20 ms·

Not only early retirement but any kind of retirement that gets the retiree in a mode that they don't have to try anymore will result in cognitive decline. I am

Not only early retirement but any kind of retirement that gets the retiree in a mode that they don't have to try anymore will result in cognitive decline. I am seeing this in my dad who has been retired for ten years now. Throughout his work life he was a sharp hard working banker. Now he uses his age and retirement as an excuse for not trying. Just yesterday he wanted me to order something for him from Amazon. I told him to send me the link to the item. He asked me how to do that. I told him if you can't find the Share link just copy the link and send it to me. He responds by saying that he doesn't know how to do copy-paste. He has been using computers for at least the last fifteen years. I asked him how come he didn't know how to copy-paste. His response was - I am retired now and there's nobody to tell me or teach me. I can see the cognitive decline. Things he used to be able to do, he can't anymore. This type of attitude is also affecting his self respect and confidence.

dsego 7y ago
Sometimes answers like these can be confabulations. My father will make up anything as an explanation when you ask why, even when it's obviously not true. He still scores ok on the mmse, for now at least.
marcos123 7y ago
Hard working banker?
RaiseProfits 7y ago
To be fair, working with text is really hard on mobile and has regressed a long way from general purpose computers like the pc. To undo you have to shake the fucking thing, and text selection takes time and patience (if you can select the text at all!)
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
  Shake to undo and also shake to report a problem and also shake to report abuse. It does different things in different contexts. I can see how this could be confusing. vs. Right click > copy; right click > paste ctrl / cmd -c; ctrl / cmd -v Which, in my experience, are (almost?) universal. If your a keyboard native like me, you probably find text entry and editing on mobile fucking sucks.
  - netsharc 7y ago
    Apple mice only had 1 button because they said they didn't want to confuse people. And nowadays? Multi fingered gestures, long presses, etc. What a shit show!
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      You can use a laptop or desktop if you want. Obviously there are tradeoffs when you squeeze 3 sq ft of real estate down to 0.1 sq ft.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
      Hahahaha! Great comment. To be fair though, expecting anyone to be consistent from one moment to the next is a pretty tall order ;)
- sp332 7y ago
  Ok but sharing is easier. Click the share button and it will put the link into email or SMS or... Dropbox, whatever you got lying around on your phone.
- geoelectric 7y ago
  In iOS 13 it's worse, because they just changed all of it up. Now shaking and the old gestures for moving the cursor or getting the copy/paste menu don't work either. Instead it's three-finger directional swipes and pinches and long-touching a caret to pick it up and whatnot. There are a couple of problems with that. One is that now instead of coordinating one finger you have to coordinate three, which may not be as easy for someone older. To be fair I think all of the gestures do have a simpler secondary alternative somewhere, but that brings the next issue. iOS (and everyone else) quit documenting stuff a long time ago aside from in help snippets, over the idea that everything was "discoverable." Aside from the core issue of expecting a user to "discover" complex and rarely-used gestures with no affordances, what happens when you "discover" they don't work anymore? I guess you get to discover the help entry via Google, or find it in a Tom's Guide "35 things you didn't know you could do..." type article...once you finally realize they changed and that it isn't just you screwing it up. We really need to create the equivalent of CUA for phone interfaces. Prior to that being broadly adopted, we had to deal with all kinds of variant menu structures and shortcuts in DOS-based and early GUI apps. After that, it was easy to move between things and (eliminating the entire freaking menu bar aside) things have stayed pretty stable since.
  - jedberg 7y ago
    > Instead it's three-finger directional swipes and pinches and long-touching a caret to pick it up and whatnot. Wait hold up. I've been on iOS13 for months now and been super frustrated with what I thought was a buggy copy/paste. Are you telling me I was just doing it wrong?!
