate yourself 100% to one thing when something else is important to you, you'll hear the voice in the back of your head. You'll feel what it is, and if you ignore it then, that's on you.
If you don't hear that voice yet, lay down the foundation that will give you the freedom to follow it when you finally do.
Yea, there is a huge distance between "saving enough money to retire comfortably" and "letting wealth accumulation dominate every decision you make." And, honestly, most people don't even get to the first one.
You're absolutely right. I realize my comment could be understood in many various ways.
My point was that, at some point, money has a negative effect on your career. Shooting for the top percentile of revenue can take you off track for life.
But you are saying that having a few hundred thousands bucks when you hit 40-50 is a life-changer and you are absolutely right as well.
Our point of views are not incompatible and were not captured by my first comment.
It might backfire for sure, but being financially independent gives you freedom to figure that out for the rest of the life.
IMO it's a lot better than the situation I myself am in right now, when I can clearly see myself working my ass off for the next 20-25 years in domains I totally hate, and then hopefully I can start working on interesting things when I'm ... 65?
I'd further argue that the only downside of my strategy is that you already have a clear non-monetary objective but decided to go with the money for 20 years. That's definitely a bad thing, and that's why in my original reply I rooted this out -- if you already have an objective, go for it.
Only if you get a rest of your life. While most do I've known more that one person who didn't make it to 40. Worse those that do all srart reporting their body is starting to fail. If you have not done some things by 40 it may be too late to ever do them.
You can't forego savings because "I might die at 40". That's really not a sensible plan. It's a balancing act, but I'd rather have saved too much and die a little early, than not save enough and somehow live to 100.
I agree 100%. There is a balance you want enough savings for 'a rainy day' and also enjoy the rest of your life. retirement is only part of enjoping your life.
the important point is don't get so lost in saving money that you don't enjoy now.
But accumulating and saving always comes at a cost. Is it worth to earn more money, but spend less time with your family for example? It's a delicate balancing act and you never know where the right balance is
It depends a lot of where you came from. If you are coming from a poor background, without any perspective of the occasional help from parents or a possible inheritance, I'd say prioritize financial security. Of course, you can accept the occasional lower salary but with better career prospects here and there, but sometimes this is a mirage, and a lot of time, better pay comes with better career prospects.
If you didn't come from a somewhat privileged background chances are you started your career with more professional debt, without a rich contact network, you're probably a bit too humble to negotiate wages and even narratives like "when I started my business I had come from a working class family, and had to scrap by raising 80k from my relatives to start my business" are out of your reality. So, prioritize being financially secure first.
This angst about a sense of purpose is basically a privileged class malady, if you are poor our friend Maslow will ensure you have more pressing issues to care about first.
I made a lot of sacrifices and experienced some serious personal pain to achieve modest financial independence by age 35 (not "FAT" by any means, but well beyond the average American), and it was worth it. I'm still working, but only because my former career momentum has carried me into a position where I'm paid a small fortune. I would never do any kind of normal engineering job for a normal income these days.
My attitude and the way my brain processes things is completely different. Getting laid off or fired goes from something you might fear or see as a bad thing to a neutral or even positive event that just encourages you to go spend your time in a different way for as long as you want.
20 years of bad habits facilitated by a given lifestyle can also be very hard to break. Not many can manage duly accumulating the savings while completely isolating themselves from what they work on, who they work with, and how all of that impacts their worldview.
And that's not even considering health. 20 years of being in a bad mental place (stress is bad, but a perceived lack of purpose and agency might well be worse) will leave its marks.
There's also a non-zero chance you'll die before year 20. I agree with the premise that seeking financial independence should be a significant factor in career/life decisions, but if you would be filled with regret by finding out it will be cut short at year 18, you're too singularly focused.
Having the money is far, far better than _not_ having money to help you "make sense or use of the next two decades". If you don't, both the sense and use are narrowed to being chained to a job indefinitely into the future.
> you realize you burned two precious decades accumulating money that, honestly, does not help you at all make sense or use of the next two
You are describing some extreme case of money chasing and/or complete ignorance to everything else. Having the "luxury" to be covered financially for the rest of your life allows you to pursue whatever goals you have in mind at mid-life. If you are susceptible to not knowing what you want, having less money won't help you find out but having more money might.
Is it any better to know what you want to do for the next 2 decades and not ever be able to afford do it? From a practical perspective you are still missing the opportunities you want or dream of, except you're also doing it with little or no financial buffer for the things you need.
The thing, being poor doesn't buy one a sense of purpose too. Money for sure doesn't solve the issue, but it gives you all the freedom to solve it for the rest of your life.
Damn I wish I had a million so that I could just drop my job and twitch my coding and gaming streams 12/7. I can't do that.
I believe most people having that million wouldn't spend it to find the fulfillment in life, but would end up increasing their life style by slacking off, drugs, expensive cars and items, etc. And the million would be gone in months and you would be left with just bad habits, dopamine hangover and no idea of the further direction in life.
Yay, do it! I'm in linear algebra right now (midterm in 40 minutes) and I'm over 40. I went back because I always regretted not taking more higher level math. It's been a lot of work, but very rewarding. My kids (age 7 and 5) think it's pretty cool to see dad working on his TI-89 and Notability on iPad.
I was running into the same issue. I wanted to get into deeeplearning but my math skills had atrophied. go check out mathacademy.com. its no where near the level of time investment that going back to college is and you will learn a lot!
Thanks. I definitely will teach myself some of the pre-requisites before registering in University. I need to prove to myself that I can sit down, take some course, complete the coursework + assignments + exams on MIT courseware, before committing anything that costs $$.
You would still very likely need human input and help. LLMs will hallunicate badly on problems just a bit more difficult than the very standard ones (first-hand experience with math).
I got excited to do this a couple years ago. (early 30s) Time and energy were a real killer.
Physics and Math in a formal setting like school is rigorous, not fun. I found it really hard to stay motivated. I don't know how I would practically use that knowledge, i would never contribute anything scientific. It would take years of grinding through foundational math and physics to get there.
More proof that old boomers don't get what its like to be a modern, young adult. I was just texting with friends about this at the coffee shop this morning while making plans for this weekend. Boss is interruping by goat-yoga mindfullness session, asking me to come into the office an hour this month. Who has time for this?
I wish I had all the money and all the time! I don't, alas...
I know it sounds stupid but I started to but lottery tickets, not to win, because statistically it is impossible, but just to give me hope, because lottery is the only thing in the world that can land a mountain of cash in one shot, with a very small investment. Nothing else can do that.
That's why humans purchase lottery tickets all the time throughout history. It's too cheer themselves up.
Needs too many correct bets or too much $$ to get a few million of returns. You can win a lottery of 50 million with just a few dollars! But I do think this is an interesting strategy. I might try it out just for fun.
Anyway I'm half joking. I do buy lottery but it is just to improve the mood of the day. Oh a good mood for a few hours is so important to keep being sane.
I strongly doubt this. It’s rare and we have all sorts of credible theories about why it’s rare, but the decline of so-called fluid intelligence is mostly Flynn Effect: people are getting better at taking tests.
It is a possibility I actually agree with, because a true understanding probably requires a lot more than taking some classes. It probably needs a PHD on Cosmology or something else.
But let's say a shallow understanding is good enough...even just completing a General Relativity graduate course with good mark is good enough.
There is absolutely zero evidence that 35 is some mystical cut off for "understanding." That poster has NO clue what they are talking about. Seriously, feel free to ignore that comment.
As for practical advice for learning, you should look into learning how to learn and then spend about 1-2 year habituating to the proper way to acquire knowledge. The science says your (not just you, practically everyone) current intuitions and habits are incorrect; as evidenced by almost everyone in this post. Youtuber Justin Sung is pretty much second to none in terms of a practical program for acquiring these skills.
Note: Simply reading that article and "understanding" what it is saying is not equivalent to having a study program that implements these things, and having a program that implements these things is not the same thing as actually executing on and habituating to said program. This process takes many months to years.
Echoing the sentiments of others here, this is why I firmly believe that public college should be free, for all, for life. Formal education just works better for some of us than video tutorials or self-paced learning, and ensuring everyone is able to learn new things and practice their skills in a consequence-free environment benefits society as a whole.
Think about the tech nerds (me) who never learned how to cook, and are in their thirties. Or lawyers and Doctors who are sick and tired of feeling like they don’t understand how computers work, and want to learn. Or an accountant who loves maths, and wants to get into the scientific side of the field. Or the homemaker who wants to re-enter the workforce now that their kids are grown, and wants to pick up carpentry and welding to become a tradesperson.
If cognitive decline comes from failing to practice it regularly, then the cheapest solution is free education for life to encourage as many people as possible to keep learning new skills and remain cognitively engaged.
I don't think I should be paying for others to study simply because they prefer a different modality of learning, especially when it has been found that learning modality selection has nearly zero impact on actual learning outcomes.
Now, if this was structured as a negative tax system, where eg everyone after graduating high school starts with -$10k in taxable income for a handful of years, perhaps that could avoid punishing those that choose to self-study.
Chat gpt is already free to a very generous extent, and covers 80% (if not more) of the learning resources you could need for almost any topic, theory-wise. I'd risk saying it can adapt for most people's needs.
For practical knowledge you just need to do it over and over. A good mentor/teacher would help a lot, but the very very basics I'd say are learnable by yourself. It's as simple as doing it over and over and keeping a critical eye on what went good and not.
As a result, I don't think free public colleges would enable more people to -actually- learn compared to what we have today. However, I find it would be a great place to build community and find people with similar interests to you, which is quite rare to do without an app these days.
See, I'm worried about relying on LLMs for learning given their penchant for hallucinations and the early studies showing they're actually bad for learning or cognitive improvement, since they remove the "research" and "critical thinking" phases of problem solving for entry-level stuff - fundamental skills that are necessary to put something into practice independently and learn from mistakes. Sure, teachers/professors can also make stuff up (and often with more damage given their position as a "reliable authority"), but in a classroom setting it feels like that'd be found out faster than using a ChatGPT that's spitting out bad results.
> However, I find it would be a great place to build community and find people with similar interests to you, which is quite rare to do without an app these days.
This is what a lot of detractors seem to miss about the benefits of in-person learning. Team projects force you to interact with strangers and cooperate for the benefit of the whole. Campuses increase the likelihood of chance encounters. They get you out of your home and into the community, which helps you feel connected to your actions and their outcomes.
The knock-on effects are often greater than the immediate benefits.
> I firmly believe that public college should be free, for all, for life
I just don't understand these statements that "this or that should be free". Do you plan to enslave the people who would provide this education? Do you not subscribe to the saying "You get what you pay for?". Public education through High School (in the US) has been free for many generations. Ever wonder what would happen if you make the next 4 years "free"? (Hint, you're not going to pop-out of those 4 years with any skills that are differentiated enough from everyone else who took-up the "free" education and not be right back in the same position you are now.)
If you don't have the motivation to prevent your own cognitive decline by taking advantage of a plethora of already free (high quality) education (e.g. https://ocw.mit.edu), then taxing the rest of us so you can be spoon-fed all the free "formal education" you want for life isn't the answer either.
> Do you plan to enslave the people who would provide this education? Do you not subscribe to the saying "You get what you pay for?". Public education through High School (in the US) has been free for many generations.
Do you believe that the people who provide public education through High School are enslaved? If yes, how? If not, why do you assume providing free public college education requires enslavement?
> Public education through High School (in the US) has been free for many generations. Ever wonder what would happen if you make the next 4 years "free"?
No need to wonder. Tuition for bachelor's degrees is free in multiple countries, for instance Germany, Finland, Sweden, Scotland and Norway. What happened there?
> Ever wonder what would happen if you make the next 4 years "free"?
A high school diploma used to mean something because it was a filter. Once graduation rate became the goal, standards were lowered, and just showing up became enough to graduate.
Higher education does some filtering. Either they filter aggressively at admissions and graduate everybody (Ivies), filter with weed-out classes and lesser degrees (respected public universities), both (other public universities), or offer a middling education and are ranked accordingly. So the degree means something.
I agree that degrees can be filters, but I question what "filter" they represent in modern contexts. From my experiences, the modern degree is little more than a gatekeeping credential to demonstrate you either took on substantial student debt (and thus likely to take lower pay or more precarious employment) or come from a wealthy background (stronger social networks for other rich folks/Capital types; a "pedigree", in other words, a la a caste system).
You're 100% right that a modern American High School Diploma does not reflect any degree of basic competency, because standards were constantly refined downward to promote graduation at all costs; I argue college degrees (and many technology certifications) are much the same, providing little more than a demonstration of taking on debt and rote memorization capabilities, rather than being a functional worker.
So if that's the case, and they're not of practical value as credentials anymore, it could be argued there's no harm in opening fundamental/foundational courses in skills to the entire populace, paid for through taxpayer money and restricted to State/Public non-profit Institutions. If we're really concerned about costs, we could implement caps on consumption unless part of a degree program to ensure those taking the advanced courses for employment prospects are given priority over those seeking non-professional growth. There's a lot of wiggle room to be had, if we're serious about opening this up.
> I just don't understand these statements that "this or that should be free".
Because you're focusing on the accumulation of a finite resource (currency, land, etc) as the sole barometer for success, and then conflating "freedom for use" with "freedom from cost". Obviously salaries have to be paid, buildings maintained, and improvements paid for. Obviously this all costs money, which is a finite resource. Obviously that money has to come from somewhere. Taxation enables everyone to contribute a fraction of the cost regardless of use, and an effective social program (like free education) distributes that cost effectively over time since there's zero chance 100% of the population will consume that resource at the same time, or even in the same year.
It's basic societal maths. If we accept forgoing a profit on the consumption of the resource (healthcare, roads, mail service, education, defense), we can lower the cost substantially and concentrate on its effective utilization. If we do that, we can carve up the cost across the widest possible demographic (taxpayers), and assign a percentage of it as taxation relative to income and wealth. It's how governments work.
> Do you not subscribe to the saying "You get what you pay for?"
Does anyone subscribe to this in the current economy? Everything has record high prices, yet still bombards you with advertisements, sells your data, and requires replacement in a matter of years instead of being repairable indefinitely. University education has boiled down to little more than gargantuan debt loads to acquire a credential for potential employment, a credential that often has no relevancy to the field you actually find work in.
So no, I don't subscribe to that, and I haven't for a decade. My $15,000 used beater car is literally more reliable than a six-figure SUV, and it doesn't keep mugging me for more value to the manufacturer through surveillance technology and forced-advertising.
> Ever wonder what would happen if you make the next 4 years "free"?
Yes. I imagine much of the populace would be better educated and informed about how modern, complex systems work. More people would be fiercely resistant to the low-wage, high-labor jobs that flood the market, forcing a reconciliation of societal priorities. I figure we'd have more engineers, and artists, and accountants, and tradespersons. We'd have more perspectives to existing problems from a broader swath of the economic strata, instead of the same old nepobabies from a lineage of college graduates making the same short-sighted mistakes.
The question is, have you considered what might happen if we made a four-year degree more economically accessible?
> If you don't have the motivation to prevent your own cognitive decline by taking advantage of a plethora of already free (high quality) education (e.g. https://ocw.mit.edu), then taxing the rest of us so you can be spoon-fed all the free "formal education" you want for life isn't the answer either.
Now you're just insulting people because they lack means, and conflating it with lack of motivation. I've lived with people whose sole education was reading books in Public Libraries because they never had public education, with Section 8 housing recipients hammering online learning courses from shared computers to try and find a way upward and out of poverty. None of that gets them a foot in the door, because they don't have the physical piece of paper that says "University Graduate" and the social networks you build from physically attending school - which adults cannot do without money or taking on substantial debt, that in turn jeopardizes their ability to survive.
If you want a society where only those of monied means have the ability to succeed, well present-day America is certainly an excellent demonstration of that. I'd rather build a society where all of us contribute a part of the proceeds of our labor to build a more equitable society for all, so everyone has an opportunity to found that new business, make those social connections, or try new ideas, without worrying about losing their home or paying for healthcare treatments.
> Formal education just works better for some of us than video tutorials or self-paced learning
I don’t agree with this at all. Anecdotally, the autodidacts I’ve met are way more knowledgeable about subjects they’re passionate about compared to those who received a formal education for it. This applies to both computer science, but also psychology majors who I’ve met who can’t even tell me the difference between Freud and Jung.
I mean, you can disagree with it based on your anecdata, but mine backs up my assertion which is why I made (and qualified) it the way I did. I specifically thrive in live sessions with an instructor knowledgeable on the material who can provide direct feedback, and I am not the only one. "Works better" is a qualifier on the effectiveness of the education on an individual, not the effectiveness of it on all individuals.
The key to learning accessibility is flexibility. Some thrive on self-study, some thrive on video tutorials, some thrive on audio lectures and others in live exercises. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if this also applied to specific topics: fundamentals of cooking might be better via live instruction, while iterating on a recipe is often fine with self-study or video tutorials.
The point is the flexibility, to allow people to learn in a way that's best for them, so they're more likely to continue learning throughout their lives.
Are you actually saying that nobody exists who learns better when taught in the best ways we currently know how to teach, and in the way all formal education currently works? That everyone is better off teaching themselves with no help?
You are disagreeing if and only if this is what you are saying.
