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 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."
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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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I'm not yet super confident in all aspects of this theory taking shape, but it's robust enough for the arguments I want to make. Like I wouldn't take the 20y horizon too literally, since chronological time is not even the ontologically appropriate notion to use here.
I've reframed that piece of the argument for myself in finite vs. infinite game terms and "foreshortened future" states as ones in which infinite game has stalled and there are no options to continue it. The motivation to have children might even be considered a hack for that.
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