    - geoelectric 7y ago
      https://www.imore.com/how-use-text-editing-gestures-iphone-ios-13 https://www.imore.com/how-use-text-editing-gestures-iphone-i... Afraid so, but there you go. Only reason I found out earlier is I lucked across it in my news feed so don't feel too bad. It's pretty obnoxious they didn't have a transition period where both sets of gestures worked.
      - 7y ago
- Swenrekcah 7y ago
  I don’t know how many times I’ve been frustrated at my iphone for not having any way to undo. Who thougt this was a good idea? There was a thread the other day about obscure iphone commands, but this takes the shaking cake.
  - selimthegrim 7y ago
    I feel less dumb for not being the only one who didn't know this.
bigYahnz 7y ago
He sounds a lot like my mother and she isn't even 60 yet. She was lucky enough to have inherited a bit of money after her mother passed. She worked a hard job cleaning most of my life and hasn't worked more than two days a week in 10 years. It is hard to watch her decline to only realize that things haven't even really started to get bad yet. If she only didn't abort my siblings, I would have someone to help with all of this. Lucky me.
zik 7y ago
There's no doubt that people decline cognitively in their old age. I don't think this study's saying that all cognitive decline is due to retirement. People get old and their bodies and brains deteriorate. To my mind the question is whether the rate of decline can be reduced by keeping mentally active.
- bigYahnz 7y ago
  Wouldn't you expect a slower physical decline from someone who has stayed active all their life? Wouldn't expect any real difference with the mind. I've overstayed my welcome at my current employer by a couple of years. I haven't had an actual challenge in a while. I feel like I am getting worse at programming. Not better.
- cft 7y ago
  People's cognitive decline statistically starts as early as 40. You can see that from the age distribution of biggest discoveries in physics and mathematics. You can also see that from the HR policies of the software companies.
  - crooked-v 7y ago
    Correlation is not causation.
    - qnsi 7y ago
      It doesnt, but it sometimes can be a big clue. What other factors can explain, that old people dont make so many breakthroughs? (If hes correct)
      - jedberg 7y ago
        Lack of testosterone because they already have a mate. There is a lot of science to back this up. That getting married and/or having kids is what marks a man's decline in innovative output, because they no longer have to impress potential mates. But it's also correlative and not causative, and assumes most men make the breakthroughs, which has been traditionally true but almost certainly because of some other factor than just gender.
2muchcoffeeman 7y ago
I guess this is why you should work less hard and do more to cultivate hobbies. I can’t imagine retiring and doing nothing. So many projects.
- maroonblazer 7y ago
  I had the same reaction but then wondered whether the thing that makes work 'work' might help stave off cognitive decline. I.e. At least a few times a week I don't feel like working but, because my livelihood depends on it, I have no choice but to force myself to. On the contrary, if I don't happen to feel like engaging in any one of my numerous hobbies it's easy for me to veg out instead and thus risk cognitive decline. Perhaps there's some threshold of 'vegging' that isn't obtained if one has enough hobbies.
  - alex-mohr 7y ago
    Choose. What you happen to be feeling at the moment can control you, or not. See e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=discipline+is+freedom https://www.google.com/search?q=discipline+is+freedom
- q5jwB6bD 7y ago
  I totally agree. I have so many interests and so little time. I can't wait until I can retire so that I can focus on the things that really interest me. I'm hoping to form groups of like minded people with similar hobbies. I envision my future as one of those old dudes playing chess in the park, except chess would be replaced with one of my many interests.
  - hunta2097 7y ago
    I also have this intention. I am about 15-20 years from retirement but I have palpable fears that I will forsake my dreams of doing something creative, falling into the rut that I've seen my older relatives and friends follow. You do meet the odd creative and intelligent senior but they are the minority. I hope I fall into that category when I retire!