You're not alone! Nobody knows everything, and what's important or necessary to our thriving changes constantly throughout our lives. Learning to cook wasn't high on that list when tech salaries were great, delivery was cheap, and housing wasn't (completely) unaffordable; now that I'm nearing my 40s and have to stretch even a six-figure salary further than before, suddenly learning to cook is a necessity.
Good people are always changing in some way. Making public education free encourages lifelong learning and builds a more adaptable human for times of crises. It's good survival strategy, that also just happens to create a more fulfilled human being.
She still got Alzheimer's and died a couple of years later.
She had multiple incidents that she hid because she was too scared to find out, and too stubborn to lose her ability to drive. She could have had some treatment if she'd approached a doctor earlier.
Alzheimer's is utterly evil. Robbing people of their unique spark, killing the person before the body dies.
Yep, first thing I thought, too. I'm terrified of age-related degeneration, so I try to stay active and mentally alert, just like my father did. He got out and played golf every chance he had, did duo-lingo to try to learn to speak Spanish, played bass in his church band, kept working even though he didn't need the money... and still got Alzheimers. Now he can't drive, can't be trusted to go out and take a walk by himself, can't even work the TV, so all he can do is sit and watch DVD's that my mom changes for him - at least while she still can.
I'm still going to try to fight it for myself, though.
Alzheimer's is a disease, you can get it in your 40s. If somebody recommends exercise to keep your legs healthy, they don't mean that if you have a staph infection in your legs that exercise will make it go away.
My grandfather had vascular dementia, and keeping him thinking and using his brain absolutely helped. Makes sense for a problem of blood flow that thinking new, hard stuff might direct some more blood supply to the brain.
Also, 1) you don't know for sure if you have Alzheimer's until you're gone, and 2) it seems that vascular dementia co-occurs with Alzheimer's a lot. So I can't imagine that it would ever be a good idea to stop using your mind if you felt it slipping.
My neighbor passed away from dementia recently. We first moved in maybe a year after his diagnosis and had to watch it progress. Horrible.
Now a friend of mine who is the best programmer I know has an early onset diagnosis. I have noticed him starting to pick fights regularly with people on LinkedIn over programming topics.
It's a really, really hard thing to watch someone go through.
I hope we have the compassion as a society to get to the point where I can say, "If I am unable to recognize my children, please kill me." At that point I would have died regardless of the condition of my body.
I don't want to wait that long. If I get diagnosed with Alzheimer's, I am taking a quick farewell tour of family and friends and then I'm done. I don't want to wait so long that I need someone else to off me. I wish that all wasn't necessary but this country (US) isn't going to get smarter anytime soon.
I hope we have the compassion as individuals not to ask others to kill us. That's a heavy weight to put on someone else. It's not abstract "society" conducting the euthanasia: individual healthcare providers would have to decide that you met the criteria and then administer the drugs.
Forcing someone to live through a disease when they have already lived a full life is simply cruel. Why should someone have to suffer on their way out?
In my opinion, there is a line that needs to be crossed and that line is extremely hard to define. To be safe, you have to go past the line so any blurriness is removed. I would ask the people I love the most to shoulder this burden and I would offer to shoulder the same burden for them. This is how love works.
Hopefully a cure comes as a form of vaccine so some folks can be totally against that.
I don't think mental stimulation correlates to the development of alzheimers anyway. The papers I've touched on the subject seem to suggest a mechanical failure in proteins essentially choking off and killing brain structure. Although the lucidity period shortly before death is interesting.
With 25 years of experience in software development, I’ve noticed that long coding sessions leave me feeling more fatigued than they used to. However, I’ve also become significantly more productive, as I spend far less time grappling with problems I’ve already solved. I’ve only just begun to explore AI-assisted coding, so that isn’t what’s driving my efficiency. Is it reasonable to assume that the natural decline in cognitive performance over time is offset by the gains in experience and expertise?
> Is it reasonable to assume that the natural decline in cognitive performance over time is offset by the gains in experience and expertise?
It depends on the task, but overall, for the work I do as a software developer, yes.
I would say I have less energy, but I need less energy, and I produce better results in the end. I'm better at anticipating where a line of work will go, and I'm quicker and better at adjusting course. There are a lot of multi-hour and multi-day mistakes that I made ten and twenty years ago that I don't make now.
The raw mental energy I had when I was younger allowed me to write things I couldn't write now, but everything I write now is something that other people can read and maintain, unlike twenty years ago. It's very rare that writing a large, clever, intricate mass of code is the right answer to anything. That used to frustrate me, because I was good at it. I used to fantasize about situations where other people would notice and appreciate my ability to do it. Now I'm glad it's not important, because my ability to do it has noticeably declined. In the rare cases where it's needed, there are always people around who can do it.
Another thing that is probably not normal, but not rare either, is that the energy I had when I was young supercharged my anxiety and caused me to avoid a lot of things that would have led to better outcomes, like talking to other people. I'm still not great (as in, not even average for an average human, maybe average for a software developer) but I'm a lot better than I used to be.
What I find most draining is the non-coding work I now do for work. I love the org I work for and it's really fulfilling but I do a lot of senior stuff now and I feel like the years slip away without always getting to build and invent as much stuff as I'd like to. There's so much to do and learn, it's amazing, we live in this difficult world but with amazing opportunities, and I wish I had an extra 12 hours a day (of energy) just to learn and build.
I was young once, 25 years ago I started programming, and I feel as though I have at least another 25 in me, if not more.
I've been coding for over 40 years at this point. I'm definitely a better programmer than I was - not necessarily faster at pumping out lines of code, but I get the right approach first time more often than I used to. Whole classes of bugs are just easy when you've seen them before, but I'm also better at avoiding them in the first place because I know my weaknesses and where to spend time thinking more carefully.
At the same time, I can't context-switch like I used to. Once I get into the zone, no problem, but interruptions affect me much more than when I was 20 (or even 40). I can almost feel the tape changer in the back of my head switching tapes and slowly streaming the new context into RAM (likely because all the staging disks have been full for years).
As for long coding sessions - I relish them when I get the chance, which isn't as often as I'd like. Once the tapes have finished loading and I'm in the zone, I can stay there half the night. So that hasn't changed with age.
It could be something similar that we see happening in seasoned weightlifters/bodybuilders:
As your absolute strength gets stronger, the same exercises and workouts get proportionally more fatiguing.
5 sets of a bench press at an 80% of max load, taken within a rep or two of failure, done by a first-year lifter, is incredibly different from that same scheme being done by somebody who's lifted for 10 years. So more advanced lifters tend to do things like lighten the load and use variations of lifts that have more favorable stimulus-to-fatigue ratios.
Anyways, I thought maybe as an advanced programmer, something here could be analogous. You've already done all the coding and thinking to figure out easier and lower-level problems. So what you're left with are the more cognitively challenging parts of coding, which should be more mentally exhausting per unit time. Whatever is '80% difficulty' for you is probably way more advanced than what you were looking at 10 or 20 years ago.
Magnus Carlsen (the multiple times chess world champion) talked about this in his recent Joe Rogan podcast. He said he passed his chess peak already now at 34. He now knows more, but when he was younger he could win via brute mental power.
> Is it reasonable to assume that the natural decline in cognitive performance over time is offset by the gains in experience and expertise?
So according to Carlsen, for chess the answer is no.
I personally also suspect the answer for programming is the same. Most, if not all, of the hotshot programmers we know became famous in their early 20s. Torvalds started writing Linux at 21. Carmack was 22 when Doom was released. Many of the most famous AI researchers were in their early 20s when doing the most groundbreaking work. Einstein's miracle year by the way was also when he was 26.
> He said he passed his chess peak already now at 34. He now knows more, but when he was younger he could win via brute mental power.
The famous anti-case for this is J.R.R Tolkien started writing Lord of the Rings when he was about 45.
Writing is not programming but they are not that dissimilar. Especially in this context.
What I've learned over the years is life is actually not fair and everyone is different. You can be razer sharp and reasonably healthy at 83 or be in great shape and die of a brain aneurism at 12 with no warning.
Basically don't let studies or other people's results persuade you into not starting or giving up.
> Creative writing is tremendously different from coding, imo.
I've had a different experience.
IMO there's a huge overlap in skills when writing, coding, making videos and playing guitar.
They all boil down to the idea of getting something out of your head and then refining it until you know when to stop refining based on whatever criteria you're optimizing for at the time.
This is based on writing over a million words and making hundreds of videos over 10 years on my blog and programming for ~20 years while casually playing the guitar for about as long.
People in their early 20s are also much less likely to have other responsibilities "intruding" into their headspace. It's a lot easier to be monomaniacal when you don't (for example) have kids yet.
I know. That's the common argument, but I don't think that's it. See the argument I made in the previous comment. As I wrote in that comment, Magnus thinks his brain was better when he was younger. It probably doesn't help to have responsibilities like children, but I don't think that explain everything. There are also many people without children for example. And if you don't have children then studying full time should take as much if not more time than a simple job.
Also, Hans Albert Einstein was born during Einstein's miracle year.
> Also, Hans Albert Einstein was born during Einstein's miracle year.
This was in an era when fathers had little to do with childcare. I don’t know about Einstein’s specific situation, but even 40 years ago almost half of fathers had never changed a diaper.
Very little of my work needs breakthroughs or inventions. Nothing new under the sun, as the Romans said. So, this mental peak is less important than being focused and efficient for me.
i have 10++ years more, but i don't notice such.. fatigue. 2..5+ hours.. no problems (even with fingers-typing-wrong-keys/order-much-more-often). What i do notice though, and not only in coding, is.. kind-of creeping-boredom. Growing tired of certain things going the way they go, too quickly. You know, the deja-vu feeling when you see something developing certain way, and seeing it go exactly there. Thousand times..
But i haven't stopped learning things, apart of the software-making-related, 2 years ago went into e-foiling, and some half-related more-technical adventures. So maybe that is keeping the dementia at bay..
> Is it reasonable to assume that the natural decline in cognitive performance over time is offset by the gains in experience and expertise?
Maybe up to a point. Most of the tools and languages I use daily are fairly recent, or at least new to me. I don't have much of an advantage, if any, compared to my younger colleagues.
There are certainly things I do better now than 10 years ago but I think I'm slowly declining though. Fortunately, there's more than one way to be productive professionally so I hope I can keep up for a few more year.
I noticed that I can still do long sessions if I have to crack open a problem ( I started coding around 35 and now I'm 40+), but the burnout may prevent me from coding for a few days.
I do think it has more to do with daily chores (work, family) than my age. I noticed that, despite being easier to get frustrated nowadays (because I get exposed to more sources of frustration) than I was in my 30s, I'm actually more perseverant than myself 10 years ago. I managed to be very close to wrap up a side project, the first time in my coding life. Of course the scope is smaller than my previous projects but I'm surprised that I didn't back down easily, considering how many times I banged my head during the first few weeks.
I guess being exposed to more frustrations does improve ones resistance to it. To be precise, I get agitated easily, but that agitation doesn't seem to burn me out in the middle term -- while in my 30s I didn't get agitated very often but every time it burns me down to the point I left my side projects.
This is something that can be gamed out mathematically, for example time to goal minus time to refactor.
As someone who has been writing software and/or managing operations for 20 years here is what I have noticed:
* The more experienced people get the more cognizant they become of fatigue in that they know when to take a step back.
* The more experienced people get the faster they get in that they know how to approach repeated problems.
* People do not necessarily get better with experience. Some developers never fully embrace automation, especially if they are reliant on certain tools versus original solution discovery.
Based on that it’s natural that some older developers tend to decline with age while others continue to grow in capability and endurance. The challenge is to identify for that versus those who mask it.
I wouldn't say, "decline," to be charitable. I tend to lean more on mathematics and writing. That often makes up for the lack of stamina.
When I look back on code I wrote 15, 20 years or more ago... it's fine but it lacks the sophistication I have now. I didn't know what I didn't know back then and had to learn. I can see in my code where I encountered a problem and instead of solving it I added more code until it, "worked."
I wasn't university educated so that's explains a bit of it. I didn't start picking up pure functional programming and formal methods until my mid thirties (gosh, has it been a decade already?). I worked through Harvard's Abstract Algebra at 38. I'm leaning more about writing proofs and proof engineering in my spare time while continuing to stream work in Haskell on various libraries and projects. And I'm in my 40s -- I'm doing more programming and mathematics now than ever.
I'm also playing in a band, practice calisthenics and skateboarding, and have been improving my illustration skills with ink.
It seems like the discovery of the article is that if you don't use your skills they start to decline as early as your late 20s. All it takes is practice to maintain and improve them!
I might get a little tired every now and then and can't keep every library I've used in my head all at once. But I tend to rely more on mathematics and specifications and writing. I write less code now. I remove code. And I keep programs and systems fast and correct.
> Is it reasonable to assume that the natural decline in cognitive performance over time is offset by the gains in experience and expertise?
It depends on what you're doing.
The stronger cognitive strength needed, the less it can be replaced with experience.
Some chess grandmasters are teenagers. Maybe maths intensive ML research could be a bit comparable. But that's... Maths. Or distributed software algorithm optimizations?
In the vast majority of software work (as in > 99% ?), experience is more important, though, if you're bright enough when young. Or so I think
(But when closer to 80 or 90 or 100 years, that's different of course.)
Productivity doesn't correlate super closely with fatigue in my experience. The worse sessions are when I'm banging my head against something and getting nowhere. When I'm flowing, I can go for hours.
I’m not sure it makes sense to differentiate between energy spend while being “productive”, and energy spent whole trouble shooting and problem solving.
After all, trouble shooting can be viewed as a productive thing.
> skills decline at older ages only for those with below-average skill usage. White-collar and higher-educated workers with above-average usage show increasing skills even beyond their forties.
> Individuals with above-average skill usage at work and home on average never face a skill decline (at least until the limit of our data at age 65).
Literally the two most important things from the article.
Get better at things so you don't have to worry about decline. That simple.
Its like a muscle - develop it early on and then you can easily keep it in shape without much effort until the day you die, without any noticeable decline (at least until like 70).
I wonder how much of the "age-related" decline is due to the brain functioning on autopilot. After over 5 decades, I have experienced most of the issues I'm going to experience in life. More often than not, I'm addressing issues with mental playbooks based on past experience.
As I get older (now in my 50s), I find myself reflecting on how many aspects of my life and decisions are operating on autopilot. I figure it's worse now with social media where people are constantly bombarded with dopamine hits, while boredom and idle thoughts have largely become things of the past.
Perhaps counterintuitively, I am trying to break this pattern and consciously engage with my experiences by asking a few basic questions, such as:
- What am I seeing here?
- What's going on?
- What am I missing?
- How can I approach this differently to achieve the same or better outcomes?
Additionally, I am making a concerted effort to notice more new details during routine tasks, like commuting or shopping. I can't count how many times I've discovered something new and interesting on my work commutes. Actually, I can: it's every time.
Edit: Also spending more time with long-form content over short-form, be it reading or watching videos. It forces me to consider a topic for a much longer period. Short form knowledge is a trap, unless you have some system that hits you with high rates of repetition (eg Anki).
In my humblest of opinions, you are probably spot on about the autopilot vs. actually experiencing things.
As a concrete example, someone in this thread mentioned their older relative spending a lot of time with puzzles daily. I too watched my grandpa doing sudokus and crosswords, but in the end if there’s nothing much else, those too will quickly become uninspiring routine.
I really believe truly experiencing life does require some introspection so that you have agency.
And agreed, at one time I really got into Sudoku and Minesweeper, but my nerd mind quickly turned them into brainless pattern matching routines that required effectively no thinking. Don't get me wrong. I appreciate those abilities, but there's a time and place.
I bet you can even accomplish some of this retroactively with the right group of friends. The question "What did you do this weekend?" can be answered in so many levels of detail.
For me. I started making enough money that all my old routines stopped being relevant. I started to drift into comforts and lost touch with my surroundings.
Are there any guidelines for what exactly this would entail?
My short term memory is falling off a cliff. What do I need to do to prevent that from getting worse? Are there any other bases I need to cover that I don't know that I'm missing?
Are you sure? I thought this was happening to me too, and then I realized when looking back 10 years ago that I have way more responsibilities now both in and out of work: I am not only getting more done at work, but also for more people. I am now picking and choosing which meetings to even hold, much less attend, because I have a higher throughput. My children's needs are much more complicated now than when they were younger. I have a side business.
I can't fathom how I would have even gotten this all done when I was younger simply due to how much leisure time I spent, much less kept all of this in short term memory back then.
> I thought this was happening to me too, and then I realized when looking back 10 years ago that I have way more responsibilities now both in and out of work
This so much. When I was in my 20s I never forgot things, but I didn't have anything that I really needed to remember lol.
It's easy to forget about how many more responsibilities we take on as we age, simply by nature of how those responsibilities slip into our lives one at a time, bit by bit, gradually shifting our window of normalcy.
My phone is now full of Notes, Alarms, and timers. I can barely leave the house to run an errand without writing down what I need to do.
As far as actually improving memory, I try to expose my mind to as much raw material as I can. The mind is a muscle, it has to be exercised, and as you get old you need to focus on its core strength rather than physique and raw strength.
Rehearsal and repetition. Read constantly, get out in the environment and really try to observe all the things that are going on. Write down all the things you want to do this year, and when you’ve done them, write that down, too. Every so often, review the list. It will prompt your recall to a wonderful degree.
