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Old people, and the terminally ill and survivors of disasters like Sept. 11, are less interested in open-ended learning and novelty seeking, and more interested in focusing on existing relationships and directly trying to keep their mood up.
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"Recently, research has indicated a special preference for emotionally positive information over emotionally negative information in memory in older adults."
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Reminds me of the Meryl Streep quote: "I no longer have patience for certain things, not because I’ve become arrogant, but simply because I reached a point in my life where I do not want to waste more time with what displeases me or hurts me."
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Learning unpleasant (but possibly important) things might seem valuable if you have a long life ahead of you, when you might make use of that information. If not, why put yourself through the misery? May as well focus on the positive.
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This is related to "sense of a foreshortened future", the phenomenon in which trauma makes people reluctant to plan because they feel like their lives are somehow "already over."https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01026/full …
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If you combine both papers, you get a theory in which the old are mildly traumatized; like survivors of disasters, they feel that starting new things is futile because they don't have enough time left to complete them.
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Unlike trauma victims, older adults are actually happier than younger adults, so the analogy's not exact, but there's a resemblance in the way they engage with time.
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This theory would predict that, for instance, if new medical discoveries gave us 20 more years of life expectancy, 60-year-olds would think differently than they do now; they'd be more interested in learning, new projects, and receiving bad news and criticism.
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Some of my friends (eg
@HiFromMichaelV) see it as a big problem that people seem to have declined in their willingness to have open-ended, sometimes troubling intellectual conversations. Seems related to this.Show this thread -
The theory may simply imply that for any given person, they're going to be less interested in open-ended intellectual conversation as they age, so that you notice your friends talking and exploring less and less over a ten-year time period.
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(Not sure this is a sufficient explanation for the widespread impression that "discourse quantity and quality has declined", just that it could be a factor.)
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The experimental fact that older adults are happier than young adults, along with the observations that they focus more attention on positive things, despite the obvious fact that aging is uncomfortable, seems to suggest a weird model of happiness/well-being.
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What if people are more interested in "darker", more troubling topics when they are confident they have the strength and resources to deal with them, while they become more "conservative" about guarding their positive outlook when they're in a position of true scarcity?
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Also related: construal level, something
@robinhanson talks a lot about. "Far mode" seems to go with the "young person style" of caring more about learning, novelty, and starting new long-term projects; "near mode" with the "old person style" about living more "in the moment."Show this thread -
If you have all the time in the world, starting new, open-ended, exploratory things, which may have large vague spots on the map, is appealing, because you can firm up the details later. You have the time to do it all.
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If you have limited time (and limited capacities), you want to limit your attention to things you can actually get done, which means more modest, more concrete, more immediately enjoyable, more "near mode."
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Achieving long-term goals is of course a matter of building a long-term, far-mode aspiration out of near-mode, concrete building blocks. If this is connected to age, maybe it's important to have more collaborations between older and younger adults.
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(This only works if there's mutual respect though; I don't think it would be any good for old or young people to shame each other for having different priorities.)
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