lacampbell 7y ago
I asked him how come he didn't know how to copy-paste. His response was - I am retired now and there's nobody to tell me or teach me. I can see the cognitive decline. Are you positive that for the 15 years he spent using a computer at work he just wasn't constantly asking younger people in the office to do stuff for him and never learned because computers are scary? I've seen it before from people who have been using computers at work for decades.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  I don't want to suggest I'm diagnosing anything, but my Mum taught some computer use as a high school teacher. She ran a computerisation project as school librarian. In retirement she did computer courses and helped w charity at which she used computers often. Then she started having to write down sequences of instructions for relatively basic things (like 'cut&paste an image into an email') to the point of not being able to do basics. By this stage, frustratingly, one could try and teach here very basic things and it was like she had no short term memory at all. She'd go along with things, make the right noises as if she were taking things in, do things as you talked her through it. Then you'd say "right, now try by yourself" and she'd just be lost and not know where to start. The year after (about 4 years ago) she had a mental health crisis, and was diagnosed with vascular dementia and Alzheimer's disease (I realise now, her dad had Alzheimer's too). This progression took about 12 years.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
meerita 7y ago
Maybe your father will be sharp in other things not computing. I will have good level of computing when i reach +75 but well, maybe newer concepts will escape me a little bit but maybe i have other skills that are even more sharper than you can imagine.
- chimpburger 7y ago
  There haven't been any fundamentally new concepts in computing for decades
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    Yes and no. Your statement is true about under-the-hood stuff, but false about user interfaces. Your phone interface is not like Windows 95, still less like a green screen terminal talking to a mainframe.
    - chimpburger 7y ago
      LOL. Downvoted? I think most people browsing HackerNews will not be freaked out by minor UI changes 30 years from now. Even a 3 year old child can figure out how to use an iPad.
      - kqr 7y ago
        You say "even a three-year old" as if three-year olds aren't hyperspecialised learning machines.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - tasuki 7y ago
        I'm 34 and already sometimes freaked out by minor UI changes.
basch 7y ago
I have noticed the same thing, but not from age, instead I attribute it to ux/ui. People used to know how to type a url into an address bar. If they didnt type it correctly it didnt work. They knew how to type an email address. Now for the life of people, its actually uncomfortable to type example.com without a space into an address bar and go directly to a site and not to google. They purposely put a space between the words because they only know how to search for terms. (This could also be a semi-unconscious learned safety behavior to avoid typos in domains.) The same applies to autocomplete in the TO field of email programs. If a name doesnt autopopulate, "well that email must not exist, because autocomplete isnt suggesting their name." As fields started thinking more for us, and the raw structure of paths has become more and more hidden (websites to apps, chrome overall shrinking and hiding protocols), I dont think its fair to attribute "well I cant find the url" to cognitive decline. Our interfaces are purpose hiding this stuff and making us depend more and more on fuzzy representations of structure.
- lisper 7y ago
  > People used to know how to type a url into an address bar. People used to know how to write in cursive too. Some skills just get obsolete.
  - Roark66 7y ago
    >People used to know how to write in cursive too. Some skills just get obsolete. I heard this few times. Is it actually a thing that people don't know how to write cursive? Natural writing (cursive) has been a part of primary education in most(perhaps all) countries since the beginning. Did they actually remove it recently? That would be insane. How one is supposed to be able to write quickly, as in when taking notes, without cursive?
    - krapp 7y ago
