Learning Chess at 40 (2016)

Chess is an utterly unforgiving game: I have played many more hours of things like Magic: the Gathering in my life, the creator of which quite rightly understood that adding variance to a game means lower skilled players actually have a chance (and some actual fun) against higher skilled ones. Navigating a child's demands that you "play your hardest" against them can be quite difficult. The thing I hate most about chess is that you can play well, perhaps for _weeks_ in a correspondence game, and then one mistake undoes it all, with no hope of coming back (but then again, never resign).

The lessons you need to learn are all very valuable: the pure skill of calculation is extremely difficult but if you can teach yourself to concentrate, visualise positions and juggle the variations, I think these are actually brain powers you can take into other aspects of your life.

The rote learning aspects aren't that fun, but again, being able to memorise literally hundreds of branching openings not only buys you free wins, but teaches you a lot of patience and general schemes for memorization (or so I imagine, I am terrible at this, especially on shorter time controls).

Learning to lose is very difficult, but the one kindness chess does is that there is (at lower levels of play) almost always a reason your lose.

The interplay of tactics and strategy is very satisfying, knowing when to use your instinct or general heuristics, instead of when to brute force calculate a move, is again the type of skill you find yourself more aware of in other pursuits.

The best thing about learning chess in 2019 though is there is so much great content. Thousands of hours of stuff from the St Louis and Atlanta Chess Clubs, coverage of every major tournament on Chess24 and myriad Twitch channels, and games of every possible skill level, variation and time control at your fingertips. ChessKid is also an excellent app + educational environment for kids.

I have found it interesting to write software to play chess for me. The last few times I tried to play chess, my mind would just drift off designing a program to do it so I wouldn't have to bother.

I don't play video games, either. It takes about 3 minutes for one to bore me to tears. Part of that is I had a job in college testing video games - that sure ruined it for me.

The universe is full of puzzles that mean something to solve. Why not work on those instead? Why would those be less interesting than a contrived set of rules?

Flying as a Challenge

If you go to the local general aviation airport, you'll find lots of guys in their 60s and 70s who are tackling challenges that are way beyond your own capabilities. Certainly these guys are much sharper and in better mental and physical shape than the average person of their age. Flying requires mental acuity and real-time decision-making that seems to keep pilots young. A lot of older folks seem to be preoccupied with trivial matters, such as organizing their junk mail or minutia within their childrens' lives. Old pilots don't seem to be subject to these preoccupations and the topics of their conversations have more in common with young pilots than with other old people.

The very process of training to be a pilot is challenging and inherently motivational. The FAA sets up milestones and checkpoints: Private Pilot, Instrument Rating, Commercial Pilot, Multi-Engine Rating, Helicopter Rating, Seaplane Rating, Airline Transport Pilot. A desire to excel was probably a factor in your ability to retire young. If you have that desire, the FAA rating system gives you a lot of opportunities to improve and prove yourself.

One of the tragedies of getting older is the narrowing of one's activities. An elementary school kid will write poetry, paint, play music, do math, write prose, etc. An adult will do three or four things that he or she can do at a professional level of competence. These are the things for which an adult draws a paycheck or these are the things that the adult finds rewarding because they can be done so well.

Learning to fly is an opportunity to go back to elementary school. No human is a natural aviator. Everything has to be learned, which by itself is stimulating.