Write down your little milestones - ‘in March we found a clutch of tadpoles in a tire track puddle and we watered and fed them there for six weeks”
Regarding memory, I have made a habit of assuming I have a faulty memory, and trying to write down anything I think I may want to remember in the future using a wiki style tool that supports back linking. The tool I use is Org Roam in Emacs, but there are lots of options. I have found that by doing this, I have offloaded a lot onto my computer, and made space in my mind to remember a lot of new things.
Contrary to the other comments saying to carry a pocket computer: my brain. Hence the improved memory. I offload my thoughts into my notes when I can. If it wasn't important enough to remember until I can find a seat at my desk, it wasn't important enough to write a note on.
The only 'exercise' I've heard of that offers measurable improvement is "N-Back", kind of like the old TV game "Concentration". The app is available on most smartphones.
Emotions can have a large impact on memory, as far as I know. They provide the catalyst, in a way, in the process that forms memories. If you are depressed or otherwise not emotionally engaged, it can become much harder to form memories.
Solve emotional problems and memory may improve. (I have no idea if that applies to you, of course.)
> short term memory
Which sort of memory do you mean? Short term memory is remembering a name while you write it down, not remembering it the next day or week.
Avoid weed if you don't already. Might seem out of left field but a programmer friend of mine is absolutely convinced their memory is shot because of long covid and it's like, well, maybe, and the trauma of the pandemic certainly put a dent in everyone's cognitive ability, but also the dabs can't be helping.
I was in the same boat, but I started noticing that if I force myself not to do silly multitasking (like not paying attention to what I am doing because my mind is thinking about irrelevant other things) it gets better. Since I stopped the infinity doom-scrolling it has improved a bit
Stress and lack of sleep also affect me a lot. Both are omnipresent, since I am a parent of young-age special-need kids.
You are not supposed to store things in the brain, that only causes stress.
Brain is to do thinking work, you are better off writing and tracking things on paper. Use the brain to think, and paper for planning, scheduling, tracking etc..
If you are older, I think the trick is to watch (or remember!) what younger people do and follow (or revert to) that behavior, as much as you can.
Comparing cognitive abilities between older and younger people fails to control for the inputs - behavior, experience, etc. Try the same inputs (using some big generalities):
* Exploration: Younger people love to explore, even just for exploration sake, and are also compelled to try things - and they also fail. Exploration is their mode, because so much of the world is new to them, because doing something new and innovative is socially admired, and especially because so many major changes happen - leave home, serious romantic relationships, first job, etc. A lot of that happens, ready or not.
* Learning: Similarly, younger people are compelled to learn lots of very challenging things, whether they want to or not; they are compelled to use cognitive skills that they are uncomfortable with. Their job is to learn, daily, for 12-16+ years. Remember school? Remember your early years at work when had little choice of what you did? Remember struggling with all those things?
* Playing: Young people love to play and are socially admired for playing better and more creatively.
What, you're past all that? Nobody is going to make you study things you're not interested in? Don't want to make any big changes? Dignity too big to play? Ego too big to explore and to fail? When you're older, you can say no and 99.99% (I think that's about accurate) take advantage of that and refuse to do or even talk about things they aren't already comfortable with. Does all this sound too hard? Then don't complain about losing those skills.
I think a big part of the problem is the same that affects CEOs - there is nobody to hold them to account.
> ”Cross-sectional age-skill profiles suggest that cognitive skills start declining by age 30 if not earlier.”
and
> ”Two main results emerge. First, average skills increase strongly into the forties before decreasing slightly in literacy and more strongly in numeracy”
Does this mean that this study contradicts the popular common understanding that cognitive skills decline after 30? Or am I missing something?
For me, personally, if feels a more impactful finding than the “use it or lose it” one
I have seen it with my own parents and my wife's parents first hand. Frankly, I think the lack of social interaction is a big part of it.
When they're working, they're regularly talking to people outside their comfort zone about potentially challenging questions. That gets largely shutdown once you retire.
Both my parents were in a huge rush to retire early, and now they just sit at home and scroll Facebook. I don't see the appeal.
I didn’t appreciate this until covid and wfh. I’m an introvert and am in my happy place sitting in front of a computer or with a book. But I was losing my mind and had to be actively social for the first time in my life. I can see a decade of living like it’s Covid turning my relatively healthy, relatively young brain into soup.
Leaning into stereotypes, the older women in my family did just fine in retirement because they just started doing social activities full time. If anything they retired and got busier. The older men sometimes did ok but usually did worse.
That is why volunteering when you are in retirement is a win-win. Very few others have the time for what is an absolutely necessary part of society, and it is great to keep your mind and heart active while you recall your life and use its lessons to give back to others. Any sort of volunteering will lend itself to that. For example, Jimmy Carter built houses, and it seems to have done him wonders.
>>Both my parents were in a huge rush to retire early, and now they just sit at home and scroll Facebook. I don't see the appeal.
My retirement plans look somewhat similar to how Knuth spends his time. Long hours of deep intellectually challenging work. Driving long distances and eating tasty food some where far away.
Most of retirement motivation comes from feeling the sun during weekdays. There is little point to be sitting whole day at home.
Social interaction must be important, but also the fact that work doesn't ask you how tired you are, you have set of tasks and go. When being master of my own time, I can imagine I would veer towards more fun activities which may not have that forceful aspect and would be done mostly alone.
And super true for those parents, my goal is to travel massively as much as my budget and health will allow it. Backpacking all around south east asia, thats what keeps me pushing to work on earlier retirement. Sitting at home unless forced, no thank you thats a downward spiral
And from what I've heard on the grapevine, life expectancy drops among those who retire relative to those that don't. This makes sense: many people don't seem to know what to do with themselves if they're not "officially employed", so when they retire, they become aimless, and they sort of decay and disengage from living.
Though is that causation or correlation? I can imagine that people with all kinds of illnesses would also retire sooner than people who are still in peak health.
For those who don't feel like taking math courses in a formal setting, making games from scratch is a fun way to learn and apply linear algebra and calculus.
I never really needed determinants in my life until I tried moving a spaceship towards another object. Trying to render realistic computer graphics gets you into some deep topics like FFTs and the physics of light and materials, with some scary-looking math, but I can feel my mind sharpening with each turn of the page in the book.
This makes so much sense. I've been programming every day since I was in my twenties and there are definitely some concepts that seem much easier for me to get my head around now (I'm in my 50's) than earlier.
Right now I'm reading through a college textbook on the biology of learning and memory with ease and good retention. Never got this deep into any subject in my school years.
> I've been programming every day since I was in my twenties and there are definitely some concepts that seem much easier for me to get my head around now (I'm in my 50's) than earlier.
Same same.
I figured this is because I have less energy, but a little more wisdom. I have much broader understanding of related concepts. So, things click a lot faster.
As someone who plays a lot of board games — particularly heavier board games — and hopes to do even more of that in retirement, I’m wondering if/how that is helping/will help fight cognitive decline.
I can imagine at the very least it won’t hurt, and intuitively it makes sense. But I’m not sure studies have been done specifically to understand how board gaming — or the problems being solved with board gaming - helps with cognitive skills.
Curious if others that are closer to this field have thoughts.
I love me some board games, but I prefer depth and decision space to complexity -- and the industry is dominated by stupendously complex beasts full of unnecessary mechanics that slow things down or extend setup without adding too much. A perfect example is TI4's expansion Prophecy of Kings, nearly all of which I despise for bloating a beautiful base game. I'm also always flabbergasted by how starved and railroaded I feel in games like Dune Imperium or Cole Wehlre's collection. Despite a wealth of mechanics, my choices are few and far between.
Complexity has its place, especially for engine builders like Terraforming Mars where complex interactions are the point. Many designers seem to be throwing in the kitchen sink arbitrarily. We're in a "bigger is better" paradigm.
Recreational travel is the only thing that routinely works for me in terms of slowing down time and fully engaging my brain. It's something I can incorporate into my life multiple times per year and it guarantees a massive amount of new stimulation (assuming travel to new and interesting places). Even the most rudimentary trip to Europe will have you grappling all day long with a different language and culture and environment in ways that are completely taken for granted in our day to day lives.
There's lots of things that can make an even bigger impact, like moving to a new place or starting a new career or school, or a new relationship. But those are things that sometimes only happen a handful of times in our entire lives.
Everything else I find eventually becomes routine, no matter how stimulatingly it can be at the start. Not that we shouldn't try! Some stimulation is a whole lot better than none, and I have a terrible feeling that many people get little-to-no stimulation for weeks and months at a time (beyond a new TV show or podcast or political drama).
I write code, pretty much every single day, and also, solve problems, every single day (7 days a week).
I think solving problems is important. Not just rote coding, but being presented with a bug, or a need to achieve an outcome, without knowing the solution, up front, is what I like.
Basically, every single day, I'm presented with a dilemma, which, if not solved, will scrap the entire project that I'm working on.
I solve every one (but sometimes, by realizing it's a red herring, and trying alternate approaches).
I think there's a valid concern about cognitive fatigue. It could be mentally exhausting to constantly "exercise" our brains just to maintain cognitive abilities as we age!
Maybe AI could be our mental gym buddy here - not replacing our thinking but offering just the right level of mental challenge to keep us sharp without burning us out. Picture an AI that knows when to push your intellectual boundaries and when to back off based on your energy levels.
And Neuralink-style brain interfaces? They could be like cognitive training wheels - gently supporting neural pathways while letting us do the actual pedaling. Instead of "downloading knowledge" (which sounds exhausting in its own way), they might subtly enhance natural learning processes or help maintain neural connections that would otherwise weaken with age.
The goal shouldn't be turning our golden years into endless mental marathons, but rather finding that sweet spot where cognitive maintenance feels engaging and enjoyable rather than like another chore on the to-do list!
> Two main results emerge. First, average skills increase strongly into the forties before decreasing slightly in literacy and more strongly in numeracy. Second, skills decline at older ages only for those with below-average skill usage. White-collar and higher-educated workers with above-average usage show increasing skills even beyond their forties. Women have larger skill losses at older age, particularly in numeracy. [emphasis mine]
So, it seems like workers with above-average usage of literacy and numeracy continue to increase their ability, while those in fields that don’t emphasize those would need some kind of mental “exercise”.
(I also note that some commenters here are rushing to add more cognitive work to their daily routine through additional studies, but I wonder if they’d be better off focusing on commonly neglected areas like physical activity.)
I'm skeptical. I was in my 40's before I graduated from a college. Before that, I did some serious electronics with a background from my local community college, have worked production lines, taught myself assembly language when I was engineering my first microprocessor-based design at work, then when I couldn't get re-employed years later, a lot of potential employers simply not believing my resume content because my 'formal education' was lacking, so I went back to school, got my BS in 1999, and my MS in 2006, then continued working on personal projects and learnign new coding languages on my own since now nobody wanted to take a chance on hiring an 'old' man. Their loss.
> I couldn't get re-employed years later, a lot of potential employers simply not believing my resume content because my 'formal education' was lacking..
I am 53 years old. I don't have a college degree. I have never been unemployed and have had good software development jobs all my adult life, including now.
It is possible and likely that your lack of a degree was not the issue.
Idk, at 29, 30 and 31 I became significantly smarter - it just had to do with things I was intensely interested in. Things that could hold my focus just no longer matter. Fortunately I'm interested in engaging things that are hard.
Older coders/technical folks tend to have more wisdom than raw compute (relative to younger coders who may have more raw compute than distilled wisdom.) Wisdom takes a more reliable and more efficient path than raw compute.
Both raw compute and wisdom will be eventually replaced by AI, but "deep wisdom" is largely held in the body, in the way we react viscerally to things, which AI as it is envisioned today does not factor in at all. So we still have a refuge in the wisdom stored in our body memory.
As an older developer who lately has been pairing with early career developers, I've been noticing lately how often wisdom comes into play. It feels like close to a daily occurrence where I suggest something is the cause, then later I'm asked how I knew that was the right thing to investigate, and the only response I have is that it's almost always the culprit.
I'd like to see how much of the decline is correlated not with age but with Parent Brain.
The mental energy occupied by and spent with parenting is palpable, not to mention long-term continued stress, physical, mental and emotional exhaustion. I wouldn't be surprised if having kids (which is of course correlated with age) is much more of a factor than age itself.
And yet ranks of successful founders are dominated by people in their mid forties. Perhaps there is something more involved with social function than pure cognitive skill?
Does that imply that it also is part of character traits? As in use empathy, become emphatic, stay in a non-emphatic environment, your brain degrades you to a sociopath?
I hung out with a friend recently I had not seen in close to a decade. He was at one time my closest friend and seeing him was kind of uncomfortable and enlightening. I saw sooo much of how I used to talk and act still in him that it really had me wondering how much of that I'd gotten from him versus the reverse.
I think it has more to do with getting desensitized to things the more you're exposed to them. With age you get more and more exposure to everything emotional and lose the strong reactions.
Add to that some frustration from not being able to keep up with things, health issues, no one "young" having time to hang out and your friends dying all the time and I'd be grumpy too. You were once a stallion taking care of everyone and now you worry about falling in the shower because you occasionally lose balance for whatever reason. And you know it'll hurt like a bitch, you'll break something and it won't heal for a year. It's quite humiliating.
I am definitely grumpy. What makes me grumpy is the fact that society keeps banging its head against a wall for no good reason.
There is everything there for growth, and yet I see none. I get very tired of knowing well what the boring, selfish reaction of the person I encounter is going to be. I am sure I do the same thing - and don't change much compared to what is available to me to make changes. I do not lead by example at all the way I would like.
Nonetheless, what makes me grumpy is lack of change, not the superficial appearance of change with which technology distracts us. Moral growth would be so refreshing to see, but I see none of it - despite virtue signalling as a veneer from all parts of society.
Said more colloquially, a lot of older people just grow tired of all our bulls*t.
There are trajectories of personality traits over the life span, I would hesitate to extrapolate them based on the trajectory of cognitive abilities though. One of the known life span emotional/personality trajectory is positivity bias, older people tend to be more positive. It is sometimes framed as negativity avoidance, that is older people tend to ignore negative things more often.
As with most research around our scientific understanding of intelligence, I assume this only scratches the surface.
There may be something to your comment.
This is sweet news. I'm over 40. I enrolled at my local university in January and I'm studying (literally right now) for my linear algebra midterm [0] which is in 45 minutes! I'm on HN to calm my nerves.
I graduated high school in the early 2000s and graduated college with major in computer science and a minor in math. My goal is 5-8 more classes for a second degree in math (major).
Wish me luck!
[0] Study guide: https://course1.winona.edu/bperatt/M311S25/Tests/Test%202/te... Course: https://course1.winona.edu/bperatt/M311S25/Administrative/M3...
I went to the University of Texas but I took summer courses in Houston Community College (calculus II, physics II, and more -- those classes were SO bad at UT).
It was insane how much better the courses were in the community college. Tiny class of 15. $300 or something. Amazing professor that you could ask questions to like you could in high school. Normal 20-30 question textbook homework where you just work basic problems and build confidence that you know the material.
Meanwhile UT was the opposite. I think I paid $1400/class/semester (and that's a bargain). Lecture halls where you couldn't possibly ask a question. Weird math/physics homework that was like 3-5 super hard questions that I often couldn't figure out, demoralizing. Often a TA that could barely speak English. It's actually quite insulting.
I sometimes think about enrolling in a local college for fun, the experience was that good.
> Weird math/physics homework that was like 3-5 super hard questions that I often couldn't figure out, demoralizing
Had this experience at an elite uni as well for math courses. At the time I felt like it pushed me to really grow, and it was absolutely necessary to do well in that specific course (tests often had questions that ~required you to know how to do all the uber-hard homework problems), but I wonder what the research actually says about this sort of homework vs your more standard variety.
Large universities are focused on research, and they incur a lot of expenses due to administrators' egos (build build build), the number of administrators, and the range of microstate services offered, like their own health care system and mental health counseling (a major thing in universities now). Community colleges are focused on teaching.
> their own health care system and mental health counseling (a major thing in universities now)
Which would be a non-issue if the US simply had single-payer or universal healthcare.
I had a similar experience -- took physics at a community college when I was in high school. The 'up-side' of the overproduction of PhDs is that many people from elite backgrounds end up teaching at community colleges.
The only negative for me was that the students were pretty checked out.
> The only negative for me was that the students were pretty checked out.
I didn't put a lot of thought into where I went to school but if I could do it over again this is something I would have considered when I applied. The school I ended up at did not have many serious students. It was a night and day difference taking courses with even one or two students who were similarly engaged with the material, but most of those students ended up transferring to better schools after a year or two.
You also run into the issue later on that the people you went to school with wash out of industry (or never work in it to begin with) at much higher rates in comparison to those who went to more serious schools.
I had the same experience where community college teachers were vastly superior to my university teachers. Vastly.
I hope it went well! I am in my fifties and enrolled in a master degree program for pure mathematics about 2 years ago (I don't need the degree, so I"m just taking all the classes they offer, so not about to graduate). It definitely took some time to get my brain sharper, but I am better each semester.
I hope people don't take away the negative side of the article, brain slows down, but the positive side: brain gets better with usage. Its uncomfortable, I can churn out programs as complex as programs I've already written and go to review meetings and planning meetings without much effort. But being able to solve PDEs reasonably quickly and accurately, I cannot, or have not without a great deal of practise. It's unconfortable in some weird mental but physical sense. But I'm sharper in everything else I do.
