Feeling old? In its annual “unwrapped” feature tracking user activity, Spotify has given me a listening age of 92. So I’m feeling ancient. (A spate of streaming the 1930s vocal quartet The Ink Spots may have something to do with it.)
Adding to a sense of fogeyishness is a new study identifying four pivotal “turning points” in human brain development. These come at about the ages of nine, 32, 66 and 83. I’m well past the second turning point in an adult category that “aligns with a plateau in intelligence and personality”, according to Cambridge University researchers.
A plateau in intelligence. Sounds about right. My success rate on Wordle is getting no better.
From 66, the early ageing phase kicks in, with a decline in brain connectivity and increased reliance on certain regions for brain function. This accelerates in the late ageing phase from 83.
These turning points are not necessarily bad. You may be less likely to revolutionise a field of scientific inquiry during the latter phases. But you could develop a sort of wisdom that escaped you in your youth.
So much for science. What does philosophy have to say about ageing? How do you deal with the existential dread that your best years are behind you?
Philosophers since Ancient Greece have grappled with this issue. They point out that human life is change. Like the Ship of Theseus, you both exist and don’t exist because the person that started out as “you” is not you now. Why grieve for the “you” that is fading in the rear mirror as a new iteration of you takes the wheel?
Epicurus tells us that fear of death is irrational. Death “is nothing to us”, he argues, because “when we are, death is not come – and when death is come, we are not”. Why fear something that only turns up when you’re gone?
Smart as these arguments are, they don’t provide much comfort. The American novelist Joyce Carol Oates (87) once told the Financial Times: “I don’t think intellectual knowledge makes any difference. I mean, we study logic, and that all men are mortal. Socrates is a man, Socrates is mortal. It doesn’t really prepare you for losing your parents.”
A good point, which is why the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell is always worth listening to. Although he was one of the great logicians of the 20th century, he was acutely aware of the limitations of reason. When offering philosophical insight on human affairs, he always included a qualifier along the lines of: this is my considered opinion, not provable fact.
This approach extended to conclusions he reached on How to Grow Old in an essay of that title and related writings. Four pieces of advice emerge from Russell’s deliberations:
1. Stay curious
The best way to overcome fear of death, Russell says, “is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life”. By “impersonal”, he means things beyond your own identity, or self-interest. For example, art, literature, politics or education.
He gives the example of his maternal grandmother. “After the age of 80 she found she had some difficulty getting to sleep, so she habitually spent the hours from midnight to 3am in reading popular science. I do not believe that she ever had time to notice that she was growing old.”
[ The value of age: ‘l am still me with wisdom gained. My goal is to stay curious’Opens in new window ]
2. Stop fussing over your children
If you have a child, or grandchild, don’t make them central to your life. “When your children are grown up they want to live their own lives,” Russell writes. “I do not mean that one should be without interest in them, but one’s interest should be contemplative and, if possible, philanthropic, but not unduly emotional.”
3. Be playful
As a scientist, Russell kept reminding us that we are animals, with animal instincts. He counsels against a life of “constant restraint of impulse for the sake of some one supreme aim” – be it moral purity or material success. “Living by a theory is dusty and desiccating,” he writes. Take “opportunities for play”. Writer George Bernard Shaw had a similar philosophy. “We don’t stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing,” he said.
4. Dare to hope
Looking back on his life, Russell describes a trail of failure. As an academic, he failed the solve all the mathematical problems he had set himself. As an anti-war activist, he failed to stop two world wars from taking place. “But beneath all this load of failure I am still conscious of something that I feel to be victory ... I may have thought the road to a world of free and happy human beings shorter than it is proving to be, but I was not wrong in thinking that such a world is possible, and that it is worthwhile to live with a view to bringing it nearer.”
Russell was politically engaged to the end, spending his last years campaigning against American and Soviet war crimes and for conflict resolution in the Middle East and elsewhere. In his last known statement, written just two days before his death on February 2nd 1970, Russell condemned Israel’s use o force to expand its territories. The statement was read at a conference in Cairo the day after Russell’s death at 97.
