I'm 63 and for me the answer is simple: more self-awareness. I am aware of what thoughts my emotion is in response to. I am aware of how my emotions are cascading other emotions and triggering feelings based on memories of similar circumstances. I am aware of how my emotions are affecting the people around me and how their response is feeding back into my thoughts and feelings. Finally, with self-awareness comes the meta-cognition ability to debug and reprogram my thoughts and feelings. My emotions are often based on something that is not quite true, so stepping back and looking at truth based reality calms them. I developed this ability only recently. I honestly think I was sleepwalking through most of my life being driven to and fro by thoughts and feelings that were difficult to understand.
I'm about half your age and I don't know much about anything but, I think I'd agree based on my experience so far. I realized a while back that I'm some sort of chemical soup and I don't know where my thoughts or emotions even originate from. I don't seem to produce them voluntarily – they just bubble up out of the silence inside me. I have some moment of control, though it doesn't seem very effective a lot of the time. However I fail or succeed appears to be largely determined by abilities I don't have much control over in the first place. I mean, how the hell can I read? Why am I able to speak and understand language? My heart keeps beating, my cells repair themselves, I somehow remember to breathe. I understand math, programming, but none of the internal mechanisms which make that possible.
I've come to the conclusion that my emotions are something to observe a lot before allowing responses, to whatever degree I can accomplish that, because I don't truly understand where they came from or why later on, let alone in the moment. The truth I'm living is a very arbitrary and subjective one at all times.
Like you say, these feelings and reactions are often based on "facts" that aren't really true anyways. Reality is a very thin veil over something I can hardly comprehend the physics or magic of.
If I can manage to develop better temperance and courage to restrain my reactions and questions my thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, I think I'll be pretty content with that. The sense of sleepwalking through life is very apt. I've felt very alive, focused, and attuned to reality at many points in my life while being very much completely out of tune and dead to the rest of the world. I didn't know who I was, what was going on, anything. And I still don't.
What do you picture in your mind when you think about your emotions? For others, I imagine an aura, colored based on the emotion I’m sensing that they’re feeling. It’s like a light emanating from their body. Inside of myself, I imagine churning liquids vying for dominance at any specific moment.
I think because emotions are so nebulous and not like gears or software programs, my visualization tracks well with how emotions work. For example, if I’m feeling especially elated, it’s like my body is filling with a deep gold that overwhelms any other emotion.
At age 20 or so, I read a quote in a book (on day trading, IIRC) that went something like: "Master your emotions, or they will master you."
After thinking about it, I realized that despite identifying as a logical-thinking individual, I was nevertheless at the mercy of the more primitive parts of my brain. Sometimes totally, but pretty much all executive functions were influenced by it to a large degree. That might be fine, but my limbic system tended to make poor decisions; ones that my more conscious brain would have to pay the price for later. It's also no match for the brains of people not in emotional mode, and would be taken advantage of by things like appeals to emotion in advertising, politics, and rhetoric. I decided my internal caveman was not my friend, and took steps to sideline his vote in decision-making.
My entirely unscientific theory is that like other cells, we're born with a limited number of fucks in our body.
When we're young, we (instinctively, subconsciously) feel like our fucks reserves are plentiful, so we give a fuck about a lot of stuff.
As we get older, our reservoir of fucks gets progressively depleted. The fucks are rarer, so we give a fuck less and less often. I've recently turned 40 and I can definitely feel this in myself; just like recovery from workouts takes a little longer than when I was 20, I don't give a fuck about things so easily.
By the time you're officially old, you're almost out of fucks, so it's not like you don't give a fuck because you don't want to, but because it's more difficult physically (harvesting of the last fucks takes more energy, because biology).
This is hilarious and yet right on the money in some way.
As you get older, you start to see that everything is the same and goes through cycles. The important stuff of my childhood (ex: having clothes that were sewhar fashionable), becomes irrelevant. Who cares if I'm wearing the same style of sandals for over 20 years now? You start to focus on what's more important to you. F** are reserved for important matters like arguing on HN about the superiority of Linux :).
When you see a child have a meltdown over not having their favorite bath towel available, you start to see how widening your scope means less care for minor problems. I have no time to worry about those things as I have bigger problems (working on marriage, work due dates, educating my kid...etc). It makes one wonder how chill an immortal being would be after milennia.
I think what you're describing is more down to desensitisation through exposure to stressful environments.
When you're younger smaller problems seem larger because you've not been desensitised to larger problems. As you progress through life you generally experience greater stress and thus the smaller problems feel smaller. You could look at it like desensitisation to capsicum, salt, violence or pornography.
