Old Age and Creativity

When you're 20-30 something and a nobody in your field, but a privileged mind, you keep your eyes open to all posibilities. You are hardworking and then results come.

Then you gain a name and have all eyes on you and your mental processes change. Suddenly with your opinions, you've got a reputation to defend. You're aware of those supporting you and those who are not. You're reasoning gets blurred by your ego and personality. Once you publicly speak an opinion on a topic for enough time, you cannot simply go back without looking like a moron.

There are several instances of the most brilliant minds following this pattern. Geniuses giving their backs to the scientific method, to all evidence, and looking like amateurs.

Comes to mind Einstein, spending his last years trying to debunk quantum physics against all evidence, Linus Pauling and his C-Vitamin craze or Nikola Tesla and his every time crazier projects with no practical viability. I guess there might be more.

Correlation is not causation. Renowned scientists and writers have plenty of reasons to do less groundbreaking work that have nothing to do with age

http://www.paulgraham.com/marginal.html

There's a tendency for exceptions to drive the narrative, which leads to a sense of mathematicians peaking earlier than they actually do. Mathematicans do indeed peak "young", relative to other fields, but most often in their early to mid 40s. Of course, at that point they're ineligible for the Fields Medal, but that doesn't mean they're no longer productive.

Writers peak around 55, but the drop-off can be steep, not because they lose the ability to write, but because revision and publishing can themselves be brutal processes. Revision is brutal because of perfectionism combined with the inability to hold a whole book's worth of context in your head. You can't look at the whole thing in one sitting, as with a painting. You have to edit at specific levels (themes and story arcs; then subplots and characters; then scene structure and transitions; then paragraphing and flow; then line edits; then copy edits; then grammar) but they sometimes compete for your attention. Writing work that's good enough to publish and sell is easy; writing work of literary quality is much harder. Publishing... well that changes every generation. These days, self-publishing is the right play for 99% of authors, but that brings its own challenges.

With age, the thing that gets hard the quickest is long-form context switching. Very few people can (or want to, or should) dedicate their lives wholesale to one pursuit. Once you start to get recognition and are invited to the parties, it gets harder to focus on writing. You spend a lot of time around non-serious players, and you become one. Lots of people turn stupid once they get popular and spend too much time with the fun people to have real thoughts anymore, and that's certainly not limited to the old. The difference is that the young can retool themselves more quickly. A 27-year-old can bounce back; he can be on cocaine-fueled benders in January, courting the nonserious players necessary to get the "tastemakers" to support one's career, and be back in his writing room by March or April. When you're older, this gets a lot harder. Older people are great when they establish momentum (leading me to question the "old people are less creative" hypothesis) but do not bounce back as well from periods of distraction or excessive comfort.

I suspect the ego/arrogance thing works both ways. When you're younger you're often more willing to show the finger to existing paradigms and are perhaps arrogant enough to think you can "revolutionize physics." Naturally, most people can't do that but some make history.

(Also, I'm talking out of my ass and should probably add some history of science to my reading stack).

I think it's true that many writers hate writing, and that's not the same with performers. I said as much here, about a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27114757

Curious to see if the lecture offers some kind of explanation.