I try to maintain my mental vitality by limiting nostalgia and intentionally seeking out new things. For example, I do this thing periodically with my music co

I try to maintain my mental vitality by limiting nostalgia and intentionally seeking out new things. For example, I do this thing periodically with my music collection where I create a playlist of only music made in the past 5 years. If that playlist is too sparse, I go looking for more. A lot of what's bad about aging strikes me as almost an ideology. The cynicism of age is an ideology. It's like a belief system where you adopt a retrograde view of time -- things are getting worse, they were better in the old days, etc. This isn't how time actually works. Things evolve over time. Some things get better, some get worse, but mostly there's just change.