      > How one is supposed to be able to write quickly, as in when taking notes, without cursive? One usually types said notes into their phone or speaks them into their watch. Or just writes them quickly the typical way, since there aren't likely to be cases where that wouldn't be sufficient.
brownbat 7y ago
> His response was - I am retired now and there's nobody to tell me or teach me. There's something prescient here. I can't count how many times a day just being surrounded other people I've seen them do or use something slightly more efficient than the way I would do it, and have integrated it into my workflow. Isolation may be a factor in cognitive decline, we absorb a ton through fleeting social interactions.
- vidarh 7y ago
  There's an attitude thing there too though (while I agree with you that you can often pick things up just by being around them), between reacting to lack of knowledge by looking for someone to tell you or teach you, and just asking someone else to do it if you're not told, vs. actively seeking out the knowledge yourself. Personally I think part of why I've learned a lot of what I know is because as an introvert I often notice that I'm willing to put in a lot of effort into figuring things out myself to avoid asking someone. As a child I was blind to my motivations, and sometimes it made me miserable because I'd stress out over how to do something that I could have trivially asked about and where figuring out the solution was a lot of effort, but learning the skill of figuring out "anything" on my own has been incredibly valuable. Today I'm aware of this tendency, and will often force myself to pick the social interaction based on a conscious trade-off of the relative pain of asking vs. doing, but I will still often choose to find a way to learn how to do something on my own rather than ask even when asking would be "less painful", both because it often teaches me more and because maintaining the skill of learning on my own is something I value in itself.
UncleOxidant 7y ago
Not sure I buy this blanket statement. My dad learned how to use Linux in his retirement.
gibolt 7y ago
You should send him exactly what you wrote here. He probably needs someone he cares about to challenge the comfort he has accepted. Depending on his personality, it could increase the time you have left to spend with him
asveikau 7y ago
This sounds like a long complaint about your dad veiled as commentary about the article. I suggest you take him out to lunch and have a good time, without spending too much time wondering how much he is or isn't trying anymore.
- draw_down 7y ago
  Come on.
debt 7y ago
Poor guy. Maybe you should hang out with your dad and show him?
- monster_group 7y ago
  Not only I taught him how to copy-paste, I also had couple of sessions with him where I showed him how to do tax estimation using Google spreadsheet.
zerr 7y ago
Another way to think about it - it is a kind of self-defence mechanism against bad thoughts in old people - imagine how hard it would be if they could fully realise that tomorrow, next day or year is the last one for them.
momokoko 7y ago
Or maybe he always had assistants to do most of that for him at work and now that he's retired he doesn't have that anymore so he's reaching out to you? Anecdotal evidence is dangerous.
mattrp 7y ago
My dad was the same - he literally wrote software for a computer that hadn’t been built yet. That’s just such a foreign concept to me. But in his last years he was barely able to use a web browser despite the fact he spent nearly his entire adult life as a developer. I don’t know if the slowdown comes first or if it comes after retirement but it frightens the hell out of me either way. And it is probably the thing that I most think about when policies like UBI are brought up.
- unicornfinder 7y ago
  This sounds shockingly close to my own dad, except he's still working (albeit in a much, much less technical role), which makes me suspect that it is the age...
Dumblydorr 7y ago
That is probably mostly just age, you can't say that an elderly person that retired is declining due to no job when they'd decline due to age 80% as much. There is obviously a sweet spot here, retire in the the 50s and play music all day is my goal.
nicklaf 7y ago
"[Geometer] H.S.M. Coxeter lived to the age of 96, working and lecturing right until his death. He attributed his long life to a strict vegetarian diet and he did 50 push-ups every day. He said, I am never bored." http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Coxeter.html http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Coxet...
- erfgh 7y ago
  Well, that's what he said.

