Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Work peak and professional decline (2019)

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 164 posts

Re: Work peak and professional decline (2019)

#111

Post by warble »

lettergram wrote: post #5

One of the most productive engineers I knew (who I’m guessing will read this) was in his 60s when I met him. He’s since “retired” and helped a company obtain a $1B valuation. Similarly, my 85 year old grandfather still doesn’t own a wheelbarrow and will move stone, dirt, etc every summer. His motto is “keep moving”, I don’t think there’s really anything else to it. Yes you will slow down, but stay engaged and motivat…

"keep moving" or something similar is the best advice.. growing to my 50s myself, and watching parents and grandparents, this is by far the biggest variable you can control.

Keep learning, keep moving your body. When you're 15 this is easy, you don't really have a choice. When you're 40+ it starts to become more of a deliberate act.

Re: Work peak and professional decline (2019)

#112

Post by stickfigure »

d3ad1ysp0rk wrote: post #62
iancmceachern wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when compared to air travel and hotel stays (which come with large water and heat costs associated with daily laundry) it's actually less of a carbon footprint.

The average room takes 2 loads of laundry, which would be in the neighborhood of 10kw of electricity. 1 gallon of gas represents the same energy (ignoring losses) as 33kw. The average 2017 car in the US got 25mpg. So with a 15+mpg difference, you'd need to either drive 5 miles or less per day (0.3g difference), OR average 100 miles per day and have the hotels wash the laundry 20x as much.

There are a lot more costs (both paid and environmental) associated with hotels than just laundry? Staff, lighting, heating. Plus eating out, taxis, and air travel.

Also, retirees roaming around the country in an RV generally sit in one place for a week or two at a time.

Re: Work peak and professional decline (2019)

#113

Post by Johnny555 »

farnsworth wrote: post #53
iancmceachern wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And when compared to air travel and hotel stays (which come with large water and heat costs associated with daily laundry) it's actually less of a carbon footprint.

People don't stay in hotels getting daily laundry for months at a time

They do if they are on the kind of cross country tour that they'd otherwise make in an RV.

Otherwise the argument becomes "Staying at home is better for the environment than traveling", which is true, not not really a fair comparison.

Re: Work peak and professional decline (2019)

#114

Post by jgraettinger1 »

sinenomine wrote: post #88
readme wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

young people think they're invincible i'm only in my 30s and already started my retirement hobby (wordworking) i'll take this career as far as I can but you never know when the day will come that you've had enough and can't bare to go to work anymore -- it gets harder to just leave a job for another one if you don't like it when you're in your late 50s.

I'm in my late 20's and I notice my mental energy/sharpness being slightly lower compared to what they were at my peak age of 22. I learned to compensate for this with some behavioral and biochemical kludges, but the reality of the trend is pretty obvious at this point. Ten years ago I picked up biology and recently added to it ageing research as a hobby, we'll see if it pays off eventually. In mice ... many things o…

In my twenties, I had an amazing ability to run at a problem. Long periods of great focus. The only trouble was how frequently I was running in the wrong direction.

The gift of aging for me (late 30's) has been the appreciation that an inability to get into flow is usually because I've got buried reservations on a design/approach, and that I need to spend some time trying to surface them.

Re: Work peak and professional decline (2019)

#115

Post by peterbell_nyc »

sinenomine wrote: post #77

This is an article written by a journalist. If we want to get to the bottom of things, we can open Google Scholar and search for related peer-reviewed publications, finding [1][2] in the process. What do we see in [1] and [2]? A very prominent downward trend ( https://i.imgur.com/avKUvTd.png ) on all but a single cognitive test, which is verbal knowledge. All the important cognitive abilities related to thinking and…

I'm 51 ands my personal experience to date has been that I am way more effective in business now that I have ever previously been. I certainly put in less hours (now only ~40-45/wk as I have a 4.5 year old and various other commitments), but now I have made so many mistakes over the years that I generally focus on what really matters and am finding my impact is substantially greater than it was even though my effort is much lower.