Careful, your radical theory could spawn a new cottage industry of snake oils! Fuck restorative juice blends and creams, fuck focusing crystals, a Gwyneth Paltrow book on giving clean fucks so as to not overly deplete your limited reserve of fuck giving.
Less about the energy to give fucks and more about having better things to give fucks about. Personally at least, I used to give a fuck about every damn thing - from the slightest perceived insult to the way rice is cooked. These days I have better/bigger things to give a fuck about. I brush off even real insults and eat two day old rice just fine.
That, combined with the wisdom one gains from having spent many fucks on the wrong things. When you examine the fucks you gave 10 or 20 years ago, you realize how clueless you were.
I respectfully disagree.
As a reluctant member of the "older individuals" I too find myself giving a boatload less fucks than I used to, but the main reasons are (in no particular order):
1. I have got my crippling Generalized Anxiety Disorder under control
2. I have realized that I used to give way too many fucks about shit that didn't matter at all, and it was not worth it and actually detrimental
Mind you, those 2 are highly correlated and of interdependent causation.
What got me here:
Therapy didn't help.
Manson's book "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck" helped quite a bit, but was not "the thing".
Articles on "Don't be a victim...." "Don't play the victim...." and similar helped.
What helped immensely is to start blogging daily, and more often than daily, about the events in my life, my thinking, my reactions starting from the points of view that:
A) I am accountable for what happens to me
B) I am 100% wrong when something unpleasant happens to me
And that, in the course of a few month, changed my life in tangible manners.
While I am not a snowflake, I am a special case: I started low, very low; and - IMHO - I have come a long way in the Depression/Anxiety/Being_a_loser scale.
I do believe that to some degree something similar happens to most everyone who doesn't start for the same ultra-low point as me, with time we learn that when young we were wrong to give too many fucks about too many things.
But guess what? Giving way too many fucks about too many things is good for:
Business: Facebook, iPhone & Co
Politicians: from left to right
Religions: all of them (except for The Dude)
And that's why the messagings that we are bombarded with aim at reinforcing giving too many fucks about too many things (aka Anxiety) and the messagings aimed at kids/teenagers aim to create and instill Anxiety.
I’ve seen a lot of people age and slowly lose the ability to control their emotions as well, so Im not exactly sure what’s the ratio of bettering or worsening of emotion control.
But generally I agree with the idea that that wisdom collects with time and experiences lived and so emotional expense is better controlled along with aging.
From my experince, at a smillar age (41), I reserve my fucks for more important events so your take on fucks fits me quite well, I generally give a lot less of them.
I'm not sure it's a discrete limited number of fucks, just the novelty wears off - after so many heartbreaks, surprises good and bad - you know you've seen something similar before and they slowly loose their power.
The thing about getting older is that you come with terms with the fact that you have limited control over life. You have only control on yourself, and this not absolute because you may get a decease that's pretty random, although your lifestyle heavily affects your well being. Outside of yourself everything else is kinda out of your influence. It's good to keep tabs on what's going on with the world in an attempt to better prepare for hardship, but the more you let go the happier you become.
Reminds me of the theory I read somewhere - we all have so many words in us and when we use them up, we die. Think it might have been Vonnegut but can't find the source at the moment.
I would like to think of it as a Bias term. The older I become the larger the Bias and the fewer fucks I give. I wish I could have performed some transfer learning to my younger self, his life would have been much easier.
Lol, that's both a hilarious and great model for sure.
But I wonder, it seems to me doomers lost their fuck faster. Is it because they have fewer initial fucks? Or is it because they lose fuck overtime even if they don't a fuck about something? Or every time everybody else gives a fuck a doomer gives two?
Another way to put it is that as you get older you start prioritizing things better that are of value to you as your time in existence is being depleted. Less time means more focus, which results in less fucks.
When I was younger thing seemed so black and white. The older I get the more I see that everything is shades of gray. Everything is more nuanced. I say "it depends" a lot more than I would have when I was younger.
Plus, I've been around long enough to realize that what seems really important and earth shattering right now will probably not even make it into the footnotes of history. Very little is worth getting worked up over.
Plus, I have so many more responsibilities taking my attention combined with not having the energy of youth that I simply don't have the ability to care about anything above the very most important things.