dsego 7y ago

Sometimes answers like these can be confabulations. My father will make up anything as an explanation when you ask why, even when it's obviously not true. He still scores ok on the mmse, for now at least.

marcos123 7y ago

Hard working banker?

RaiseProfits 7y ago

To be fair, working with text is really hard on mobile and has regressed a long way from general purpose computers like the pc. To undo you have to shake the fucking thing, and text selection takes time and patience (if you can select the text at all!)

TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
Shake to undo and also shake to report a problem and also shake to report abuse. It does different things in different contexts. I can see how this could be confusing. vs. Right click > copy; right click > paste ctrl / cmd -c; ctrl / cmd -v Which, in my experience, are (almost?) universal. If your a keyboard native like me, you probably find text entry and editing on mobile fucking sucks.
- netsharc 7y ago
  Apple mice only had 1 button because they said they didn't want to confuse people. And nowadays? Multi fingered gestures, long presses, etc. What a shit show!
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    You can use a laptop or desktop if you want. Obviously there are tradeoffs when you squeeze 3 sq ft of real estate down to 0.1 sq ft.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
    Hahahaha! Great comment. To be fair though, expecting anyone to be consistent from one moment to the next is a pretty tall order ;)
sp332 7y ago
Ok but sharing is easier. Click the share button and it will put the link into email or SMS or... Dropbox, whatever you got lying around on your phone.
geoelectric 7y ago
In iOS 13 it's worse, because they just changed all of it up. Now shaking and the old gestures for moving the cursor or getting the copy/paste menu don't work either. Instead it's three-finger directional swipes and pinches and long-touching a caret to pick it up and whatnot. There are a couple of problems with that. One is that now instead of coordinating one finger you have to coordinate three, which may not be as easy for someone older. To be fair I think all of the gestures do have a simpler secondary alternative somewhere, but that brings the next issue. iOS (and everyone else) quit documenting stuff a long time ago aside from in help snippets, over the idea that everything was "discoverable." Aside from the core issue of expecting a user to "discover" complex and rarely-used gestures with no affordances, what happens when you "discover" they don't work anymore? I guess you get to discover the help entry via Google, or find it in a Tom's Guide "35 things you didn't know you could do..." type article...once you finally realize they changed and that it isn't just you screwing it up. We really need to create the equivalent of CUA for phone interfaces. Prior to that being broadly adopted, we had to deal with all kinds of variant menu structures and shortcuts in DOS-based and early GUI apps. After that, it was easy to move between things and (eliminating the entire freaking menu bar aside) things have stayed pretty stable since.
- jedberg 7y ago
  > Instead it's three-finger directional swipes and pinches and long-touching a caret to pick it up and whatnot. Wait hold up. I've been on iOS13 for months now and been super frustrated with what I thought was a buggy copy/paste. Are you telling me I was just doing it wrong?!
  - geoelectric 7y ago
    https://www.imore.com/how-use-text-editing-gestures-iphone-ios-13 https://www.imore.com/how-use-text-editing-gestures-iphone-i... Afraid so, but there you go. Only reason I found out earlier is I lucked across it in my news feed so don't feel too bad. It's pretty obnoxious they didn't have a transition period where both sets of gestures worked.
    - 7y ago
Swenrekcah 7y ago
I don’t know how many times I’ve been frustrated at my iphone for not having any way to undo. Who thougt this was a good idea? There was a thread the other day about obscure iphone commands, but this takes the shaking cake.
- selimthegrim 7y ago
  I feel less dumb for not being the only one who didn't know this.

bigYahnz 7y ago

He sounds a lot like my mother and she isn't even 60 yet. She was lucky enough to have inherited a bit of money after her mother passed. She worked a hard job cleaning most of my life and hasn't worked more than two days a week in 10 years. It is hard to watch her decline to only realize that things haven't even really started to get bad yet. If she only didn't abort my siblings, I would have someone to help with all of this. Lucky me.

zik 7y ago

There's no doubt that people decline cognitively in their old age. I don't think this study's saying that all cognitive decline is due to retirement. People get old and their bodies and brains deteriorate. To my mind the question is whether the rate of decline can be reduced by keeping mentally active.

bigYahnz 7y ago
Wouldn't you expect a slower physical decline from someone who has stayed active all their life? Wouldn't expect any real difference with the mind. I've overstayed my welcome at my current employer by a couple of years. I haven't had an actual challenge in a while. I feel like I am getting worse at programming. Not better.
cft 7y ago
People's cognitive decline statistically starts as early as 40. You can see that from the age distribution of biggest discoveries in physics and mathematics. You can also see that from the HR policies of the software companies.
- crooked-v 7y ago
  Correlation is not causation.
  - qnsi 7y ago
    It doesnt, but it sometimes can be a big clue. What other factors can explain, that old people dont make so many breakthroughs? (If hes correct)
    - jedberg 7y ago
      Lack of testosterone because they already have a mate. There is a lot of science to back this up. That getting married and/or having kids is what marks a man's decline in innovative output, because they no longer have to impress potential mates. But it's also correlative and not causative, and assumes most men make the breakthroughs, which has been traditionally true but almost certainly because of some other factor than just gender.