One interesting thing about software as career followed by math classes is that there's no compiler - you can type any janky thought into LaTeX and if you don't detect that it's bogus, nothing will, until you show it to a professor.
Also, the information density of maths notation is way higher than (good) code. We want code to be readable by some that doesn't know it; a lot of math seems to be readable when you sort of 80% already are familiar with all the prereqs. So no just skimming and then hitting compile/test/run (whatever validation you do). It's typing letter by letter and taking the mental effort to actually see and decipher the letter (at least, for me in my current stage; I'm trying to do novel research, but my demonstrated understanding of the details of the previous research is embarrassing low).
Also, weirdly, I still have the same fear of professors that I did as a young person. I manage it better with my decades of maturity (really) but it is still a part of my social interactions.
> But being able to solve PDEs reasonably quickly and accurately, I cannot, or have not without a great deal of practise.
No one - young or old - does well in math without a great deal of practice :-)
The information density is incredible. A 2x2 matrix (Jordan constants) containing enough information to produce a slice of a hyperbolic paraboloid. Leaves me mesmerized...
It's funny, at the end of each lecture I just want to yell... "NO! Don't stop! I must see how this ends!"
Very similar to when I stop our children's movie and tell them to go take a bath.
Good luck! You can do it! I started doing statistics classes three years ago when I was 45, continued doing a MSc degree, which I finished successfully a few months ago. I am now looking into doing a PhD. This is more fun than I ever imagined (fair enough: I was a teenager when imagining it).
Good luck! You should check out Math Academy, it's more effective/efficient/cheaper but also a good supplement since it's accredited.
I recently turned 40 myself and I'm working through their Foundations courses (made to help adults catch up) before tackling the Machine Learning and other uni courses.
Have you found Math Academy better than just prompting ChatGPT/Claude/etc. to be a math tutor?
I'll tell you my experience as someone who's been using Math Academy for past 6 months.
Math Academy does what every good application or service does. Make things convenient. That's it. No juggling heavy books or multiple tabs of PDFs. Each problem comes with detailed solution so getting them wrong doesn't mean looking around on the internet for a hint about your mistake (this is pre ChatGPT era of course, where not getting something correct meant putting down MathJax on stackexchange).
> better than just prompting ChatGPT/Claude/etc
The convenience means you are doing the most important part of learning maths with most ease: problem solving and practice. That is something an LLM will not be able to help you with. For me, solving problems is pretty much the only way to mostly wrap my head around the topic.
I say mostly because LLMs are amazing at complementing Math Academy. Any time I hit a conceptual snag, I run off to ChatGPT to get more clarity. And it works great.
So in my opinion, Math Academy alone is pretty good. Even great for school level maths I'd say. Coupled with ChatGPT the package becomes a pretty solid teaching medium.
Yes, much better. ChatGPT/Claude/etc. are useful the times I want extra explanation to help connect the dots, but Math Academy incorporates spaced repetition, interleaving, etc. the way a dedicated tutor would, but in a better structured environment/UI.
Their marketing website leaves a lot to be desired (a perk since they are all math nerds focused on the product), but here are two references on their site that explain their approach:
- https://mathacademy.com/how-it-works
- https://mathacademy.com/pedagogy
They also did a really good interview last week that goes in depth about their process with Dr. Alex Smith (Director of Curriculum) and Justin Skycak (Director of Analytics) from Math Academy: https://chalkandtalkpodcast.podbean.com/e/math-academy-optim...
Given my ChatGPT and friends experience has been one of overwhelming frustration due to incorrect information, I would say Math Academy is in an entirely different galaxy. ChatGPT is great if you want to learn that pi is equal to 4.
b-b-b-but the next supercalifragilistic ChatGPT version will be able to tell you that pi is between 3.1 and 3.2. that will be a Quantum improvement, asymptotically close to AGI.
at least, i think i heard alt samman say so.
you plebs and proles better shell out the $50 a month, increasing by $10 per day, to keep dis honest billionaires able to keep on buying deir multi-million dollar yachts and personal jets.
be grateful for the valuable crumbs we toss to you, serfs.
Math is something that should be taught in an opinionated way with an eye toward pedagogy. Self study with GPT is an excellent tool in math, but only for those who have enough perspective to know which directions to set out on. I don’t think anybody who doesn’t know linear algebra should be guiding their studies themselves.
Not OP, but I have found MathAcademy to be infinitely better. I really liked the assessment portion which levels you and gives you an idea of where you are are at the present. As someone who graduated with an engineering degree a while ago, there were things I realized I didn’t know as well as I thought I did and I probably would not have prompted an LLM to review.
I haven't used it, but there was a big thread about it yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43241499
Good luck! I'm over 40 and just had my midterm for General Linear Models (statistics + linear algebra).
This YouTube playlist was invaluable for me: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmM_3MA2HWpYYo7QExaRvor_u...
Appreciating the link!
Keep making those pushes! I was a non-traditional graduate student because around 10 years I got very serious about going for my doctorate. I literally scheduled times with my friends to watch Khan Academy videos on upper level maths and spent time practicing those skills. Then grad school is just one intensive learning session.
Years of martial arts ingrained that sense of being a life-long learner. I was taught the mantra of "Progress comes to those who train" and "Practice makes permanent" and even though those phrases were focused on learning to beat someone up, I've carried them on into other parts of my life.
Break a leg and Good luck!
Congrats! It is never too late to be doing this type of study and work.
I'm doing something similar: I just turned 50 and have been taking graduate ML classes where I work (at Carnegie Mellon). When I finish the graduate certificate program in generative AI and LLMs that I am enrolled in, I will be only two semesters away from earning a full masters degree.
Good luck! Are you in Winona, too? I live near the campus and have been considering taking some classes there, this was a nice surprise to see. :-)
Good luck! I'm 36 and still hoping to master Digital Signal Processing at some point even though I find the math extremely difficult.
Great for you; that's really fantastic and by posting about it, I hope you make a lot of other middle-aged people comfortable with persuing education.
> My goal is 5-8 more classes for a second degree in math (major).
Why not get a masters degree?
Edit: answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43282629
> Wish me luck!
You don't need it. :)
> graduated college with major in computer science and a minor in math.
Me too. High five!
> My goal is 5-8 more classes for a second degree in math (major).
But why? Wouldn't it make more sense to go for a master in computer science? Are you going to use it for work. Otherwise, aren't you going to "lose it" anyways? Also, is your job paying for the degree or are you paying out of pocket?
I’m self employed and this is “for fun.” My wife is a professor in another department and I’ve got a tuition waiver.
An academic pursuit can be done for sake of knowledge. Forcing your mind to constantly flex is never a bad idea.
It could be both, though.
> My goal is 5-8 more classes for a second degree in math (major)
Do colleges usually let you do this when you're adding to a degree you earned 20 years ago?
This college requires something like taking 30 credits from the institution to award a degree. That's somewhere between 7-10 classes (mix of 3/4 credits each).
No doubt, a lot of us are greatly relieved to read this.
I will be 40 in 2 years and I also plan on going back for a masters in something :). Maybe CS, maybe business who knows.
Best of luck on your pursuit.
Off-topic but this is a pretty interesting study guide format.
Maybe it's standard in lots of places, but I've mostly seen study guides where they just list a ton of topics and that's it.
It’s been twenty years so my opinion is skewed and my memory is quite faded, however, I’ve got opinions on the guide and class in general.
The main thing is there are no surprises or tricks. The exams are straightforward and EXHAUSTIVE. I do all the assigned homework twice. Once when we cover the material and again before the exam. Let’s hope that strategy pays off again.
I'm pretty sure it will. Sounds like you are putting some real effort so I don't see why you won't do just fine.
Good luck!
Good on you! Of course even after 40, it's still not the end of the world if you don't get what you're hoping first time, but I hope it goes well.
Kudos! Curious how you got back into classes? If you are getting another degree, sounds like you went back through admissions?
Yes, through admissions. Getting a degree in math, maybe... depends on how much stress this adds to my life. If I were retired I'd just take a full load, but raising a family and running my business I can only take it one class at a time.
How did it go?
I didn't ace it, but knew immediately what I had done wrong as I rode my bicycle home. I kept checking my linear transformation matrix and the Eigen values didn't compute... Looked again at the TI-89 when I got home and realized I swapped the orientation on the Jordan constants. I wrote all the equations out, so maybe my professor will have mercy on me. Oh well, another case of elevator wit - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27esprit_de_l%27escalier
Is calculus included in your classes?
Cool, good luck!
Good luck!
Nice, good luck
I'd like to see a study on how the acute stress of living in survival mode for a lifetime affects the brain by using it too much for the wrong tasks.
The last 25 years have been particularly painful for people like me who favor academia and pure research over profit-driven innovation that tends to reinvent the wheel. When I look around at the sheer computing power available to us, I'm saddened that people with wealth, power and influence tend to point to their own success as reason to perpetuate the status quo. When we could have had basic resources like energy, water, some staple foods and shelter provided for free (or nearly free) through automation. So that we could focus on getting real work done in the sciences for example, instead of just making rent.
I've been living like someone from movies like In Time and The Pursuit of Happyness for so many decades without a win that my subconscious no longer believes that the future will be better. I have to overcome tremendous spidey sense warning signs from my gut in order to begin working each day. The starting friction is intense. To the point where I'm not sure how much longer I can continue doing this to myself, and I'm "only" in my mid-40s. After a lifetime of negative reinforcement, I'm not sure that I can adopt new innovations like AI into my workflows.
It's a hollow feeling to have so much experience in solving any problem, when problem solving itself will soon be solved/marginalized to the point that nobody wants to pay for it because AI can do it. I feel rather strongly that within 3 years, mass-layoffs will start sweeping the world with no help coming from our elected officials or private industry. Nobody will be safe from being rendered obsolete, not even you the reader.
So I have my faculties, I have potential, but I've never felt dumber or more ineffectual than I do right now.
>I'd like to see a study on how the acute stress of living in survival mode for a lifetime affects the brain by using it too much for the wrong tasks. The last 25 years have been particularly painful for people like me who favor academia and pure research over profit-driven innovation that tends to reinvent the wheel.
I suspected something very different based off the first sentence. Like someone living in a high crime area and trying not to get dragged into it. Or constantly struggling with poverty, food insecurity, etc.
You're not the only one that has had those kind of feelings, and I really relate to the movies you referenced.
Try to remember, AI is a tool, not a solution, and there will always be new problems. There's a strong case that unlike every other time people said that technology will kill all the jobs, this time it actually will. But a helpful framework comes from Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Solution (not the much more famous Innovator's Dilemma) - whereas a business has well defined needs that can be satisfied by improving products, customers (i.e. people) have ever evolving needs that will never be met. So while specific skills may lose value, there will always be a demand for the ability to recognize and provide value and solutions.
What makes a labor market for agents that recognize problems and provide solutions special or different from markets for other kinds of labor? If AIs get to a point where they dramatically outperform humans in other forms of labor, why not in this one?
I think some humans will be doing it well enough to keep themselves afloat the rest of our lifetime, and some will get fabulously rich building products as a one-man operation leveraging AIs. But there will be far more people failing at it. It will be like Youtube creators or Instagram influencers where there are few winners who take virtually all the rewards.
compared to the broadcast era aren't there way more winners -- with a smaller pieces of the pie -- nowadays?
it's still a Pareto distribution, I'm sure, but mega-stardom kinda died and was replaced by all these mini-stars, as far as I can tell. I'm not sure it supports your hypothesis.
Sure, there is some truth to this.
I'm not really in touch with other genres, but I like to watch chess videos/streams on Youtube and Twitch. The vast, vast majority of views and revenue are captured by about ten people.
I like those people too, but I've also watched a lot of smaller acts, even some amateur players not much stronger than me. So I get those recommendations, and I see their view counts. They aren't making anything at all.
There are other people who have some followers, but even 50,000 followers would be a dream for most people doing it and they will make next to nothing from that. I'd guess there are at least 30x the number of strong, titled players in the 50k group as there are in the 1MM+ group. These are all people who were chess prodigies as kids, won every scholastic tournament in their state, took gap years or went to colleges that let them basically major in chess, travelled the world for tournaments, with awe-inspiring skills, and they are not making anywhere close enough to live on.
And the thing is, I think software might even be tougher in twenty years. Its hard to get people to change from a system they use to another thing, much harder than recommending a new face on Youtbue.
Maybe someday they will. But the current run of LLMs are fantastic at regurgitating and synthesizing existing knowledge, and getting better all the time, but not so good at coming up with new ideas. As long as you keep to the realm of what is known, they can seem incredibly intelligent, but as soon as you cross that boundary there's a clear change - often to just meaningless bullshit. So, I personally don't think we're going to be outsourcing idea generation to LLMs (or AI in general) anytime soon. Though to be fair, I'm only about 75% confident in that, and even so, it doesn't mean they won't be hugely transformative anyway.
AI didn't really mesh seamlessly with my work until I used Claude, I highly recommend it. If your current workflow involves googling, reading documentation and examples on github until you can put together a solution then AI should slot into your work nicely. It just does all those things but faster and can often surface what I want in 30 seconds instead of 30 minutes of research.
I wouldn't worry though, if the last 4 years are any indicator, we will continue to see LLMs refined as better and better tools at a logarithmic rate, but I don't really see them making the jump to replacing engineers entirely unless some monumental leap happens. If AI ever gets that good it will have replaced vast swathes of white collar workers before us.
I am somewhat optimistic, tech adoption is only going to go up, and the number of students pouring into CS programs is cooling off now that there aren't $100k jobs waiting for anyone who can open up an IDE. My ideal future is people who really love tech are still here in 10 years, and we will have crazy output because the tooling is so good, and all the opportunistic money seekers will have been shaken out.
> When we could have had basic resources like energy, water, some staple foods and shelter provided for free (or nearly free) through automation.
I was inspired to get into programming by Star Trek in the early 2000s because I thought I could contribute to automation that would lead towards that kind of society; much like you've stated here. Some will say we're naive and unrealistic, but all the ingredients for having society function in this way are attainable with a bit of a cultural shift. I was fine with the idea that society could take baby steps towards it, but it seems the last 25 years have been a mixture of regressing and small incremental improvements to things that don't contribute towards that goal. Just like you, my expectations have been utterly destroyed and my outlook for the future is grim.
In Star Trek, people do actually work and have responsibilities with little (or no) leisure time or say over how they spend their days.
In Star Trek money exists but there isn't much use for it because technology has made material abundance cost approximately nothing.
Star Trek doesn't show the 50 billion landwhales watching Netflix all day, because it makes for bad television. It shows the 1% who still work even when they don't have to, who work because they want to.
The Star Trek future does seem out of reach. On the other hand canonically they only got to fully automated luxury space communism after fighting a global nuclear war against eugenisists.
This is a rather simplistic view of life IMHO. What’s wrong with people working for rent or groceries? What do you expect everyone to work on?
Well, even if we agree that's the best we can aim for as a species (how sad), soon we won't even have that luxury.
> What’s wrong with people working for rent or groceries?
Many people are compelled to do that, but almost everyone wants more out of life. Strong evidence is that they take more whenever they can get it.
If you could get whatever you want out of life, right now, with no effort, what would you want exactly?
I'd travel the world, taking in diverse centers of culture, history, and nature. I'd try to learn new languages. I'd do more track days, karting, and Ultimate. I'd buy a shell and try to get back into rowing. I'd play more computer games. I'd play ping-pong, foosball, and board games with my kids. I'd coach kids' sports. I'd go to more plays and concerts. Even movies. I'd volunteer.
Of course I wouldn't do ALL of that, since even without work there are only so many hours in the day. But I certainly wouldn't want for things to do!
Some people do all that and still work, you probably just need better time management. You could study a language before work in the morning, and then go row for a bit. Then go to work. Then you could play computer games from 5 to 6, play ping pong with kids from 6 to 6:30, eat a dinner, coach kids soccer from 7 to 8, volunteer open source from 8:30 to 9:30, catch a movie at 10.
So simple! Just as easy to do it as saying it right?
> What’s wrong with people working for rent or groceries?
Why should people have to work to be able to afford rent and groceries?
Poverty is difficult enough to escape--not having to worry about rent and groceries would sure help.
There is a reason why school meal programs are such a success.
I think if you let your imagination wander and you end up seeing the scale of potential we have and what we could really achieve, stuff like paying for rent and groceries starts to feel archaic and wasteful, or as some kind of artificial constraint holding us back as a species.
> I'm saddened that people with wealth, power and influence tend to point to their own success as reason to perpetuate the status quo. When we could have had basic resources like energy, water, some staple foods and shelter provided for free (or nearly free) through automation
What you stated is true, but my disappointing observation is that the people with wealth/power are only marginally smarter than the rest of us on the topic you mentioned. And then I suspect that even if one had a rich benefactor, pulling that off is not easy. It takes a threshold number people who have a holistic view of things to pull of what you mentions i.e nearly free basics of life. Check my profile etc. - some of what I wrote may strike a chord with you.
Also the proponents on Technocracy (Hubbert etc.) about a 100 years back, essentially touched on the subject you state. Note: The word technocracy today has a different connotation.
I think (from personal experience) talking with a good mental health professional would really help with your current state of mind and the pressure you’re feeling.
Really? And how exactly?
"Just man up", maybe?
