> and by the time you’re 50 or 60 or 70 you do know what you want.
I'm on the plus side of 50 and, from personal experience as well as observing my contemporaries, this is relatively rarely true.
Its quite possible to waste^Wuse years chasing stuff that you only thought you wanted. Its also quite possible to spend years being busy with work or child raising or whatever - and then you find yourself washed ashore on the metaphorical beach of your later life and you have to figure out how to make a shelter and survive there. And this still may not beat any insight into your head.
That old cliche: an old person is just a young person looking at them self and going "huh? what the...?"
> I also suspect that the declining intelligence measurements of old people are mostly attributable to slower-lookup and “shallow” reactions rather than any actual decline in quality of decision-making.
My limited experience and insight from introspection is that you lose raw cognitive power but gain experience. I feel like the latter is more useful for the challenges of middle and later life, but you have to be increasingly mindful of confirmation bias. The challenge is distilling your experiences into wisdom, somehow.
Life is so rich, as Scott Galloway says, but I know next to nothing
Obviously theres a context to this article in Biden's recent debate performance. As a non-USian observing it all, I understand the concern. But I wish people would remember that a national leader is just the head of of a decision-making team. They don't decide everything themselves, they lead the team and set the direction. And they almost never ever have to make decisions alone at the tempo of an adversarial debate. Its possible to imagine scenarios where Biden would have 30 seconds to make a nationally existential decision, but such things only happen in films, not real life.
Wisdom not raw power.
But his opponent is an extremely dangerous individual, so I get the concern.
I'm on the plus side of 50 and, from personal experience as well as observing my contemporaries, this is relatively rarely true.
Its quite possible to waste^Wuse years chasing stuff that you only thought you wanted. Its also quite possible to spend years being busy with work or child raising or whatever - and then you find yourself washed ashore on the metaphorical beach of your later life and you have to figure out how to make a shelter and survive there. And this still may not beat any insight into your head.
That old cliche: an old person is just a young person looking at them self and going "huh? what the...?"
> I also suspect that the declining intelligence measurements of old people are mostly attributable to slower-lookup and “shallow” reactions rather than any actual decline in quality of decision-making.
My limited experience and insight from introspection is that you lose raw cognitive power but gain experience. I feel like the latter is more useful for the challenges of middle and later life, but you have to be increasingly mindful of confirmation bias. The challenge is distilling your experiences into wisdom, somehow.
Life is so rich, as Scott Galloway says, but I know next to nothing