One of the interesting results from psychology is that emotions are a complicated feedback loop from stimulus, around through the body, back to the feeling, but critically involving bodily response, not just states of the brain. I've personally experienced "feeling anxious" simply because my heart was beating too quickly for purely physiological reasons. (I've had some heart troubles.) Once I addressed those reasons, the anxiety faded with it. This is a handwave in the direction of this research and ideas, not an explanation of it; consult the web if you're interested in more.
I propose something that neither the article nor anyone else is in the comments so far, which is that we age, our bodies simply get less physical about the emotions. It makes it easier to be more level if your body is literally being more level, and the aforementioned feedback loop is literally weaker. Everything else gets weaker in old age, why not the physiological strength of emotions, too?
I think it's simple: Perspective, and emotional fatigue.
The first time <insert good thing> happens to you, you might be overwhelmed with excitement and joy. The 85th time, not so much. Hopefully you still appreciate it, but for the same dramatic response, the reward center needs more. Anything that happens to you 85 times isn't special enough to be life-changing, by definition.
The first time <insert bad thing> happens to you, you might be crushed. By the 5th time it happens to you, or you've seen it happen to others, you are just kind of immune. You know bad things happen, and you either decide to move forward or you do not.
Interestingly though: seeing someone else experience the now-banal-to-you positive thing can be it's own reward. Watching a child's first taste of ice cream is somehow magical. Or a puppy's first experience of snow.
And we try to have patience for the corresponding first-negative experiences too. A child who does not get exactly what they wanted for dinner, or who must go home from the park earlier than he or she might like...
(Examples above intentionally light-weight. There are real bad things that happen to people, but the level of emotional energy elicited by the trivialities can be enormous!)
If this were the whole story, it would mean that a man who had been in a coma his whole life up to 60 would have the same emotional control as a little kid. For example, he would cry at losing a board game. That's very hard to believe.
I'm pretty sure the difference between old people and young people is mostly just energy. Old people can't feel intense emotions for the same reason they can't run a marathon. They just get fatigued too easily.
Personally I just don't give a shit. I still get upset the same way as I did decades ago, but it's just not worth my time and energy to get all up in arms about most things that are upsetting to me.
On most things I either know nothing I will do or say will make a positive impact, or I know the issue will take care of itself or someone else is taking care of it, just not right at this very moment. So why bother. I have better things to do with my life. Like lie down on my couch and binge watch Golden Girls.
I make an exception on things endangering the well being of my wife and kids.
Independent of any biological or hormonal causes, I can think of several reasons why older folks might be more even keeled merely by virtue of where they are in their life span:
1. The more experiences you have, the less likely any new experience is to be an extreme outlier. A toddler has the best and worst day of their life once a month or so. A twenty-something every couple of years. By your sixties, there's a good chance that most of the extreme emotional outliers are all in your past.
So when you're going through something that would overwhelm a younger person, it's likely you can correctly say, "Eh, I've been through worse." And that realization, and the memory of what it was like after it is itself an emotional buffer. It's hard to feel like your world is falling apart when you clearly remember yourself putting it back together once before.
2. The stakes for your decisions are lower. When you're a teen, it feels like every decision can radically alter the course of your life. Maybe that after school sport becomes your scholarship ticket to an expensive college. Your major determines your career. Deciding whether to go to that party could mean meeting the love of your life of not. The butterfly effect iterated future ahead of scales the magnitude of every single thing you do. But when you're older, there is simply less time for that scaling to occur. No decision a seventy-year-old makes will change the course of their life radically for the next sixty years because, well, they don't have sixty years. Most bets are thus relatively safer.
3. Your existence is more secure. By the time you reach middle age, you likely (though not definitely) have accumulated skills, experience, a social network, job contacts, a career, and wealth. You live in a pretty well-feathered nest, able to withstand most bouts of bad weather.
It's perspective. Young people have little perspective, by definition. They can't predict how things will play out, or what the consequences of various actions will be on an emotional level.
You can try to gain perspective by doing things like reading realistic novels or realism-based historical studies (as opposed to the morality tales so in vogue today). I think this type of vicarious emotional absorption is the best that young people can do if they are actively trying to improve their perspective. But then you are at the mercy of how accurately the author or historian is portraying life -- older people can detect "false notes" more easily, and I see many false notes when I watch media or listen to music, some so egregiously false as to classify those works as deception. Then you can get into a situation where your emotional depth is getting worse with time because you are learning things vicariously that aren't accurately describing how life works.
But most people will eventually come to have enough authentic emotional experiences as to be able to gain some depth, e.g. perspective, even if they have consumed a lot of false vicarious experiences. In fact, those authentic experience might be incredibly jarring. I've heard that Ruskin had lots of sexual issues in his life because he was trained to work with sculptures of naked women with no pubic hair or realistic features, and was shocked when he saw an actual (non-idealized) nude woman. He may never have managed to purge himself of the false notes he absorbed as a young art student.