Sorry for the snark but I don't think they can just magically make you feel better. An example or two could change my mind.
Cognitive Behavior Therapy can help with a wide range of issues. If there are worries that are not productive for you, that you can't get out of your head, a therapist can teach you how to use some basic tools to control that. And you'll probably only need a few visits. You can also read books, but given what you've stated I think you should start with a human.
My son went to a few sessions and completely got his OCD under control. He doesn't have to go anymore. I used similar technique to quit smoking 30 years ago after at least a half-dozen serious tries by other means failed. Still off them. It applies to all kinds of issues though, its also very effective for depression. According to the literature studies I did twenty years ago, it was the only technique that actually showed sustained benefit for depression other than medication.
My depression comes from super severe learned helplessness. I have been extremely stupid with money and career choices and nowadays things got hard, I have several chronic health conditions and the difficulty got up not by 2x, more like 20x. I just can't muster the will to even do one job interview, financial reserves are dwindling fast and, you get the picture.
I have zero faith any therapist can help me. They'll likely start with "but it's for your own good!" and I'll just say "yeah yeah, like 200 other things I have been told and zero of them turned out to be true". That's how I imagine it.
I am not against paying professionals. Obviously. I just don't believe in therapy at all.
What would you do to start with, with a guy like me? (I am aware you are not a therapist yourself.)
To try to complement what other replies already said...
I think an important result of successful intervention is to awaken (or reawaken) the mind to the idea that thoughts and perceptions are internal and not always accurate representation of an objective, external world. Much psychological stress comes from these internal experiences, and subtle shifts in your mental posture can change this environment.
That's not to say that real stressors and stimuli don't exist. It's just that often times a person can spiral in a way that makes their internal reactions counterproductive and harmful to well being.
Another important result is learning better coping and adaptation strategies, so you can start to shift your mental posture or even change lifestyle and environment to reduce chronic stress.
It's not always easy, not magic, and not perfect. But, it can help...
I think its important to understand that CBT is a system, a set of tools for managing your thought patterns. Therapists who specialize in it are largely in the business of educating their clients, not having them lie on a couch and talk to the ceiling about their childhood. I'm not saying you won't have generic "talk-therapy" kind of conversations - those are still necessary for them to understand the specific issues you need to work on - but its not just someone helping you find insights that don't change anything.
If you are completely against meeting with a therapist though, you can start with books. I wish I could recommend one that I've used, but this is an example of one that looks really promising to me, with a practical approach: https://www.amazon.com/Retrain-Your-Brain-Behavioral-Depress...
I am also not a therapist but I am a former tech founder turned executive coach so I do talk to people who are facing what feels like overwhelming challenges, risk, and uncertainty.
Even in the language you used "severe learned helplessness" and "extremely stupid", you are revealing a state of mind (cynicism, self-flagellation) that is not oriented to improving your condition.
You know you have a strong bias against therapists—given your seeming lack of knowledge about them, where do you think that bias came from? Fundamentally, we are a social species and evolved to live with strong connections to small groups.
Our society is no longer set up like that. So professionals like therapists and coaches provide the essential value of a caring, supportive, and helpful relationship that we lack. Like getting an essential nutrient that your diet lacks.
Do you have health insurance? Many of them cover mental health—the site Headway can help you find one that takes insurance. Try a few and gather some first-party data before writing them off fully. The downside is a few hundred dollars. The upside is a much brighter and materially better future.
Every case is different. Therapists are brain debuggers. We don’t know what the bug is yet.
How do you know someone is a European? They think therapy and mental health issues are a silly American "trendy" fixation.
Trust me, us Europeans are not exempt from the "everyone should see a psychologist" trope blasting social media the last decade. We are not blind to every Hollywood actor having a personal therapist either.
I think the main difference (speaking as a northern European) is that when you Americans speak of therapy you seem to mean the stereotypical "talk therapy" where as basically every therapy here is cognitive behavioral therapy.
Can cognitive behavioral therapy help someone who has a bit of existential dread about his tech job? Maybe. I don't think it's silly on it's face though to say "really?" if the poster's life is in order otherwise.
> "Just man up", maybe?
That's the toxic stuff you get from society, which leads to you hiring mental health professionals that can teach you healthy, effective ways of dealing with stress.
This much I know and have heard. Still curious about some examples though.
Responding to your earlier comment, it's not magic and they don't do it, you do it. They help you learn how but it's up to you.
Look up "how to reduce salt" on YouTube. And remember, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
Perhaps your life is on the easy setting? Hungry people work really hard. Fearing destroying an entire family by losing my job allows me to find strength and courage.
I'm very sympathetic to your experience and agree with most of what you say, but as someone who has spend half his life in academia and half outside, "who favor academia and pure research over profit-driven innovation that tends to reinvent the wheel", I must say that 'reinventing the wheel' is at least as prevalent in academia than it is in business.
As a researcher who changed career paths to teaching at a community college, I empathize. Twenty years ago when I graduated from high school, I was inspired by the stories I’ve read about Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and early Apple and Microsoft. I wanted to be a researcher, and I wanted to do interesting, impactful work.
Over the years I’ve become disappointed and disillusioned. We have nothing like the Bell Labs and Xerox PARC of old, where researchers were given the freedom to pursue their interests without having to worry about short-term results. Industrial research these days is not curiosity-driven, instead driven by finding immediate solutions to business problems. Life at research universities isn’t much better, with the constant “publish-or-perish” and fundraising pressures. Since the latter half of January this year, the funding situation for US scientists has gotten much worse, with disruptions to the NIH and NSF. If these disruptions are permanent, who is going to fund medium- and long-term research that cannot be monetized immediately?
I have resigned myself to the situation, and I now pursue research as a hobby instead of as a paid profession. My role is strictly a teaching one, with no research obligations. I do research during the summer months and whenever else I find spare time.
Maybe it's time for me (40+) to go back to college. I want to pick up Mathematics and Physics up to the point of General Relativity. Since it's "use it or lose it", I better start reading now.
But I don't really have any time. There are so many things to do, to learn. Younger people who happen to stumble upon this reply, please please prioritize financial freedom if you don't have a clear objective in mind -- and from my observation many people don't have a clear objective when they are in their 20s! If you can retire around 35-40, you have ample time to pursuit any project you want for the rest of the life.
> up to the point of General Relativity.
Putting in a plug for MIT OCW 8.962 [1]. I also had this itch, and was able to find time during the pandemic to work through the course (at about 1/2 speed). But true to what others are saying, life intruded for the last few lectures, so still have some items on my todo list. I thought Scott Hughes laid out the math with terrific clarity, with just the right amount of joviality. It is not for everyone, but if you have a suitable background it may turn "scratch an itch" into the obsession that it has done to me.
And to make the obligatory on-topic comment: I'm 61yo. Now get off my lawn.
[1] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/8-962-general-relativity-spring-...
Thanks! Yeah I planned to use MIT OCW for my education, at least the first 3-4 pre-requisite courses, before I even consider registering in an independent program in some University.
BTW I hope you are going to get more free time in a few years so that you can come back and enjoy the education again.
I've always toyed with the idea of studying Computer Science since I taught myself how to code.
Hell of a lot more difficult now when I need to work and don't really have the same amount of time to dedicate to studying. Hell of a lot easier when you're younger, your whole life basically revolves around the education, and any job you have generally fits around your school life rather than the other way round.
Yeah it was really a surprise to me when I realized that my energy declined to the point that I couldn't work on my side projects for the down days. Then I counted how many days I have for the rest of my life (up to 75) and this dreaded me a lot.
And it got worse after my son was born a few years ago. I would count the number of weeks available, not the days, because there has been whole weeks that I couldn't do anything. After all those are two full-time jobs.
As for your CS education, I'd recommend getting into some side projects and explore from there. If you go to a school, it's going to take too many courses.
I'm in my late 40s and I've found that my desire for working on side projects after work is affected by how engaged I am mentally at work. When I'm building new features/products from scratch and I'm having to figure out architecture and learn more about whatever language I'm coding in, I get more amped to do side projects at home. When I'm bored and just bug fixing and dealing with more mundane things, I have no desire to do any more coding after work. Something about being more engaged gets my brain in a state that I can keep going for the rest of the day until I need to pull myself away from the computer because it's 2am and I should have been asleep hours ago. I should note that I don't have children so the only "obligation" I have is to spend time with my partner and eat dinner, which I enjoy doing, of course. She usually starts getting ready for bed around 10pm and that's when I start coding. I do have some bad sleep patterns though, doesn't matter if I'm coding or not, which is probably not healthy. I have that revenge nighttime procrastination thing real bad.
Have you considered doing your side projects before work?
It takes me one call in the morning, of me saying for the hundreth time in the past 8 months that the integration is still missing data, to get me off the rails for the day. I know at 10AM that I won't touch anything else after work.
Been contemplating starting early and dedicating "the best hours" to myself.
That absolutely works for me! I play multiple instruments and have found that the early morning is the best time mentally for me to devote uninterrupted time to practice and playing. I’m also fortunate enough to have a basement with another floor between my cacophony and my sleeping family
(Not original replier)
That was something I have considered for a while, but then figured out it is unrealistic because I have a kid. But original replier probably can do if he/she doesn't have one.
I'm in the same boat.
I realized that frustration from work usually spills over to other parts of my life, not surprising as work is usually the first big thing we do during a day. I'm exactly like you -- when I have a lot of frustration from work, then I wouldn't want to work on side projects. It has nothing to do with how many hours I have.
I also have some bad sleep patterns as I only sleep about 5-6 hours every night most of the time.
I think, it might be useful to learn some mental skills to compartment one's mental state. If I could somehow put that frustration from work into a separate space without it spilling all over the ship, it would definitely help a lot. But so far I don't know how to do it -- plus I have a kid so I can't chill down after work until late night.
Exercise goes a long way to keep up energy levels after work.
Plugging Georgia Tech's online masters program - I did it over the course of 4 years while working - can take 1 class a semester - and it's very cheap for a high quality masters
I'm going to second ativzzz. It's a great program. I did it the same way: 1 class a semester over 4 years.
I've been going through various MIT OCW lecture series as I work on a personal programming project.
Esp. good were:
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-001-structure-and-interpretati...
and
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-042j-mathematics-for-computer-...
> Hell of a lot more difficult now when I need to work and don't really have the same amount of time to dedicate to studying.
Not really. You'll find that as an experienced programmer, you have a massive advantage at times in your classes.
I'm over 40 and even though I mostly manage/lead now I have time to do programming and plenty of math. I still see improvement mentally (not so much physically anymore), but also a lot of improvement in skills I neglected when I was younger like interpersonal skills and sales. I'm also learning a new language and read more than ever. Sometimes I feel like I'm less sharp, but I wonder if that's because I'm doing so much more.
My tricks that I don't always follow, is work out every day, get enough sleep, and stay off of most short form social media. I realized when I was on short form social it would zap a lot of time and kill any focus I had.
"If you can retire around 35-40" really? If you can retire that young, you probably don't need any advice.
Achieving financial independence and early retirement does not mean one no longer needs any advice about life. Indeed, because those people have a longer retirement, they might ponder things like the meaning of life much more than someone who's living paycheck to paycheck and has to devote all brain cycles to survival. And there are so many options for those who retire at 40 that they genuinely need advice about what to do, how to find what matters most to them, and how to go about doing the things they had always wanted to do but couldn't.
These people have succeeded in making money and that's all. But life is so much more than just making money.
You can't blame an old man trying to give advices to people who don't need them...
If you’re going to try this route, I’d also recommend prioritizing your family and/or life partner with all your remaining energy.
Grinding is soul-sucking, and having someone at home was the only way I made it through the roughest patches.
I semi-retired in the 35-40 range, but if my choices were being retired and single or working but with my family, I’d 100% take the latter.
I found 'So You Want to Learn Physics...' helpful: https://www.susanrigetti.com/physics
Agreed on prioritizing financial freedom.
Thanks. I did read that but found it to be too broad. I set a very narrow target and hopefully everything can be wrapped up in 8-10 Math/Physics courses.
I often ponder if I have the energy to go back to school. I am employed by MIT at one of the labs where I do research for embedded security. As a consequence, they offer free classes you can pick up. I am yet to actually take advantage of that yet but your comment has me thinking the same thing. I turn 36 in a couple days!
> please please prioritize financial freedom
This advice could really backfire badly if taken literally by young people.
Optimizing for financial reward early in your career could be the surest way to end up in a dead end from a mission/purpose/domain/skills perspective.
20 years later, you realize you burned two precious decades accumulating money that, honestly, does not help you at all make sense or use of the next two.
> 20 years later, you realize you burned two precious decades accumulating money that, honestly, does not help you at all make sense or use of the next two.
Ah, but it does. Speaking as someone approaching fifty, you feel every penny. Everything about your financial situation weighs into your decision-making, makes different options possible or impossible. It changes which jobs you can take, and which jobs you can turn down. It affects how much time you can take between jobs. It affects how much energy you pour into keeping your job or chasing a promotion versus investing your energy in education or other things you find satisfying.
People worry that they will accidentally pursue money with such single-minded focus that they turn off every other part of their soul, and miss out on what they "really" want to do. But I don't think that's possible. Replace money with anything else: fame, family, intellectual achievement, hedonism. If you try to dedicate yourself 100% to one thing when something else is important to you, you'll hear the voice in the back of your head. You'll feel what it is, and if you ignore it then, that's on you.
If you don't hear that voice yet, lay down the foundation that will give you the freedom to follow it when you finally do.
Yea, there is a huge distance between "saving enough money to retire comfortably" and "letting wealth accumulation dominate every decision you make." And, honestly, most people don't even get to the first one.
You're absolutely right. I realize my comment could be understood in many various ways.
My point was that, at some point, money has a negative effect on your career. Shooting for the top percentile of revenue can take you off track for life.
But you are saying that having a few hundred thousands bucks when you hit 40-50 is a life-changer and you are absolutely right as well.
Our point of views are not incompatible and were not captured by my first comment.
It might backfire for sure, but being financially independent gives you freedom to figure that out for the rest of the life.
IMO it's a lot better than the situation I myself am in right now, when I can clearly see myself working my ass off for the next 20-25 years in domains I totally hate, and then hopefully I can start working on interesting things when I'm ... 65?
I'd further argue that the only downside of my strategy is that you already have a clear non-monetary objective but decided to go with the money for 20 years. That's definitely a bad thing, and that's why in my original reply I rooted this out -- if you already have an objective, go for it.
Only if you get a rest of your life. While most do I've known more that one person who didn't make it to 40. Worse those that do all srart reporting their body is starting to fail. If you have not done some things by 40 it may be too late to ever do them.
You can't forego savings because "I might die at 40". That's really not a sensible plan. It's a balancing act, but I'd rather have saved too much and die a little early, than not save enough and somehow live to 100.
I agree 100%. There is a balance you want enough savings for 'a rainy day' and also enjoy the rest of your life. retirement is only part of enjoping your life.
the important point is don't get so lost in saving money that you don't enjoy now.
But accumulating and saving always comes at a cost. Is it worth to earn more money, but spend less time with your family for example? It's a delicate balancing act and you never know where the right balance is
It depends a lot of where you came from. If you are coming from a poor background, without any perspective of the occasional help from parents or a possible inheritance, I'd say prioritize financial security. Of course, you can accept the occasional lower salary but with better career prospects here and there, but sometimes this is a mirage, and a lot of time, better pay comes with better career prospects.
If you didn't come from a somewhat privileged background chances are you started your career with more professional debt, without a rich contact network, you're probably a bit too humble to negotiate wages and even narratives like "when I started my business I had come from a working class family, and had to scrap by raising 80k from my relatives to start my business" are out of your reality. So, prioritize being financially secure first.
This angst about a sense of purpose is basically a privileged class malady, if you are poor our friend Maslow will ensure you have more pressing issues to care about first.
I made a lot of sacrifices and experienced some serious personal pain to achieve modest financial independence by age 35 (not "FAT" by any means, but well beyond the average American), and it was worth it. I'm still working, but only because my former career momentum has carried me into a position where I'm paid a small fortune. I would never do any kind of normal engineering job for a normal income these days.
My attitude and the way my brain processes things is completely different. Getting laid off or fired goes from something you might fear or see as a bad thing to a neutral or even positive event that just encourages you to go spend your time in a different way for as long as you want.
20 years of bad habits facilitated by a given lifestyle can also be very hard to break. Not many can manage duly accumulating the savings while completely isolating themselves from what they work on, who they work with, and how all of that impacts their worldview.
And that's not even considering health. 20 years of being in a bad mental place (stress is bad, but a perceived lack of purpose and agency might well be worse) will leave its marks.
There's also a non-zero chance you'll die before year 20. I agree with the premise that seeking financial independence should be a significant factor in career/life decisions, but if you would be filled with regret by finding out it will be cut short at year 18, you're too singularly focused.
Having the money is far, far better than _not_ having money to help you "make sense or use of the next two decades". If you don't, both the sense and use are narrowed to being chained to a job indefinitely into the future.
> you realize you burned two precious decades accumulating money that, honestly, does not help you at all make sense or use of the next two
You are describing some extreme case of money chasing and/or complete ignorance to everything else. Having the "luxury" to be covered financially for the rest of your life allows you to pursue whatever goals you have in mind at mid-life. If you are susceptible to not knowing what you want, having less money won't help you find out but having more money might.