2muchcoffeeman 7y ago

I guess this is why you should work less hard and do more to cultivate hobbies. I can’t imagine retiring and doing nothing. So many projects.

maroonblazer 7y ago
I had the same reaction but then wondered whether the thing that makes work 'work' might help stave off cognitive decline. I.e. At least a few times a week I don't feel like working but, because my livelihood depends on it, I have no choice but to force myself to. On the contrary, if I don't happen to feel like engaging in any one of my numerous hobbies it's easy for me to veg out instead and thus risk cognitive decline. Perhaps there's some threshold of 'vegging' that isn't obtained if one has enough hobbies.
- alex-mohr 7y ago
  Choose. What you happen to be feeling at the moment can control you, or not. See e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=discipline+is+freedom https://www.google.com/search?q=discipline+is+freedom
q5jwB6bD 7y ago
I totally agree. I have so many interests and so little time. I can't wait until I can retire so that I can focus on the things that really interest me. I'm hoping to form groups of like minded people with similar hobbies. I envision my future as one of those old dudes playing chess in the park, except chess would be replaced with one of my many interests.
- hunta2097 7y ago
  I also have this intention. I am about 15-20 years from retirement but I have palpable fears that I will forsake my dreams of doing something creative, falling into the rut that I've seen my older relatives and friends follow. You do meet the odd creative and intelligent senior but they are the minority. I hope I fall into that category when I retire!

lacampbell 7y ago

I asked him how come he didn't know how to copy-paste. His response was - I am retired now and there's nobody to tell me or teach me. I can see the cognitive decline. Are you positive that for the 15 years he spent using a computer at work he just wasn't constantly asking younger people in the office to do stuff for him and never learned because computers are scary? I've seen it before from people who have been using computers at work for decades.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
I don't want to suggest I'm diagnosing anything, but my Mum taught some computer use as a high school teacher. She ran a computerisation project as school librarian. In retirement she did computer courses and helped w charity at which she used computers often. Then she started having to write down sequences of instructions for relatively basic things (like 'cut&paste an image into an email') to the point of not being able to do basics. By this stage, frustratingly, one could try and teach here very basic things and it was like she had no short term memory at all. She'd go along with things, make the right noises as if she were taking things in, do things as you talked her through it. Then you'd say "right, now try by yourself" and she'd just be lost and not know where to start. The year after (about 4 years ago) she had a mental health crisis, and was diagnosed with vascular dementia and Alzheimer's disease (I realise now, her dad had Alzheimer's too). This progression took about 12 years.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

meerita 7y ago

Maybe your father will be sharp in other things not computing. I will have good level of computing when i reach +75 but well, maybe newer concepts will escape me a little bit but maybe i have other skills that are even more sharper than you can imagine.

chimpburger 7y ago
There haven't been any fundamentally new concepts in computing for decades
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Yes and no. Your statement is true about under-the-hood stuff, but false about user interfaces. Your phone interface is not like Windows 95, still less like a green screen terminal talking to a mainframe.
  - chimpburger 7y ago
    LOL. Downvoted? I think most people browsing HackerNews will not be freaked out by minor UI changes 30 years from now. Even a 3 year old child can figure out how to use an iPad.
    - kqr 7y ago
      You say "even a three-year old" as if three-year olds aren't hyperspecialised learning machines.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - tasuki 7y ago
      I'm 34 and already sometimes freaked out by minor UI changes.

basch 7y ago

I have noticed the same thing, but not from age, instead I attribute it to ux/ui. People used to know how to type a url into an address bar. If they didnt type it correctly it didnt work. They knew how to type an email address. Now for the life of people, its actually uncomfortable to type example.com without a space into an address bar and go directly to a site and not to google. They purposely put a space between the words because they only know how to search for terms. (This could also be a semi-unconscious learned safety behavior to avoid typos in domains.) The same applies to autocomplete in the TO field of email programs. If a name doesnt autopopulate, "well that email must not exist, because autocomplete isnt suggesting their name." As fields started thinking more for us, and the raw structure of paths has become more and more hidden (websites to apps, chrome overall shrinking and hiding protocols), I dont think its fair to attribute "well I cant find the url" to cognitive decline. Our interfaces are purpose hiding this stuff and making us depend more and more on fuzzy representations of structure.