When a brand new CS student who has never written a program, or has only written a handful of exercises, are thrown into a large codebase, you expect them to make poor decisions. That's why their work is supervised. Not because they lack intelligence, but because they lack perspective. They are not thinking of how X will be maintained over time, or the consequences of creating some dependencies, etc. Over time, they acquire that perspective and make better decisions, at which point they need less supervision and can eventually supervise others.
So it is with everything that requires the exercise of judgement, whether writing code or handling your emotions or finances, or relationships. It takes time to acquire sufficient perspective to exercise good judgement. This is why historically nations had committees of elders who could block laws deemed reckless, and why traditionally young people were not allowed to vote and only gradually were entrusted with privileges that required the exercise of judgement such as signing contracts.
Is it even true? There is a common stereotype of "older individuals", at least in the US, as cranky and irritable. Stereotypes aren't truth, but I think we've all encountered at least some examples of this.
I'm not actually sure that contradicts the article, which takes a somewhat specific view of "control". But I've just spent four years dealing with a very prominent older individual who seemed to have absolutely zero control over his feelings, and also seemed to bring out a very large cohort of similar individuals.
Hormones go down and we get more experienced with all the crap life throws at everybody. Older folks tend to know themselves much better and also what they want in life, what actually matters and what is shallow bullsh*t.
Yeah, I'm surprised that the article seems to just ignore the role of hormones. There's certainly a decline in testosterone as men age [1]:
> Total testosterone levels fall at an average of 1.6% per year whilst free and bioavailable levels fall by 2%–3% per year ... [t]wenty percent of men aged over 60 have total testosterone levels below the normal range and the figure rises to 50% in those aged over 80.
I know there's been a lot of pushback on the idea that testosterone is just a masculine hormone, but the link between testosterone and aggression [2] seems pretty well-accepted. So it seems reasonable that declining testosterone might make you more even-keeled.
I experienced my worst emotionally stressfull events at age of 39 and 55. The latter was harder, and the trauma is not really healed after three years. Everything that you can say shortly about feelings and age is going to be badly oversimplified.
The older you get, the more you've experienced and the less any individual moment represents of your accumulated life.
When you are a child of like 5, a year represents 20% of your entire life. When you don't get that toy. That is literally the worst thing that's happened in your life up to that point. You have absolutely no frame of reference. You don't even have the capability to imagine and compare hypotheticals. You are unaware they even exist.
As you get older, you get more experience, you become capable of hypothetical thinking and comparing events to things you haven't directly experienced. And, any given year is less of your total lifespan.
That's what we call maturity, that ability to reference our own experience. That's why children who have experienced great trauma seem more mature. Because they've been given experiences we don't expect even adults to handle alone. Like kids in cancer wards. They're mostly chill because not getting a lollipop after chemo is kind of insignificant to, you know, having cancer.
It's also a perspective we lose as we get older. We don't remember what it's like to not have that life experience. Not really. I can remember being really disappointed at not getting that really sweet Lego space set when I was 9 or 10, but I can't really feel it again. I look back on that kid as almost someone else. Even though I feel as much myself now as I did then.
What was that bit from The Breakfast Club? "When you grow up, your heart dies."
I believe several factors are in play.
First, instinctual self-regulation of cycles. It seems that babies need to figure out how to sleep on a regular basis, but eventually they "settle down." Similarly, I suspect that the outbursts of childhood self-regulate, without reflection.
I also consider conscious self-reflection. In the American remake of La Femme Nikita, one character adopts another's line, "I never did mind the little things" as a response to provocation. Mine has been "Well, this is hardly the worst thing that has happened to me."
Which leads into the third factor -- the more we experience, the greater breadth of experience we have and so we have greater highs and lower lows against which to compare our current experiences.
Fourth, declining energy levels. We get tired as we grow older. It becomes easier to deprioritize simply because we must spend our limited reserves on other things.
All of this sounds reasonable, but I do wonder, in the pallor of middle age, about the idea that your heart dies. Just a little.
The biggest change I noticed was having a kid. It’s like there’s been a process running in my head since birth called “affects me?” A few months after kiddo, there’s a new process, “affects kid?” The new process seems to have taken a third to a half of the resources the first was using. Much of what bothered me doesn’t affect the kid so I don’t care nearly as much.