Is it any better to know what you want to do for the next 2 decades and not ever be able to afford do it? From a practical perspective you are still missing the opportunities you want or dream of, except you're also doing it with little or no financial buffer for the things you need.
I see this argument a lot, i think no one is right. you just need to pick a away to approach life and deal with it.
> honestly, does not help you at all make sense or use of the next two.
Why?
Money can't buy you a sense of purpose, especially if that purpose would largely involve non-monetary aspects.
The thing, being poor doesn't buy one a sense of purpose too. Money for sure doesn't solve the issue, but it gives you all the freedom to solve it for the rest of your life.
Damn I wish I had a million so that I could just drop my job and twitch my coding and gaming streams 12/7. I can't do that.
Absolutely. Money (at least some amount, at least for most people) is necessary, but not sufficient for a fulfilled life.
I believe most people having that million wouldn't spend it to find the fulfillment in life, but would end up increasing their life style by slacking off, drugs, expensive cars and items, etc. And the million would be gone in months and you would be left with just bad habits, dopamine hangover and no idea of the further direction in life.
Yay, do it! I'm in linear algebra right now (midterm in 40 minutes) and I'm over 40. I went back because I always regretted not taking more higher level math. It's been a lot of work, but very rewarding. My kids (age 7 and 5) think it's pretty cool to see dad working on his TI-89 and Notability on iPad.
I was running into the same issue. I wanted to get into deeeplearning but my math skills had atrophied. go check out mathacademy.com. its no where near the level of time investment that going back to college is and you will learn a lot!
If you have the discipline, you can create a lesson plan with an LLM without spending an arm and a leg.
Thanks. I definitely will teach myself some of the pre-requisites before registering in University. I need to prove to myself that I can sit down, take some course, complete the coursework + assignments + exams on MIT courseware, before committing anything that costs $$.
Math Academy is really all you need. 30 minutes per day is enough, though more time will mean faster progress.
You would still very likely need human input and help. LLMs will hallunicate badly on problems just a bit more difficult than the very standard ones (first-hand experience with math).
I got excited to do this a couple years ago. (early 30s) Time and energy were a real killer.
Physics and Math in a formal setting like school is rigorous, not fun. I found it really hard to stay motivated. I don't know how I would practically use that knowledge, i would never contribute anything scientific. It would take years of grinding through foundational math and physics to get there.
More proof that old boomers don't get what its like to be a modern, young adult. I was just texting with friends about this at the coffee shop this morning while making plans for this weekend. Boss is interruping by goat-yoga mindfullness session, asking me to come into the office an hour this month. Who has time for this?
You olds have all the money, all the time.
I wish I had all the money and all the time! I don't, alas...
I know it sounds stupid but I started to but lottery tickets, not to win, because statistically it is impossible, but just to give me hope, because lottery is the only thing in the world that can land a mountain of cash in one shot, with a very small investment. Nothing else can do that.
That's why humans purchase lottery tickets all the time throughout history. It's too cheer themselves up.
I found a cheaper way. I walk around the city for a couple hours every weekend with the hopes of randomly finding a winning lottery ticket.
Why not buy out of money options in companies that you know with spare money? Better odds and good payouts if you hit it right.
Needs too many correct bets or too much $$ to get a few million of returns. You can win a lottery of 50 million with just a few dollars! But I do think this is an interesting strategy. I might try it out just for fun.
Anyway I'm half joking. I do buy lottery but it is just to improve the mood of the day. Oh a good mood for a few hours is so important to keep being sane.
It is impossible to truly understand General Relativity after the age of 35.
I strongly doubt this. It’s rare and we have all sorts of credible theories about why it’s rare, but the decline of so-called fluid intelligence is mostly Flynn Effect: people are getting better at taking tests.
It is a possibility I actually agree with, because a true understanding probably requires a lot more than taking some classes. It probably needs a PHD on Cosmology or something else.
But let's say a shallow understanding is good enough...even just completing a General Relativity graduate course with good mark is good enough.
You should not have entertained that comment.
There is absolutely zero evidence that 35 is some mystical cut off for "understanding." That poster has NO clue what they are talking about. Seriously, feel free to ignore that comment.
As for practical advice for learning, you should look into learning how to learn and then spend about 1-2 year habituating to the proper way to acquire knowledge. The science says your (not just you, practically everyone) current intuitions and habits are incorrect; as evidenced by almost everyone in this post. Youtuber Justin Sung is pretty much second to none in terms of a practical program for acquiring these skills.
If you want general guidelines to follow to determine who's telling you the truth and who isn't use the following wikipedia article to guide you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_learning#The_principles...
Note: Simply reading that article and "understanding" what it is saying is not equivalent to having a study program that implements these things, and having a program that implements these things is not the same thing as actually executing on and habituating to said program. This process takes many months to years.
Best of luck.
Is the joke because Einstein published his findings on General Relativity at 36?
Devil's advocate: how many years did it take him to get to publishing this work?
Echoing the sentiments of others here, this is why I firmly believe that public college should be free, for all, for life. Formal education just works better for some of us than video tutorials or self-paced learning, and ensuring everyone is able to learn new things and practice their skills in a consequence-free environment benefits society as a whole.
Think about the tech nerds (me) who never learned how to cook, and are in their thirties. Or lawyers and Doctors who are sick and tired of feeling like they don’t understand how computers work, and want to learn. Or an accountant who loves maths, and wants to get into the scientific side of the field. Or the homemaker who wants to re-enter the workforce now that their kids are grown, and wants to pick up carpentry and welding to become a tradesperson.
If cognitive decline comes from failing to practice it regularly, then the cheapest solution is free education for life to encourage as many people as possible to keep learning new skills and remain cognitively engaged.
I don't think I should be paying for others to study simply because they prefer a different modality of learning, especially when it has been found that learning modality selection has nearly zero impact on actual learning outcomes.
Now, if this was structured as a negative tax system, where eg everyone after graduating high school starts with -$10k in taxable income for a handful of years, perhaps that could avoid punishing those that choose to self-study.
Chat gpt is already free to a very generous extent, and covers 80% (if not more) of the learning resources you could need for almost any topic, theory-wise. I'd risk saying it can adapt for most people's needs.
For practical knowledge you just need to do it over and over. A good mentor/teacher would help a lot, but the very very basics I'd say are learnable by yourself. It's as simple as doing it over and over and keeping a critical eye on what went good and not.
As a result, I don't think free public colleges would enable more people to -actually- learn compared to what we have today. However, I find it would be a great place to build community and find people with similar interests to you, which is quite rare to do without an app these days.
See, I'm worried about relying on LLMs for learning given their penchant for hallucinations and the early studies showing they're actually bad for learning or cognitive improvement, since they remove the "research" and "critical thinking" phases of problem solving for entry-level stuff - fundamental skills that are necessary to put something into practice independently and learn from mistakes. Sure, teachers/professors can also make stuff up (and often with more damage given their position as a "reliable authority"), but in a classroom setting it feels like that'd be found out faster than using a ChatGPT that's spitting out bad results.
> However, I find it would be a great place to build community and find people with similar interests to you, which is quite rare to do without an app these days.
This is what a lot of detractors seem to miss about the benefits of in-person learning. Team projects force you to interact with strangers and cooperate for the benefit of the whole. Campuses increase the likelihood of chance encounters. They get you out of your home and into the community, which helps you feel connected to your actions and their outcomes.
The knock-on effects are often greater than the immediate benefits.
> I firmly believe that public college should be free, for all, for life
I just don't understand these statements that "this or that should be free". Do you plan to enslave the people who would provide this education? Do you not subscribe to the saying "You get what you pay for?". Public education through High School (in the US) has been free for many generations. Ever wonder what would happen if you make the next 4 years "free"? (Hint, you're not going to pop-out of those 4 years with any skills that are differentiated enough from everyone else who took-up the "free" education and not be right back in the same position you are now.)
If you don't have the motivation to prevent your own cognitive decline by taking advantage of a plethora of already free (high quality) education (e.g. https://ocw.mit.edu), then taxing the rest of us so you can be spoon-fed all the free "formal education" you want for life isn't the answer either.
> Do you plan to enslave the people who would provide this education? Do you not subscribe to the saying "You get what you pay for?". Public education through High School (in the US) has been free for many generations.
Do you believe that the people who provide public education through High School are enslaved? If yes, how? If not, why do you assume providing free public college education requires enslavement?
> Public education through High School (in the US) has been free for many generations. Ever wonder what would happen if you make the next 4 years "free"?
No need to wonder. Tuition for bachelor's degrees is free in multiple countries, for instance Germany, Finland, Sweden, Scotland and Norway. What happened there?
> Ever wonder what would happen if you make the next 4 years "free"?
A high school diploma used to mean something because it was a filter. Once graduation rate became the goal, standards were lowered, and just showing up became enough to graduate.
Higher education does some filtering. Either they filter aggressively at admissions and graduate everybody (Ivies), filter with weed-out classes and lesser degrees (respected public universities), both (other public universities), or offer a middling education and are ranked accordingly. So the degree means something.
I agree that degrees can be filters, but I question what "filter" they represent in modern contexts. From my experiences, the modern degree is little more than a gatekeeping credential to demonstrate you either took on substantial student debt (and thus likely to take lower pay or more precarious employment) or come from a wealthy background (stronger social networks for other rich folks/Capital types; a "pedigree", in other words, a la a caste system).
You're 100% right that a modern American High School Diploma does not reflect any degree of basic competency, because standards were constantly refined downward to promote graduation at all costs; I argue college degrees (and many technology certifications) are much the same, providing little more than a demonstration of taking on debt and rote memorization capabilities, rather than being a functional worker.
So if that's the case, and they're not of practical value as credentials anymore, it could be argued there's no harm in opening fundamental/foundational courses in skills to the entire populace, paid for through taxpayer money and restricted to State/Public non-profit Institutions. If we're really concerned about costs, we could implement caps on consumption unless part of a degree program to ensure those taking the advanced courses for employment prospects are given priority over those seeking non-professional growth. There's a lot of wiggle room to be had, if we're serious about opening this up.
> I just don't understand these statements that "this or that should be free".
Because you're focusing on the accumulation of a finite resource (currency, land, etc) as the sole barometer for success, and then conflating "freedom for use" with "freedom from cost". Obviously salaries have to be paid, buildings maintained, and improvements paid for. Obviously this all costs money, which is a finite resource. Obviously that money has to come from somewhere. Taxation enables everyone to contribute a fraction of the cost regardless of use, and an effective social program (like free education) distributes that cost effectively over time since there's zero chance 100% of the population will consume that resource at the same time, or even in the same year.
It's basic societal maths. If we accept forgoing a profit on the consumption of the resource (healthcare, roads, mail service, education, defense), we can lower the cost substantially and concentrate on its effective utilization. If we do that, we can carve up the cost across the widest possible demographic (taxpayers), and assign a percentage of it as taxation relative to income and wealth. It's how governments work.
> Do you not subscribe to the saying "You get what you pay for?"
Does anyone subscribe to this in the current economy? Everything has record high prices, yet still bombards you with advertisements, sells your data, and requires replacement in a matter of years instead of being repairable indefinitely. University education has boiled down to little more than gargantuan debt loads to acquire a credential for potential employment, a credential that often has no relevancy to the field you actually find work in.
So no, I don't subscribe to that, and I haven't for a decade. My $15,000 used beater car is literally more reliable than a six-figure SUV, and it doesn't keep mugging me for more value to the manufacturer through surveillance technology and forced-advertising.
> Ever wonder what would happen if you make the next 4 years "free"?
Yes. I imagine much of the populace would be better educated and informed about how modern, complex systems work. More people would be fiercely resistant to the low-wage, high-labor jobs that flood the market, forcing a reconciliation of societal priorities. I figure we'd have more engineers, and artists, and accountants, and tradespersons. We'd have more perspectives to existing problems from a broader swath of the economic strata, instead of the same old nepobabies from a lineage of college graduates making the same short-sighted mistakes.
The question is, have you considered what might happen if we made a four-year degree more economically accessible?
> If you don't have the motivation to prevent your own cognitive decline by taking advantage of a plethora of already free (high quality) education (e.g. https://ocw.mit.edu), then taxing the rest of us so you can be spoon-fed all the free "formal education" you want for life isn't the answer either.
Now you're just insulting people because they lack means, and conflating it with lack of motivation. I've lived with people whose sole education was reading books in Public Libraries because they never had public education, with Section 8 housing recipients hammering online learning courses from shared computers to try and find a way upward and out of poverty. None of that gets them a foot in the door, because they don't have the physical piece of paper that says "University Graduate" and the social networks you build from physically attending school - which adults cannot do without money or taking on substantial debt, that in turn jeopardizes their ability to survive.
If you want a society where only those of monied means have the ability to succeed, well present-day America is certainly an excellent demonstration of that. I'd rather build a society where all of us contribute a part of the proceeds of our labor to build a more equitable society for all, so everyone has an opportunity to found that new business, make those social connections, or try new ideas, without worrying about losing their home or paying for healthcare treatments.
> Formal education just works better for some of us than video tutorials or self-paced learning
I don’t agree with this at all. Anecdotally, the autodidacts I’ve met are way more knowledgeable about subjects they’re passionate about compared to those who received a formal education for it. This applies to both computer science, but also psychology majors who I’ve met who can’t even tell me the difference between Freud and Jung.
I mean, you can disagree with it based on your anecdata, but mine backs up my assertion which is why I made (and qualified) it the way I did. I specifically thrive in live sessions with an instructor knowledgeable on the material who can provide direct feedback, and I am not the only one. "Works better" is a qualifier on the effectiveness of the education on an individual, not the effectiveness of it on all individuals.
The key to learning accessibility is flexibility. Some thrive on self-study, some thrive on video tutorials, some thrive on audio lectures and others in live exercises. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if this also applied to specific topics: fundamentals of cooking might be better via live instruction, while iterating on a recipe is often fine with self-study or video tutorials.
The point is the flexibility, to allow people to learn in a way that's best for them, so they're more likely to continue learning throughout their lives.
> I don’t agree with this at all.
Are you actually saying that nobody exists who learns better when taught in the best ways we currently know how to teach, and in the way all formal education currently works? That everyone is better off teaching themselves with no help?
You are disagreeing if and only if this is what you are saying.
you're saying you don't agree with it, but then go on to talk about something entirely unrelated.
op isn't saying self paced learning doesn't work for anyone, therefore it's irrelevant if you know some whizz autodidacts
I am 100% with you. I am great engineering wise.. Have no clue how to eat and live healthy!
You're not alone! Nobody knows everything, and what's important or necessary to our thriving changes constantly throughout our lives. Learning to cook wasn't high on that list when tech salaries were great, delivery was cheap, and housing wasn't (completely) unaffordable; now that I'm nearing my 40s and have to stretch even a six-figure salary further than before, suddenly learning to cook is a necessity.
Good people are always changing in some way. Making public education free encourages lifelong learning and builds a more adaptable human for times of crises. It's good survival strategy, that also just happens to create a more fulfilled human being.
My mother in law did many mind puzzles every day.
She still got Alzheimer's and died a couple of years later.
She had multiple incidents that she hid because she was too scared to find out, and too stubborn to lose her ability to drive. She could have had some treatment if she'd approached a doctor earlier.
Alzheimer's is utterly evil. Robbing people of their unique spark, killing the person before the body dies.
Sorry for the rant
Yep, first thing I thought, too. I'm terrified of age-related degeneration, so I try to stay active and mentally alert, just like my father did. He got out and played golf every chance he had, did duo-lingo to try to learn to speak Spanish, played bass in his church band, kept working even though he didn't need the money... and still got Alzheimers. Now he can't drive, can't be trusted to go out and take a walk by himself, can't even work the TV, so all he can do is sit and watch DVD's that my mom changes for him - at least while she still can.
I'm still going to try to fight it for myself, though.
Alzheimer's is a disease, you can get it in your 40s. If somebody recommends exercise to keep your legs healthy, they don't mean that if you have a staph infection in your legs that exercise will make it go away.
My grandfather had vascular dementia, and keeping him thinking and using his brain absolutely helped. Makes sense for a problem of blood flow that thinking new, hard stuff might direct some more blood supply to the brain.
Also, 1) you don't know for sure if you have Alzheimer's until you're gone, and 2) it seems that vascular dementia co-occurs with Alzheimer's a lot. So I can't imagine that it would ever be a good idea to stop using your mind if you felt it slipping.
Sorry to hear that. My FIL was just diagnosed with dementia and it’s heartbreaking to watch it progress.
My neighbor passed away from dementia recently. We first moved in maybe a year after his diagnosis and had to watch it progress. Horrible.
Now a friend of mine who is the best programmer I know has an early onset diagnosis. I have noticed him starting to pick fights regularly with people on LinkedIn over programming topics.
It's a really, really hard thing to watch someone go through.
What kind of incidents, if you don't mind?
Hallucinating while driving, seeing people or animals that weren't there. That happened multiple times over several years before the diagnosis.
Unfortunately she didn't share what other incidents she had, I really wish she had.
I hope we have the compassion as a society to get to the point where I can say, "If I am unable to recognize my children, please kill me." At that point I would have died regardless of the condition of my body.
I don't want to wait that long. If I get diagnosed with Alzheimer's, I am taking a quick farewell tour of family and friends and then I'm done. I don't want to wait so long that I need someone else to off me. I wish that all wasn't necessary but this country (US) isn't going to get smarter anytime soon.