lisper 7y ago
> People used to know how to type a url into an address bar. People used to know how to write in cursive too. Some skills just get obsolete.
- Roark66 7y ago
  >People used to know how to write in cursive too. Some skills just get obsolete. I heard this few times. Is it actually a thing that people don't know how to write cursive? Natural writing (cursive) has been a part of primary education in most(perhaps all) countries since the beginning. Did they actually remove it recently? That would be insane. How one is supposed to be able to write quickly, as in when taking notes, without cursive?
  - krapp 7y ago
    > How one is supposed to be able to write quickly, as in when taking notes, without cursive? One usually types said notes into their phone or speaks them into their watch. Or just writes them quickly the typical way, since there aren't likely to be cases where that wouldn't be sufficient.

brownbat 7y ago

> His response was - I am retired now and there's nobody to tell me or teach me. There's something prescient here. I can't count how many times a day just being surrounded other people I've seen them do or use something slightly more efficient than the way I would do it, and have integrated it into my workflow. Isolation may be a factor in cognitive decline, we absorb a ton through fleeting social interactions.

vidarh 7y ago
There's an attitude thing there too though (while I agree with you that you can often pick things up just by being around them), between reacting to lack of knowledge by looking for someone to tell you or teach you, and just asking someone else to do it if you're not told, vs. actively seeking out the knowledge yourself. Personally I think part of why I've learned a lot of what I know is because as an introvert I often notice that I'm willing to put in a lot of effort into figuring things out myself to avoid asking someone. As a child I was blind to my motivations, and sometimes it made me miserable because I'd stress out over how to do something that I could have trivially asked about and where figuring out the solution was a lot of effort, but learning the skill of figuring out "anything" on my own has been incredibly valuable. Today I'm aware of this tendency, and will often force myself to pick the social interaction based on a conscious trade-off of the relative pain of asking vs. doing, but I will still often choose to find a way to learn how to do something on my own rather than ask even when asking would be "less painful", both because it often teaches me more and because maintaining the skill of learning on my own is something I value in itself.

UncleOxidant 7y ago

Not sure I buy this blanket statement. My dad learned how to use Linux in his retirement.

gibolt 7y ago

You should send him exactly what you wrote here. He probably needs someone he cares about to challenge the comfort he has accepted. Depending on his personality, it could increase the time you have left to spend with him

asveikau 7y ago

This sounds like a long complaint about your dad veiled as commentary about the article. I suggest you take him out to lunch and have a good time, without spending too much time wondering how much he is or isn't trying anymore.

draw_down 7y ago
Come on.

debt 7y ago

Poor guy. Maybe you should hang out with your dad and show him?

monster_group 7y ago
Not only I taught him how to copy-paste, I also had couple of sessions with him where I showed him how to do tax estimation using Google spreadsheet.

zerr 7y ago

Another way to think about it - it is a kind of self-defence mechanism against bad thoughts in old people - imagine how hard it would be if they could fully realise that tomorrow, next day or year is the last one for them.

momokoko 7y ago

Or maybe he always had assistants to do most of that for him at work and now that he's retired he doesn't have that anymore so he's reaching out to you? Anecdotal evidence is dangerous.

mattrp 7y ago

My dad was the same - he literally wrote software for a computer that hadn’t been built yet. That’s just such a foreign concept to me. But in his last years he was barely able to use a web browser despite the fact he spent nearly his entire adult life as a developer. I don’t know if the slowdown comes first or if it comes after retirement but it frightens the hell out of me either way. And it is probably the thing that I most think about when policies like UBI are brought up.

unicornfinder 7y ago
This sounds shockingly close to my own dad, except he's still working (albeit in a much, much less technical role), which makes me suspect that it is the age...

Dumblydorr 7y ago

That is probably mostly just age, you can't say that an elderly person that retired is declining due to no job when they'd decline due to age 80% as much. There is obviously a sweet spot here, retire in the the 50s and play music all day is my goal.

nicklaf 7y ago

"[Geometer] H.S.M. Coxeter lived to the age of 96, working and lecturing right until his death. He attributed his long life to a strict vegetarian diet and he did 50 push-ups every day. He said, I am never bored." http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Coxeter.html http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Coxet...

erfgh 7y ago
Well, that's what he said.