Because when you’re young, your feelings control you. So you end up doing and saying things that don’t actually serve your own interests, or those of people around you. Also because when you’re young you don’t yet know that certain displays of, or acting out of, impulsive emotions, isn’t acceptable in our society.
So over time, to stop fucking your own life up, your progressively learn to say less, to hold your tongue, to decide later, to consider things from the perspective of others, to reserve and hold back. To give things time and think before acting or talking. To give people the benefit of the doubt. You earn that things are likely to change so there’s less reason to respond in an extreme manner to right now.
You learn that you’re not as important as you think you were when you were younger.
Natural selection. At a young age, some people know how to control their feelings, others don't. The ones who can't then die from road rage or similar, leaving only the ones with at least a modicum of self control in the older age groups.
How many people do you think die from road rage (or similar) annually? How do you account for all the people who couldn’t handle their emotions when young and now can when older?
Alternatively, your brain is way more 'energetic' when you are younger. You feel things more strongly, can be over whelmed with all the competing signals and are inexperienced.
Maturity does reduce the sensitivity and improve the focus (e.g. pruning of the neocortex). But I also think experience helps too e.g. Knowing your body is feeling anger you are experienced enough to walk away or not send that email.
'Not giving a fuck' is also a strategy to avoid harmful repetition of negative memories.
It's just from feeling more right? When I was 9 the best pizza I'd ever had came from a Walmart food court. Now that I'm closer to 30 I'm had a lot more pizza that was far better and far worse than that pizza. If I were to eat that same pizza again it probably wouldnt taste better than any pizza I've ever had.
My experience is informed by past experience. Just like my emotional reaction is informed by past emotional experiences.
I think you're onto something here in certain ways, but the expanding relative emotional scale idea doesn't explain why the young tend to be the thrill-seekers and the old tend to enjoy more of the "simple pleasures" of life.
If the Wal-Mart pizza were the main factor, it seems to me we'd expect to see the reverse: the young would be more content with the simple, but as they got bored over time, they'd seek greater and greater thrills as they aged.
That said, I do think you're right when it comes to a sense of sadness. A middle-schooler is devastated when another student says his shoes are out of style. Someone in their 50s is generally devastated by more substantive things like the death of a child.
[+] [-] okareaman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steve_adams_86|4 years ago|reply
I've come to the conclusion that my emotions are something to observe a lot before allowing responses, to whatever degree I can accomplish that, because I don't truly understand where they came from or why later on, let alone in the moment. The truth I'm living is a very arbitrary and subjective one at all times.
Like you say, these feelings and reactions are often based on "facts" that aren't really true anyways. Reality is a very thin veil over something I can hardly comprehend the physics or magic of.
If I can manage to develop better temperance and courage to restrain my reactions and questions my thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, I think I'll be pretty content with that. The sense of sleepwalking through life is very apt. I've felt very alive, focused, and attuned to reality at many points in my life while being very much completely out of tune and dead to the rest of the world. I didn't know who I was, what was going on, anything. And I still don't.
Here's to trying to figure it out I guess!
[+] [-] slver|4 years ago|reply
But also less hormones. Young people are hormone-driven action-reaction machines.
[+] [-] aledalgrande|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nefitty|4 years ago|reply
I think because emotions are so nebulous and not like gears or software programs, my visualization tracks well with how emotions work. For example, if I’m feeling especially elated, it’s like my body is filling with a deep gold that overwhelms any other emotion.
[+] [-] bm3719|4 years ago|reply
After thinking about it, I realized that despite identifying as a logical-thinking individual, I was nevertheless at the mercy of the more primitive parts of my brain. Sometimes totally, but pretty much all executive functions were influenced by it to a large degree. That might be fine, but my limbic system tended to make poor decisions; ones that my more conscious brain would have to pay the price for later. It's also no match for the brains of people not in emotional mode, and would be taken advantage of by things like appeals to emotion in advertising, politics, and rhetoric. I decided my internal caveman was not my friend, and took steps to sideline his vote in decision-making.
[+] [-] ggambetta|4 years ago|reply
When we're young, we (instinctively, subconsciously) feel like our fucks reserves are plentiful, so we give a fuck about a lot of stuff.
As we get older, our reservoir of fucks gets progressively depleted. The fucks are rarer, so we give a fuck less and less often. I've recently turned 40 and I can definitely feel this in myself; just like recovery from workouts takes a little longer than when I was 20, I don't give a fuck about things so easily.
By the time you're officially old, you're almost out of fucks, so it's not like you don't give a fuck because you don't want to, but because it's more difficult physically (harvesting of the last fucks takes more energy, because biology).