I hope we have the compassion as individuals not to ask others to kill us. That's a heavy weight to put on someone else. It's not abstract "society" conducting the euthanasia: individual healthcare providers would have to decide that you met the criteria and then administer the drugs.
Forcing someone to live through a disease when they have already lived a full life is simply cruel. Why should someone have to suffer on their way out?
You always have the option to die whenever you want to. Why would you put the burden of ending your life upon other people? That's utter cowardice.
In my opinion, there is a line that needs to be crossed and that line is extremely hard to define. To be safe, you have to go past the line so any blurriness is removed. I would ask the people I love the most to shoulder this burden and I would offer to shoulder the same burden for them. This is how love works.
Hopefully a cure comes as a form of vaccine so some folks can be totally against that.
I don't think mental stimulation correlates to the development of alzheimers anyway. The papers I've touched on the subject seem to suggest a mechanical failure in proteins essentially choking off and killing brain structure. Although the lucidity period shortly before death is interesting.
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With 25 years of experience in software development, I’ve noticed that long coding sessions leave me feeling more fatigued than they used to. However, I’ve also become significantly more productive, as I spend far less time grappling with problems I’ve already solved. I’ve only just begun to explore AI-assisted coding, so that isn’t what’s driving my efficiency. Is it reasonable to assume that the natural decline in cognitive performance over time is offset by the gains in experience and expertise?
> Is it reasonable to assume that the natural decline in cognitive performance over time is offset by the gains in experience and expertise?
It depends on the task, but overall, for the work I do as a software developer, yes.
I would say I have less energy, but I need less energy, and I produce better results in the end. I'm better at anticipating where a line of work will go, and I'm quicker and better at adjusting course. There are a lot of multi-hour and multi-day mistakes that I made ten and twenty years ago that I don't make now.
The raw mental energy I had when I was younger allowed me to write things I couldn't write now, but everything I write now is something that other people can read and maintain, unlike twenty years ago. It's very rare that writing a large, clever, intricate mass of code is the right answer to anything. That used to frustrate me, because I was good at it. I used to fantasize about situations where other people would notice and appreciate my ability to do it. Now I'm glad it's not important, because my ability to do it has noticeably declined. In the rare cases where it's needed, there are always people around who can do it.
Another thing that is probably not normal, but not rare either, is that the energy I had when I was young supercharged my anxiety and caused me to avoid a lot of things that would have led to better outcomes, like talking to other people. I'm still not great (as in, not even average for an average human, maybe average for a software developer) but I'm a lot better than I used to be.
What I find most draining is the non-coding work I now do for work. I love the org I work for and it's really fulfilling but I do a lot of senior stuff now and I feel like the years slip away without always getting to build and invent as much stuff as I'd like to. There's so much to do and learn, it's amazing, we live in this difficult world but with amazing opportunities, and I wish I had an extra 12 hours a day (of energy) just to learn and build.
I was young once, 25 years ago I started programming, and I feel as though I have at least another 25 in me, if not more.
I find that I have "less horsepower, but smarter gears", so it kind of evens out.
I'm less likely to code until midnight, but more likely to have the problem solved before clocking out at 6pm ;)
I've been coding for over 40 years at this point. I'm definitely a better programmer than I was - not necessarily faster at pumping out lines of code, but I get the right approach first time more often than I used to. Whole classes of bugs are just easy when you've seen them before, but I'm also better at avoiding them in the first place because I know my weaknesses and where to spend time thinking more carefully.
At the same time, I can't context-switch like I used to. Once I get into the zone, no problem, but interruptions affect me much more than when I was 20 (or even 40). I can almost feel the tape changer in the back of my head switching tapes and slowly streaming the new context into RAM (likely because all the staging disks have been full for years).
As for long coding sessions - I relish them when I get the chance, which isn't as often as I'd like. Once the tapes have finished loading and I'm in the zone, I can stay there half the night. So that hasn't changed with age.
It could be something similar that we see happening in seasoned weightlifters/bodybuilders:
As your absolute strength gets stronger, the same exercises and workouts get proportionally more fatiguing.
5 sets of a bench press at an 80% of max load, taken within a rep or two of failure, done by a first-year lifter, is incredibly different from that same scheme being done by somebody who's lifted for 10 years. So more advanced lifters tend to do things like lighten the load and use variations of lifts that have more favorable stimulus-to-fatigue ratios.
Anyways, I thought maybe as an advanced programmer, something here could be analogous. You've already done all the coding and thinking to figure out easier and lower-level problems. So what you're left with are the more cognitively challenging parts of coding, which should be more mentally exhausting per unit time. Whatever is '80% difficulty' for you is probably way more advanced than what you were looking at 10 or 20 years ago.
Magnus Carlsen (the multiple times chess world champion) talked about this in his recent Joe Rogan podcast. He said he passed his chess peak already now at 34. He now knows more, but when he was younger he could win via brute mental power.
> Is it reasonable to assume that the natural decline in cognitive performance over time is offset by the gains in experience and expertise?
So according to Carlsen, for chess the answer is no.
I personally also suspect the answer for programming is the same. Most, if not all, of the hotshot programmers we know became famous in their early 20s. Torvalds started writing Linux at 21. Carmack was 22 when Doom was released. Many of the most famous AI researchers were in their early 20s when doing the most groundbreaking work. Einstein's miracle year by the way was also when he was 26.
> He said he passed his chess peak already now at 34. He now knows more, but when he was younger he could win via brute mental power.
The famous anti-case for this is J.R.R Tolkien started writing Lord of the Rings when he was about 45.
Writing is not programming but they are not that dissimilar. Especially in this context.
What I've learned over the years is life is actually not fair and everyone is different. You can be razer sharp and reasonably healthy at 83 or be in great shape and die of a brain aneurism at 12 with no warning.
Basically don't let studies or other people's results persuade you into not starting or giving up.
Creative writing is tremendously different from coding, imo.
> Creative writing is tremendously different from coding, imo.
I've had a different experience.
IMO there's a huge overlap in skills when writing, coding, making videos and playing guitar.
They all boil down to the idea of getting something out of your head and then refining it until you know when to stop refining based on whatever criteria you're optimizing for at the time.
This is based on writing over a million words and making hundreds of videos over 10 years on my blog and programming for ~20 years while casually playing the guitar for about as long.
What aspects make them feel different for you?
People in their early 20s are also much less likely to have other responsibilities "intruding" into their headspace. It's a lot easier to be monomaniacal when you don't (for example) have kids yet.
I know. That's the common argument, but I don't think that's it. See the argument I made in the previous comment. As I wrote in that comment, Magnus thinks his brain was better when he was younger. It probably doesn't help to have responsibilities like children, but I don't think that explain everything. There are also many people without children for example. And if you don't have children then studying full time should take as much if not more time than a simple job.
Also, Hans Albert Einstein was born during Einstein's miracle year.
> Also, Hans Albert Einstein was born during Einstein's miracle year.
This was in an era when fathers had little to do with childcare. I don’t know about Einstein’s specific situation, but even 40 years ago almost half of fathers had never changed a diaper.
Very little of my work needs breakthroughs or inventions. Nothing new under the sun, as the Romans said. So, this mental peak is less important than being focused and efficient for me.
That is the conventional wisdom: decreasing stamina/energy is compensated by having more experience/expertise.
i have 10++ years more, but i don't notice such.. fatigue. 2..5+ hours.. no problems (even with fingers-typing-wrong-keys/order-much-more-often). What i do notice though, and not only in coding, is.. kind-of creeping-boredom. Growing tired of certain things going the way they go, too quickly. You know, the deja-vu feeling when you see something developing certain way, and seeing it go exactly there. Thousand times..
But i haven't stopped learning things, apart of the software-making-related, 2 years ago went into e-foiling, and some half-related more-technical adventures. So maybe that is keeping the dementia at bay..
> Is it reasonable to assume that the natural decline in cognitive performance over time is offset by the gains in experience and expertise?
Maybe up to a point. Most of the tools and languages I use daily are fairly recent, or at least new to me. I don't have much of an advantage, if any, compared to my younger colleagues.
There are certainly things I do better now than 10 years ago but I think I'm slowly declining though. Fortunately, there's more than one way to be productive professionally so I hope I can keep up for a few more year.
State of the art tools and technologies today are implementing the features of cutting edge languages and technologies from decades ago.
There are very few capabilities in mainstream languages today, if any, that weren’t available in Common Lisp back in the 1980s or 90s.
I noticed that I can still do long sessions if I have to crack open a problem ( I started coding around 35 and now I'm 40+), but the burnout may prevent me from coding for a few days.
I do think it has more to do with daily chores (work, family) than my age. I noticed that, despite being easier to get frustrated nowadays (because I get exposed to more sources of frustration) than I was in my 30s, I'm actually more perseverant than myself 10 years ago. I managed to be very close to wrap up a side project, the first time in my coding life. Of course the scope is smaller than my previous projects but I'm surprised that I didn't back down easily, considering how many times I banged my head during the first few weeks.
I guess being exposed to more frustrations does improve ones resistance to it. To be precise, I get agitated easily, but that agitation doesn't seem to burn me out in the middle term -- while in my 30s I didn't get agitated very often but every time it burns me down to the point I left my side projects.
This is something that can be gamed out mathematically, for example time to goal minus time to refactor.
As someone who has been writing software and/or managing operations for 20 years here is what I have noticed:
* The more experienced people get the more cognizant they become of fatigue in that they know when to take a step back.
* The more experienced people get the faster they get in that they know how to approach repeated problems.
* People do not necessarily get better with experience. Some developers never fully embrace automation, especially if they are reliant on certain tools versus original solution discovery.
Based on that it’s natural that some older developers tend to decline with age while others continue to grow in capability and endurance. The challenge is to identify for that versus those who mask it.
Software developer of more than 20 years.
I wouldn't say, "decline," to be charitable. I tend to lean more on mathematics and writing. That often makes up for the lack of stamina.
When I look back on code I wrote 15, 20 years or more ago... it's fine but it lacks the sophistication I have now. I didn't know what I didn't know back then and had to learn. I can see in my code where I encountered a problem and instead of solving it I added more code until it, "worked."
I wasn't university educated so that's explains a bit of it. I didn't start picking up pure functional programming and formal methods until my mid thirties (gosh, has it been a decade already?). I worked through Harvard's Abstract Algebra at 38. I'm leaning more about writing proofs and proof engineering in my spare time while continuing to stream work in Haskell on various libraries and projects. And I'm in my 40s -- I'm doing more programming and mathematics now than ever.
I'm also playing in a band, practice calisthenics and skateboarding, and have been improving my illustration skills with ink.
It seems like the discovery of the article is that if you don't use your skills they start to decline as early as your late 20s. All it takes is practice to maintain and improve them!
I might get a little tired every now and then and can't keep every library I've used in my head all at once. But I tend to rely more on mathematics and specifications and writing. I write less code now. I remove code. And I keep programs and systems fast and correct.
Nothing declining here!
> . Some developers never fully embrace automation, especially if they are reliant on certain tools versus original solution discovery.
can you expand on that for clarity ?
They don't embrace AI is how I read that.
That's pretty much current state of knowledge.
Terms you want to check for more detailed info are 'liquid intelligence' and 'crystalized intelligence', but you basically nailed it.
I've seen 'fluid' as well as 'liquid' intelligence, but these are the terms the scientific community seems to use.
> Is it reasonable to assume that the natural decline in cognitive performance over time is offset by the gains in experience and expertise?
It depends on what you're doing.
The stronger cognitive strength needed, the less it can be replaced with experience.
Some chess grandmasters are teenagers. Maybe maths intensive ML research could be a bit comparable. But that's... Maths. Or distributed software algorithm optimizations?
In the vast majority of software work (as in > 99% ?), experience is more important, though, if you're bright enough when young. Or so I think
(But when closer to 80 or 90 or 100 years, that's different of course.)
If your time is spent in higher productivity work, wouldn't that - irrespective of age - leave you feeling more exhausted?
I am old and I can easily code / design all day. 10-16 hours if it’s something I am in to. It’s dealing with people / social issues that exhaust me.
Productivity doesn't correlate super closely with fatigue in my experience. The worse sessions are when I'm banging my head against something and getting nowhere. When I'm flowing, I can go for hours.
I’m not sure it makes sense to differentiate between energy spend while being “productive”, and energy spent whole trouble shooting and problem solving.
After all, trouble shooting can be viewed as a productive thing.
Interesting idea though.
A lot of it depends on how good your tools are.
Someone who is more efficient expends less energy to accomplish the same thing relative to someone who is less efficient.
>>I’ve noticed that long coding sessions leave me feeling more fatigued than they used to.
As we age, learning vs getting-paid graph first flattens, then either grows very slowly or not at all.
Im guessing that is where the fatigue part comes. You are not exactly growing too much after working hard after a while.
In fact reducing hours worked might correlate with happiness more as you can allocate free time to other rewarding tasks.
> skills decline at older ages only for those with below-average skill usage. White-collar and higher-educated workers with above-average usage show increasing skills even beyond their forties.
> Individuals with above-average skill usage at work and home on average never face a skill decline (at least until the limit of our data at age 65).
A lot of hiring managers need to read this.
Right? ageism maybe should work in reverse!
I get that but growing older does mean less energy at the very least.
Literally the two most important things from the article.
Get better at things so you don't have to worry about decline. That simple.
Its like a muscle - develop it early on and then you can easily keep it in shape without much effort until the day you die, without any noticeable decline (at least until like 70).
I wonder how much of the "age-related" decline is due to the brain functioning on autopilot. After over 5 decades, I have experienced most of the issues I'm going to experience in life. More often than not, I'm addressing issues with mental playbooks based on past experience.
As I get older (now in my 50s), I find myself reflecting on how many aspects of my life and decisions are operating on autopilot. I figure it's worse now with social media where people are constantly bombarded with dopamine hits, while boredom and idle thoughts have largely become things of the past.
Perhaps counterintuitively, I am trying to break this pattern and consciously engage with my experiences by asking a few basic questions, such as:
- What am I seeing here?
- What's going on?
- What am I missing?
- How can I approach this differently to achieve the same or better outcomes?
Additionally, I am making a concerted effort to notice more new details during routine tasks, like commuting or shopping. I can't count how many times I've discovered something new and interesting on my work commutes. Actually, I can: it's every time.
Edit: Also spending more time with long-form content over short-form, be it reading or watching videos. It forces me to consider a topic for a much longer period. Short form knowledge is a trap, unless you have some system that hits you with high rates of repetition (eg Anki).
In my humblest of opinions, you are probably spot on about the autopilot vs. actually experiencing things.
As a concrete example, someone in this thread mentioned their older relative spending a lot of time with puzzles daily. I too watched my grandpa doing sudokus and crosswords, but in the end if there’s nothing much else, those too will quickly become uninspiring routine.
I really believe truly experiencing life does require some introspection so that you have agency.
Interesting points.
And agreed, at one time I really got into Sudoku and Minesweeper, but my nerd mind quickly turned them into brainless pattern matching routines that required effectively no thinking. Don't get me wrong. I appreciate those abilities, but there's a time and place.
You might also be able to avoid the subjective acceleration of time that happens to many of us as we age.
This is another thing I've been exploring, but I haven't had a whole lot of luck in actually slowing down time.
The "fix" seems to be:
- Add more activities to your day, every day.
- Try to break up routines. Eg. you may run every day, but you don't have to take the same route.
- Be actually present during those activities. Engage in conscious thought about those activities.
- Take photos, videos, recordings to recall those activities and jog the brain.
I bet you can even accomplish some of this retroactively with the right group of friends. The question "What did you do this weekend?" can be answered in so many levels of detail.
For me. I started making enough money that all my old routines stopped being relevant. I started to drift into comforts and lost touch with my surroundings.
Are there any guidelines for what exactly this would entail?
My short term memory is falling off a cliff. What do I need to do to prevent that from getting worse? Are there any other bases I need to cover that I don't know that I'm missing?
> My short term memory is falling off a cliff
Are you sure? I thought this was happening to me too, and then I realized when looking back 10 years ago that I have way more responsibilities now both in and out of work: I am not only getting more done at work, but also for more people. I am now picking and choosing which meetings to even hold, much less attend, because I have a higher throughput. My children's needs are much more complicated now than when they were younger. I have a side business.
I can't fathom how I would have even gotten this all done when I was younger simply due to how much leisure time I spent, much less kept all of this in short term memory back then.
> I thought this was happening to me too, and then I realized when looking back 10 years ago that I have way more responsibilities now both in and out of work
This so much. When I was in my 20s I never forgot things, but I didn't have anything that I really needed to remember lol.
It's easy to forget about how many more responsibilities we take on as we age, simply by nature of how those responsibilities slip into our lives one at a time, bit by bit, gradually shifting our window of normalcy.
My phone is now full of Notes, Alarms, and timers. I can barely leave the house to run an errand without writing down what I need to do.
As far as actually improving memory, I try to expose my mind to as much raw material as I can. The mind is a muscle, it has to be exercised, and as you get old you need to focus on its core strength rather than physique and raw strength.
Rehearsal and repetition. Read constantly, get out in the environment and really try to observe all the things that are going on. Write down all the things you want to do this year, and when you’ve done them, write that down, too. Every so often, review the list. It will prompt your recall to a wonderful degree.
