3 ms·

When you are this talented at communication in general it must be triply annoying to be condescended to.

• onesixtythree 11y ago
  People overestimate the mental decline that comes with age dramatically. It's more sporadic: most people decline very little, while a few people (i.e. those with dementia) get hit very hard. Unfortunately, much of society forms its model of "old people" based on the "hit very hard" category, and not people like Jacques Barzun, who did his best work in his 80s and 90s. There's something you observe with biological mental illness which is that it's more stigmatized than it deserves because people encounter the "raving, crazy" people with it (the worst-off 2%) and not the other 98% for whom depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, et al, are more accurately modeled as boring and often manageable health problems than as residence in an alternative universe. I think that the cognitive negatives of aging (typically mild to nonexistent, except in senescent brain diseases like Alzheimer's) get the same smear. In fact, various studies have put the intellectual peak age (in healthy people) anywhere from 17 to 65 (except for in language acquisition, at which we peak in childhood). That's largely because the curve is so flat and individualized (e.g. some people peak early, some late) that it's impossible to tell.