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.1 reply 0 retweets 8 likesShow 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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Well.. what if most negative things are outside of your control and older adults are being quite rational to ignore them?
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That's certainly one interpretation -- that it's accumulated wisdom. Another interpretation is that more things *are* outside the control of people who have less time alive to change them!
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