Brb, submitting to Nature.
[+] [-] 7thaccount|4 years ago|reply
As you get older, you start to see that everything is the same and goes through cycles. The important stuff of my childhood (ex: having clothes that were sewhar fashionable), becomes irrelevant. Who cares if I'm wearing the same style of sandals for over 20 years now? You start to focus on what's more important to you. F** are reserved for important matters like arguing on HN about the superiority of Linux :).
When you see a child have a meltdown over not having their favorite bath towel available, you start to see how widening your scope means less care for minor problems. I have no time to worry about those things as I have bigger problems (working on marriage, work due dates, educating my kid...etc). It makes one wonder how chill an immortal being would be after milennia.
[+] [-] hnlmorg|4 years ago|reply
When you're younger smaller problems seem larger because you've not been desensitised to larger problems. As you progress through life you generally experience greater stress and thus the smaller problems feel smaller. You could look at it like desensitisation to capsicum, salt, violence or pornography.
[+] [-] monkeybutton|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 8ytecoder|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seriousquestion|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SMAAART|4 years ago|reply
1. I have got my crippling Generalized Anxiety Disorder under control
2. I have realized that I used to give way too many fucks about shit that didn't matter at all, and it was not worth it and actually detrimental
Mind you, those 2 are highly correlated and of interdependent causation.
What got me here:
Therapy didn't help.
Manson's book "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck" helped quite a bit, but was not "the thing".
Articles on "Don't be a victim...." "Don't play the victim...." and similar helped.
What helped immensely is to start blogging daily, and more often than daily, about the events in my life, my thinking, my reactions starting from the points of view that:
A) I am accountable for what happens to me
B) I am 100% wrong when something unpleasant happens to me
And that, in the course of a few month, changed my life in tangible manners.
While I am not a snowflake, I am a special case: I started low, very low; and - IMHO - I have come a long way in the Depression/Anxiety/Being_a_loser scale.
I do believe that to some degree something similar happens to most everyone who doesn't start for the same ultra-low point as me, with time we learn that when young we were wrong to give too many fucks about too many things.
But guess what? Giving way too many fucks about too many things is good for:
Business: Facebook, iPhone & Co
Politicians: from left to right
Religions: all of them (except for The Dude)
And that's why the messagings that we are bombarded with aim at reinforcing giving too many fucks about too many things (aka Anxiety) and the messagings aimed at kids/teenagers aim to create and instill Anxiety.
Mic drop.
[+] [-] tartoran|4 years ago|reply
But generally I agree with the idea that that wisdom collects with time and experiences lived and so emotional expense is better controlled along with aging.
From my experince, at a smillar age (41), I reserve my fucks for more important events so your take on fucks fits me quite well, I generally give a lot less of them.
[+] [-] helsinkiandrew|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elorant|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chadcmulligan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|4 years ago|reply
https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=Vqbk9cDX0l0
[+] [-] SpinsInCircles|4 years ago|reply
As an aside I feel this is a wonderful anthem for life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vqbk9cDX0l0
[+] [-] op03|4 years ago|reply
It can go the other way.
[+] [-] namelosw|4 years ago|reply
But I wonder, it seems to me doomers lost their fuck faster. Is it because they have fewer initial fucks? Or is it because they lose fuck overtime even if they don't a fuck about something? Or every time everybody else gives a fuck a doomer gives two?
[+] [-] decebalus1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] miguelmota|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Leary|4 years ago|reply
But emotions don't feel as raw/immediate as they used to feel when I was younger.
[+] [-] irrational|4 years ago|reply
Plus, I've been around long enough to realize that what seems really important and earth shattering right now will probably not even make it into the footnotes of history. Very little is worth getting worked up over.
Plus, I have so many more responsibilities taking my attention combined with not having the energy of youth that I simply don't have the ability to care about anything above the very most important things.
[+] [-] jerf|4 years ago|reply
I propose something that neither the article nor anyone else is in the comments so far, which is that we age, our bodies simply get less physical about the emotions. It makes it easier to be more level if your body is literally being more level, and the aforementioned feedback loop is literally weaker. Everything else gets weaker in old age, why not the physiological strength of emotions, too?
[+] [-] quesera|4 years ago|reply
The first time <insert good thing> happens to you, you might be overwhelmed with excitement and joy. The 85th time, not so much. Hopefully you still appreciate it, but for the same dramatic response, the reward center needs more. Anything that happens to you 85 times isn't special enough to be life-changing, by definition.