Write down your little milestones - ‘in March we found a clutch of tadpoles in a tire track puddle and we watered and fed them there for six weeks”
Regarding memory, I have made a habit of assuming I have a faulty memory, and trying to write down anything I think I may want to remember in the future using a wiki style tool that supports back linking. The tool I use is Org Roam in Emacs, but there are lots of options. I have found that by doing this, I have offloaded a lot onto my computer, and made space in my mind to remember a lot of new things.
And when you’re not in front of a computer?
Contrary to the other comments saying to carry a pocket computer: my brain. Hence the improved memory. I offload my thoughts into my notes when I can. If it wasn't important enough to remember until I can find a seat at my desk, it wasn't important enough to write a note on.
We have computers we can carry around in our pockets now!
Lots of approaches exist, mine is Obsidian + Syncthing and just jotting down notes on my phone that I go flesh out when I'm back at my PC.
I’ve found these work well:
https://www.ataglance.com/p/planners-calendars/journals-diar...
No batteries or Internet required.
One option is using voice assistants to send a message to your todo inbox.
Use your phone
or note book which you later re-write into your knowledge base.
The only 'exercise' I've heard of that offers measurable improvement is "N-Back", kind of like the old TV game "Concentration". The app is available on most smartphones.
Emotions can have a large impact on memory, as far as I know. They provide the catalyst, in a way, in the process that forms memories. If you are depressed or otherwise not emotionally engaged, it can become much harder to form memories.
Solve emotional problems and memory may improve. (I have no idea if that applies to you, of course.)
> short term memory
Which sort of memory do you mean? Short term memory is remembering a name while you write it down, not remembering it the next day or week.
Avoid weed if you don't already. Might seem out of left field but a programmer friend of mine is absolutely convinced their memory is shot because of long covid and it's like, well, maybe, and the trauma of the pandemic certainly put a dent in everyone's cognitive ability, but also the dabs can't be helping.
I wonder how much of that is due to age and how much due to electronic distractions.
I was in the same boat, but I started noticing that if I force myself not to do silly multitasking (like not paying attention to what I am doing because my mind is thinking about irrelevant other things) it gets better. Since I stopped the infinity doom-scrolling it has improved a bit
Stress and lack of sleep also affect me a lot. Both are omnipresent, since I am a parent of young-age special-need kids.
I've found poor sleep really affected my memory. Maybe start tracking your sleep.
I feel so much dumber since having a kid :(
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>>My short term memory is falling off a cliff.
Read the book GTD by David Allen.
You are not supposed to store things in the brain, that only causes stress.
Brain is to do thinking work, you are better off writing and tracking things on paper. Use the brain to think, and paper for planning, scheduling, tracking etc..
If you are older, I think the trick is to watch (or remember!) what younger people do and follow (or revert to) that behavior, as much as you can.
Comparing cognitive abilities between older and younger people fails to control for the inputs - behavior, experience, etc. Try the same inputs (using some big generalities):
* Exploration: Younger people love to explore, even just for exploration sake, and are also compelled to try things - and they also fail. Exploration is their mode, because so much of the world is new to them, because doing something new and innovative is socially admired, and especially because so many major changes happen - leave home, serious romantic relationships, first job, etc. A lot of that happens, ready or not.
* Learning: Similarly, younger people are compelled to learn lots of very challenging things, whether they want to or not; they are compelled to use cognitive skills that they are uncomfortable with. Their job is to learn, daily, for 12-16+ years. Remember school? Remember your early years at work when had little choice of what you did? Remember struggling with all those things?
* Playing: Young people love to play and are socially admired for playing better and more creatively.
What, you're past all that? Nobody is going to make you study things you're not interested in? Don't want to make any big changes? Dignity too big to play? Ego too big to explore and to fail? When you're older, you can say no and 99.99% (I think that's about accurate) take advantage of that and refuse to do or even talk about things they aren't already comfortable with. Does all this sound too hard? Then don't complain about losing those skills.
I think a big part of the problem is the same that affects CEOs - there is nobody to hold them to account.
The abstract has these two statements:
> ”Cross-sectional age-skill profiles suggest that cognitive skills start declining by age 30 if not earlier.”
and
> ”Two main results emerge. First, average skills increase strongly into the forties before decreasing slightly in literacy and more strongly in numeracy”
Does this mean that this study contradicts the popular common understanding that cognitive skills decline after 30? Or am I missing something?
For me, personally, if feels a more impactful finding than the “use it or lose it” one
Falling off the cognitive cliff after retirement is something I think a lot of people are familiar with in their own lives.
I have seen it with my own parents and my wife's parents first hand. Frankly, I think the lack of social interaction is a big part of it.
When they're working, they're regularly talking to people outside their comfort zone about potentially challenging questions. That gets largely shutdown once you retire.
Both my parents were in a huge rush to retire early, and now they just sit at home and scroll Facebook. I don't see the appeal.
I didn’t appreciate this until covid and wfh. I’m an introvert and am in my happy place sitting in front of a computer or with a book. But I was losing my mind and had to be actively social for the first time in my life. I can see a decade of living like it’s Covid turning my relatively healthy, relatively young brain into soup.
Leaning into stereotypes, the older women in my family did just fine in retirement because they just started doing social activities full time. If anything they retired and got busier. The older men sometimes did ok but usually did worse.
That is why volunteering when you are in retirement is a win-win. Very few others have the time for what is an absolutely necessary part of society, and it is great to keep your mind and heart active while you recall your life and use its lessons to give back to others. Any sort of volunteering will lend itself to that. For example, Jimmy Carter built houses, and it seems to have done him wonders.
I (unfortunately) find myself doing this far too much after work, and am worried about what retirement might accidentally look like.
>>Both my parents were in a huge rush to retire early, and now they just sit at home and scroll Facebook. I don't see the appeal.
My retirement plans look somewhat similar to how Knuth spends his time. Long hours of deep intellectually challenging work. Driving long distances and eating tasty food some where far away.
Most of retirement motivation comes from feeling the sun during weekdays. There is little point to be sitting whole day at home.
Social interaction must be important, but also the fact that work doesn't ask you how tired you are, you have set of tasks and go. When being master of my own time, I can imagine I would veer towards more fun activities which may not have that forceful aspect and would be done mostly alone.
And super true for those parents, my goal is to travel massively as much as my budget and health will allow it. Backpacking all around south east asia, thats what keeps me pushing to work on earlier retirement. Sitting at home unless forced, no thank you thats a downward spiral
And from what I've heard on the grapevine, life expectancy drops among those who retire relative to those that don't. This makes sense: many people don't seem to know what to do with themselves if they're not "officially employed", so when they retire, they become aimless, and they sort of decay and disengage from living.
This is characteristic of acedia.
Though is that causation or correlation? I can imagine that people with all kinds of illnesses would also retire sooner than people who are still in peak health.
For those who don't feel like taking math courses in a formal setting, making games from scratch is a fun way to learn and apply linear algebra and calculus.
I never really needed determinants in my life until I tried moving a spaceship towards another object. Trying to render realistic computer graphics gets you into some deep topics like FFTs and the physics of light and materials, with some scary-looking math, but I can feel my mind sharpening with each turn of the page in the book.
This makes so much sense. I've been programming every day since I was in my twenties and there are definitely some concepts that seem much easier for me to get my head around now (I'm in my 50's) than earlier.
Right now I'm reading through a college textbook on the biology of learning and memory with ease and good retention. Never got this deep into any subject in my school years.
> I've been programming every day since I was in my twenties and there are definitely some concepts that seem much easier for me to get my head around now (I'm in my 50's) than earlier.
Same same.
I figured this is because I have less energy, but a little more wisdom. I have much broader understanding of related concepts. So, things click a lot faster.
As someone who plays a lot of board games — particularly heavier board games — and hopes to do even more of that in retirement, I’m wondering if/how that is helping/will help fight cognitive decline.
I can imagine at the very least it won’t hurt, and intuitively it makes sense. But I’m not sure studies have been done specifically to understand how board gaming — or the problems being solved with board gaming - helps with cognitive skills.
Curious if others that are closer to this field have thoughts.
I love me some board games, but I prefer depth and decision space to complexity -- and the industry is dominated by stupendously complex beasts full of unnecessary mechanics that slow things down or extend setup without adding too much. A perfect example is TI4's expansion Prophecy of Kings, nearly all of which I despise for bloating a beautiful base game. I'm also always flabbergasted by how starved and railroaded I feel in games like Dune Imperium or Cole Wehlre's collection. Despite a wealth of mechanics, my choices are few and far between.
Complexity has its place, especially for engine builders like Terraforming Mars where complex interactions are the point. Many designers seem to be throwing in the kitchen sink arbitrarily. We're in a "bigger is better" paradigm.
Recreational travel is the only thing that routinely works for me in terms of slowing down time and fully engaging my brain. It's something I can incorporate into my life multiple times per year and it guarantees a massive amount of new stimulation (assuming travel to new and interesting places). Even the most rudimentary trip to Europe will have you grappling all day long with a different language and culture and environment in ways that are completely taken for granted in our day to day lives.
There's lots of things that can make an even bigger impact, like moving to a new place or starting a new career or school, or a new relationship. But those are things that sometimes only happen a handful of times in our entire lives.
Everything else I find eventually becomes routine, no matter how stimulatingly it can be at the start. Not that we shouldn't try! Some stimulation is a whole lot better than none, and I have a terrible feeling that many people get little-to-no stimulation for weeks and months at a time (beyond a new TV show or podcast or political drama).
I'm 63, and still learn new stuff, every day.
I write code, pretty much every single day, and also, solve problems, every single day (7 days a week).
I think solving problems is important. Not just rote coding, but being presented with a bug, or a need to achieve an outcome, without knowing the solution, up front, is what I like.
Basically, every single day, I'm presented with a dilemma, which, if not solved, will scrap the entire project that I'm working on.
I solve every one (but sometimes, by realizing it's a red herring, and trying alternate approaches).
I me my I do I am I did I'm [age] I will I think Me
Every comment in this shitass thread thx for your contribution
This is a reason public college should be free.
This study needs to capture the affects of sleep deficiency. I'm in my mid-forties and don't sleep enough anymore (6-7 hours at best).
What matters is quantity of deep sleep and REM sleep.
REM sleep seems to be related to archiving of events( memory formation ) while lack of deep sleep affects the brain itself.
Pickup a smartwatch and track the sleep stages with Apple watch being the most accurate.
I think there's a valid concern about cognitive fatigue. It could be mentally exhausting to constantly "exercise" our brains just to maintain cognitive abilities as we age!
Maybe AI could be our mental gym buddy here - not replacing our thinking but offering just the right level of mental challenge to keep us sharp without burning us out. Picture an AI that knows when to push your intellectual boundaries and when to back off based on your energy levels.
And Neuralink-style brain interfaces? They could be like cognitive training wheels - gently supporting neural pathways while letting us do the actual pedaling. Instead of "downloading knowledge" (which sounds exhausting in its own way), they might subtly enhance natural learning processes or help maintain neural connections that would otherwise weaken with age.
The goal shouldn't be turning our golden years into endless mental marathons, but rather finding that sweet spot where cognitive maintenance feels engaging and enjoyable rather than like another chore on the to-do list!
> Two main results emerge. First, average skills increase strongly into the forties before decreasing slightly in literacy and more strongly in numeracy. Second, skills decline at older ages only for those with below-average skill usage. White-collar and higher-educated workers with above-average usage show increasing skills even beyond their forties. Women have larger skill losses at older age, particularly in numeracy. [emphasis mine]
So, it seems like workers with above-average usage of literacy and numeracy continue to increase their ability, while those in fields that don’t emphasize those would need some kind of mental “exercise”.
(I also note that some commenters here are rushing to add more cognitive work to their daily routine through additional studies, but I wonder if they’d be better off focusing on commonly neglected areas like physical activity.)
I'm skeptical. I was in my 40's before I graduated from a college. Before that, I did some serious electronics with a background from my local community college, have worked production lines, taught myself assembly language when I was engineering my first microprocessor-based design at work, then when I couldn't get re-employed years later, a lot of potential employers simply not believing my resume content because my 'formal education' was lacking, so I went back to school, got my BS in 1999, and my MS in 2006, then continued working on personal projects and learnign new coding languages on my own since now nobody wanted to take a chance on hiring an 'old' man. Their loss.
> I couldn't get re-employed years later, a lot of potential employers simply not believing my resume content because my 'formal education' was lacking..
I am 53 years old. I don't have a college degree. I have never been unemployed and have had good software development jobs all my adult life, including now.
It is possible and likely that your lack of a degree was not the issue.
Idk, at 29, 30 and 31 I became significantly smarter - it just had to do with things I was intensely interested in. Things that could hold my focus just no longer matter. Fortunately I'm interested in engaging things that are hard.
It has never been easier to pickup a subject and start learning on Youtube or similar streaming platforms. Just Do It, folks! You can do it!
At nights and weekends, I have been learning home improvements, home automations, piano, Korean, and LLM toolings. All from streaming platforms.
Older coders/technical folks tend to have more wisdom than raw compute (relative to younger coders who may have more raw compute than distilled wisdom.) Wisdom takes a more reliable and more efficient path than raw compute.
Both raw compute and wisdom will be eventually replaced by AI, but "deep wisdom" is largely held in the body, in the way we react viscerally to things, which AI as it is envisioned today does not factor in at all. So we still have a refuge in the wisdom stored in our body memory.
As an older developer who lately has been pairing with early career developers, I've been noticing lately how often wisdom comes into play. It feels like close to a daily occurrence where I suggest something is the cause, then later I'm asked how I knew that was the right thing to investigate, and the only response I have is that it's almost always the culprit.
So, this explains the average aging Trump voter's cognitive impairment? Well, at least it's not leaded gasoline or reality TV.
Is self-employment better able to cope with brain changes?
Thats why I don't do vibe coding and try not to use LLMs to generate code.
Because it literally speeds up your cognitive decline as your brain shuts off and offloads all the heavy lifting.
What about using adderall to get an edge in cognitive skills?
I'd like to see how much of the decline is correlated not with age but with Parent Brain.
The mental energy occupied by and spent with parenting is palpable, not to mention long-term continued stress, physical, mental and emotional exhaustion. I wouldn't be surprised if having kids (which is of course correlated with age) is much more of a factor than age itself.
I for one feel dumber than pre-kids.
It's time for our geriatric political class to be retired.
For this type of research the data sample is too small.
Same as for muscles / physical skills, after all...
Correlation/causation. People whose faculties are still intact are more likely to do and enjoy activities requiring those faculties.
And yet ranks of successful founders are dominated by people in their mid forties. Perhaps there is something more involved with social function than pure cognitive skill?
Does that imply that it also is part of character traits? As in use empathy, become emphatic, stay in a non-emphatic environment, your brain degrades you to a sociopath?
"You become the average of the 5 people you hang out with most" is a common phrase, there must be at least an ounce of truth to it.
I hung out with a friend recently I had not seen in close to a decade. He was at one time my closest friend and seeing him was kind of uncomfortable and enlightening. I saw sooo much of how I used to talk and act still in him that it really had me wondering how much of that I'd gotten from him versus the reverse.
I've seen people age into the classic "grumpy old man" so there's something to it. But there's probably a lot more to it too I'd think.
I think it has more to do with getting desensitized to things the more you're exposed to them. With age you get more and more exposure to everything emotional and lose the strong reactions.
Add to that some frustration from not being able to keep up with things, health issues, no one "young" having time to hang out and your friends dying all the time and I'd be grumpy too. You were once a stallion taking care of everyone and now you worry about falling in the shower because you occasionally lose balance for whatever reason. And you know it'll hurt like a bitch, you'll break something and it won't heal for a year. It's quite humiliating.
I always assumed that it was something to do with people getting increasingly frustrated with the struggle of keeping up with stuff.
Chronic pain probably plays a part too. I know I get grumpy and miserable when I'm unwell or in pain.
I've attributed that to a decreased ability to deal with novel situations as we age. E.g. the world behaved differently than I was expecting.
One thing it's definitely possible and important to intentionally keep exposing oneself to!
I am definitely grumpy. What makes me grumpy is the fact that society keeps banging its head against a wall for no good reason.
There is everything there for growth, and yet I see none. I get very tired of knowing well what the boring, selfish reaction of the person I encounter is going to be. I am sure I do the same thing - and don't change much compared to what is available to me to make changes. I do not lead by example at all the way I would like.
Nonetheless, what makes me grumpy is lack of change, not the superficial appearance of change with which technology distracts us. Moral growth would be so refreshing to see, but I see none of it - despite virtue signalling as a veneer from all parts of society.
Said more colloquially, a lot of older people just grow tired of all our bulls*t.
But all the objective bullshit still existed when we were younger! And it didn't bother us as much then.
I think you mean empathetic, rather than emphatic.
There are trajectories of personality traits over the life span, I would hesitate to extrapolate them based on the trajectory of cognitive abilities though. One of the known life span emotional/personality trajectory is positivity bias, older people tend to be more positive. It is sometimes framed as negativity avoidance, that is older people tend to ignore negative things more often.
As with most research around our scientific understanding of intelligence, I assume this only scratches the surface. There may be something to your comment.
personally yes. I absolutely have seen this in myself and moved to rectify it.
Personality disorders like BPD tend to attenuate with age, so you would be more likely to become less sociopathic.
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