Re: Work peak and professional decline (2019)

#116

Post by UncleOxidant »

el_dev_hell wrote: post #58
fxtentacle wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that and weird examples. Around 1860, so roughly 160 years ago, Darwin felt old in his 50-ies. But that kind of omits the fact that in our modern day and age, the elderly have a lot more technical help available. For Darwin, it was a decision of leaving his family behind to go on a months-long trip. Nowadays, it'd be a 6 hour flight and you can call your friends while you're on vacation. So the risk/reward trad…

I really enjoyed the article overall. The section on Darwin was an eyebrow raiser. It makes sense to include someone like Darwin (very interesting and well known), but he's not a great example to compare to "normal" people (like the couple mentioned in the opening paragraph). A 50 year old in the 1800s whose job was catching a ship to the other side of the planet is a little different when compared to a factory worke…

> > Unfortunately, Mendel’s work was published in an obscure academic journal and Darwin never saw it

This part is true. Not sure about Darwin's mathematical knowledge.

Re: Work peak and professional decline (2019)

#117

Post by jasondigitized »

chrisweekly wrote: post #81
caeril wrote: post #10

Related: The notion of "retirement" is a relatively recent invention. Traditionally, when you were too old to work the farm or prove the theorem (sorry, cognitive decline is a well-documented thing, and tends to coincide with physical decline[1]), you would "retire" to a productive life in less-demanding pursuits: caretaking of the grandkids, woodworking, food preservation, writing, etc. It's important to maintain ho…

Retirement seems like a pretty unimaginative goal. See the Japanese concept of "Ikigai" (ie, raison d-etre or reason to get out of bed in the morning). I don't plan to retire, though I may shift the balance towards my non-economically-oriented interests after putting my children through college.

I think of retirement along the same lines. I plan to remain productive, some of which may be economically oriented, but I simply won't be worrying about the outcome or having someone with power over me telling me how and when I am allowed to do it.

Re: Work peak and professional decline (2019)

#118

Post by bkjelden »

rootusrootus wrote: post #36
etrautmann wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I share your antipathy for low-efficiency vehicles, why is traveling around the national parks of the west a sad way to spend your retirement years?

> low-efficiency vehicles Tangent: Are these actually low efficiency? Sure, 10 mpg (this is a more typical average, BTW, not 8 mpg) is terrible gas mileage ... for an average car. But a portable house that can drive down the interstate isn't just a car. Per pound, it doesn't seem that bad.

Yea, they are. If for example, you look at the Ford chassis that is the basis for a majority of Class C RVs, the engine tech is a good decade or two behind what Ford is putting in their new trucks and larger SUVs.

Unfortunately the RV industry is one where products are built to be sold, not to be used, and what's under the hood is not a selling point compared to how fancy the interior is.

When reading a review of Ford's new hybrid F-150 a couple months ago, one of the comments at the bottom of the article really stood out to me - "Ford needs to get this in their RV platform ASAP". I tend to agree that that's actually a super clever idea - most RVs already have a standalone generator separate from the drivetrain, and rolling that into a hybrid system makes a lot of sense.

Re: Work peak and professional decline (2019)

#119

Post by Johnny555 »

tomc1985 wrote: post #65
etrautmann wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I share your antipathy for low-efficiency vehicles, why is traveling around the national parks of the west a sad way to spend your retirement years?

Personally, RVs kind of miss the point of tooling around nature if one can wimp out and retreat to a house-on-wheels

Why do you assume that "tooling around nature" is the only point of traveling (whether by RV or otherwise)?

I like being out in nature, but I also like having a comfortable bed and a kitchen (with refrigerator) where I can prepare full meals. The cooking part is why I like having an RV - while it's possible to find a hotel with a kitchenette, it's still a pretty limited kitchen (often without an oven) and you have to find a way to schlep your food around from hotel to hotel if you're on an extended trip.

Plus, it's nice to have your own bathroom, especially during a Pandemic.

Post reply on HN