The first time <insert bad thing> happens to you, you might be crushed. By the 5th time it happens to you, or you've seen it happen to others, you are just kind of immune. You know bad things happen, and you either decide to move forward or you do not.
Interestingly though: seeing someone else experience the now-banal-to-you positive thing can be it's own reward. Watching a child's first taste of ice cream is somehow magical. Or a puppy's first experience of snow.
And we try to have patience for the corresponding first-negative experiences too. A child who does not get exactly what they wanted for dinner, or who must go home from the park earlier than he or she might like...
(Examples above intentionally light-weight. There are real bad things that happen to people, but the level of emotional energy elicited by the trivialities can be enormous!)
[+] [-] niknoble|4 years ago|reply
I'm pretty sure the difference between old people and young people is mostly just energy. Old people can't feel intense emotions for the same reason they can't run a marathon. They just get fatigued too easily.
[+] [-] gorbachev|4 years ago|reply
On most things I either know nothing I will do or say will make a positive impact, or I know the issue will take care of itself or someone else is taking care of it, just not right at this very moment. So why bother. I have better things to do with my life. Like lie down on my couch and binge watch Golden Girls.
I make an exception on things endangering the well being of my wife and kids.
Older and wiser? Or older and lazier?
[+] [-] FredPret|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] terminalserver|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] munificent|4 years ago|reply
1. The more experiences you have, the less likely any new experience is to be an extreme outlier. A toddler has the best and worst day of their life once a month or so. A twenty-something every couple of years. By your sixties, there's a good chance that most of the extreme emotional outliers are all in your past.
So when you're going through something that would overwhelm a younger person, it's likely you can correctly say, "Eh, I've been through worse." And that realization, and the memory of what it was like after it is itself an emotional buffer. It's hard to feel like your world is falling apart when you clearly remember yourself putting it back together once before.
2. The stakes for your decisions are lower. When you're a teen, it feels like every decision can radically alter the course of your life. Maybe that after school sport becomes your scholarship ticket to an expensive college. Your major determines your career. Deciding whether to go to that party could mean meeting the love of your life of not. The butterfly effect iterated future ahead of scales the magnitude of every single thing you do. But when you're older, there is simply less time for that scaling to occur. No decision a seventy-year-old makes will change the course of their life radically for the next sixty years because, well, they don't have sixty years. Most bets are thus relatively safer.
3. Your existence is more secure. By the time you reach middle age, you likely (though not definitely) have accumulated skills, experience, a social network, job contacts, a career, and wealth. You live in a pretty well-feathered nest, able to withstand most bouts of bad weather.
[+] [-] rsj_hn|4 years ago|reply
You can try to gain perspective by doing things like reading realistic novels or realism-based historical studies (as opposed to the morality tales so in vogue today). I think this type of vicarious emotional absorption is the best that young people can do if they are actively trying to improve their perspective. But then you are at the mercy of how accurately the author or historian is portraying life -- older people can detect "false notes" more easily, and I see many false notes when I watch media or listen to music, some so egregiously false as to classify those works as deception. Then you can get into a situation where your emotional depth is getting worse with time because you are learning things vicariously that aren't accurately describing how life works.
But most people will eventually come to have enough authentic emotional experiences as to be able to gain some depth, e.g. perspective, even if they have consumed a lot of false vicarious experiences. In fact, those authentic experience might be incredibly jarring. I've heard that Ruskin had lots of sexual issues in his life because he was trained to work with sculptures of naked women with no pubic hair or realistic features, and was shocked when he saw an actual (non-idealized) nude woman. He may never have managed to purge himself of the false notes he absorbed as a young art student.
When a brand new CS student who has never written a program, or has only written a handful of exercises, are thrown into a large codebase, you expect them to make poor decisions. That's why their work is supervised. Not because they lack intelligence, but because they lack perspective. They are not thinking of how X will be maintained over time, or the consequences of creating some dependencies, etc. Over time, they acquire that perspective and make better decisions, at which point they need less supervision and can eventually supervise others.
So it is with everything that requires the exercise of judgement, whether writing code or handling your emotions or finances, or relationships. It takes time to acquire sufficient perspective to exercise good judgement. This is why historically nations had committees of elders who could block laws deemed reckless, and why traditionally young people were not allowed to vote and only gradually were entrusted with privileges that required the exercise of judgement such as signing contracts.
