Ask HN: I'm 40 and feel my mental ability declining. Programming seems harder.

I think what we have to deal with is not just cognitive decline, but more importantly cognitive overload. People in their 40s usually juggle lots of responsibilities, especially if they have a family. At this age you normally also have earned some money, and if you start buying things like a summer house or an apartment for renting out, those things come with maintenance tasks. This can accumulate quickly.

Whatever the reasons are, my approach was to get used to it and work differently. I am terrible at doing multiple things at a time and my short-term memory is bad, so I learned to concentrate on one task at a time and eliminate distractions. I buy large monitors, so that I can have multiple things on the screen at the same time and avoid having to remember (I can easily forget an IP address when switching windows!). I spend money on Apple hardware, because of 5K displays: 5K makes a huge difference, because I can comfortably have THREE columns of code in my fullscreen Emacs instead of two. That means I often have 5 different pieces of code visible, which does wonders for things like APIs, which you mentioned — I can follow the entire path of a call and keep it all on screen.

I also noticed that there are positives that come with age and experience! I find that I'm much better at seeing the "big picture", analytical thinking, design, and predicting potential problems. Most importantly, I'm now much better at knowing what not to do. These skills are invaluable when running your own business.

https://www.sciencealert.com/kids-incredible-learning-may-al...

My theory is simple - kids simply have more time to learn and less other bullshit to deal with. Some years they have practically nothing else but learning, exploring, sleeping, eating and pooping. And not to mention that many of the humans around them actively bring all concepts down to their level (and some use babytalk) to explain them. So yea… an adult doesn’t have any of these advantages.

I went for many years without an exercise habit. About 5 months ago I started lifting weights. The transformation has defied all my expectations and the biggest unexpected benefit is that my mind has become sharper, faster and more focused. I essentially feel like I've reversed a decade's worth of brain and body aging by going into the gym and lugging some iron around a couple times a week.

Around the same time I started cutting back on alcohol intake and cleaned up my diet a bit. So it could be any of these factors but I think it's a combination of all of them, as you get older, you need to maintain your body or it'll deteriorate and take your mind with it.

I also had that difficulty when I was a younger developer. The difference now is that the novelty of learning how to program at a professional level, learning a new language, and learning a new framework, isn't there.

Instead, the novelty comes from convincing others not to make the mistakes I would have made 20 years ago; and not making those same mistakes myself.

I was in your shoes, things I'd find frustrating are:

- The original version was working fine; a rewrite just isn't justified.

- Some team members are writing poor quality code, and I just can't convince them to do it right.

- The original version has style / habits that make it fragile or hard to understand.

- The original version has behavior that's generally not understood.