[+] [-] jfengel|4 years ago|reply
I'm not actually sure that contradicts the article, which takes a somewhat specific view of "control". But I've just spent four years dealing with a very prominent older individual who seemed to have absolutely zero control over his feelings, and also seemed to bring out a very large cohort of similar individuals.
[+] [-] saiya-jin|4 years ago|reply
Enough reasons to be chill just about everything
[+] [-] mycologos|4 years ago|reply
> Total testosterone levels fall at an average of 1.6% per year whilst free and bioavailable levels fall by 2%–3% per year ... [t]wenty percent of men aged over 60 have total testosterone levels below the normal range and the figure rises to 50% in those aged over 80.
I know there's been a lot of pushback on the idea that testosterone is just a masculine hormone, but the link between testosterone and aggression [2] seems pretty well-accepted. So it seems reasonable that declining testosterone might make you more even-keeled.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2544367/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone#Aggression_and_cr...
[+] [-] citizenpaul|4 years ago|reply
1.Experience : Every situation is new when you are young therefore much more stressful/emotional.
2.Hormones : obvious but an 80yo is not getting the same surge of adrenaline for things as a 20yo.
3.Control : Old people general have money, options, connections, safety nets. Much easier to stay unemotional when something cant affect you.
There didn't need a PHD for that....
[+] [-] gatestone|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bena|4 years ago|reply
When you are a child of like 5, a year represents 20% of your entire life. When you don't get that toy. That is literally the worst thing that's happened in your life up to that point. You have absolutely no frame of reference. You don't even have the capability to imagine and compare hypotheticals. You are unaware they even exist.
As you get older, you get more experience, you become capable of hypothetical thinking and comparing events to things you haven't directly experienced. And, any given year is less of your total lifespan.
That's what we call maturity, that ability to reference our own experience. That's why children who have experienced great trauma seem more mature. Because they've been given experiences we don't expect even adults to handle alone. Like kids in cancer wards. They're mostly chill because not getting a lollipop after chemo is kind of insignificant to, you know, having cancer.
It's also a perspective we lose as we get older. We don't remember what it's like to not have that life experience. Not really. I can remember being really disappointed at not getting that really sweet Lego space set when I was 9 or 10, but I can't really feel it again. I look back on that kid as almost someone else. Even though I feel as much myself now as I did then.
[+] [-] kcmastrpc|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] at_a_remove|4 years ago|reply
I believe several factors are in play.
First, instinctual self-regulation of cycles. It seems that babies need to figure out how to sleep on a regular basis, but eventually they "settle down." Similarly, I suspect that the outbursts of childhood self-regulate, without reflection.
I also consider conscious self-reflection. In the American remake of La Femme Nikita, one character adopts another's line, "I never did mind the little things" as a response to provocation. Mine has been "Well, this is hardly the worst thing that has happened to me."
Which leads into the third factor -- the more we experience, the greater breadth of experience we have and so we have greater highs and lower lows against which to compare our current experiences.
Fourth, declining energy levels. We get tired as we grow older. It becomes easier to deprioritize simply because we must spend our limited reserves on other things.
All of this sounds reasonable, but I do wonder, in the pallor of middle age, about the idea that your heart dies. Just a little.
[+] [-] 0xEFF|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] terminalserver|4 years ago|reply
So over time, to stop fucking your own life up, your progressively learn to say less, to hold your tongue, to decide later, to consider things from the perspective of others, to reserve and hold back. To give things time and think before acting or talking. To give people the benefit of the doubt. You earn that things are likely to change so there’s less reason to respond in an extreme manner to right now.
You learn that you’re not as important as you think you were when you were younger.
[+] [-] amarant|4 years ago|reply
Basically, it's survivor bias, but literally.
[+] [-] exegete|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kye|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SunlightEdge|4 years ago|reply
Maturity does reduce the sensitivity and improve the focus (e.g. pruning of the neocortex). But I also think experience helps too e.g. Knowing your body is feeling anger you are experienced enough to walk away or not send that email. 'Not giving a fuck' is also a strategy to avoid harmful repetition of negative memories.
[+] [-] AlwaysRock|4 years ago|reply
My experience is informed by past experience. Just like my emotional reaction is informed by past emotional experiences.
[+] [-] ARandomerDude|4 years ago|reply
If the Wal-Mart pizza were the main factor, it seems to me we'd expect to see the reverse: the young would be more content with the simple, but as they got bored over time, they'd seek greater and greater thrills as they aged.
That said, I do think you're right when it comes to a sense of sadness. A middle-schooler is devastated when another student says his shoes are out of style. Someone in their 50s is generally devastated by more substantive things like the death of a child.