Article 2: Never Too Old To Change

Your mind is very good at telling you what you cannot do. This becomes particularly convincing as we get older.

If you have reached fifty, sixty, seventy, or eighty years of age using a particular collection of habits, routines, relationships, beliefs, and behaviors, then there is an obvious argument for continuing to use them: They have kept you alive this long, therefore they must be good.

Within the Biological Robot framework, familiarity carries a certain kind of safety. Whatever else can be said about the life you are living, your system has evidence that you can survive it because you already have.

Change does not come with that evidence. Change is uncertain. Perhaps it will be better. Perhaps it will be worse. Perhaps you will fail. The older we become, the easier it can be to convince ourselves that the time for change has passed. I don't believe that. I watched someone very close to me demonstrate exactly why. 

My father-in-law was seventy-eight years old and miserable. His days consisted largely of watching television, napping, watching TikTok on his phone, and thinking about how much of his life had already passed him by. He did not have much to look forward to. 

One day, with considerable effort, I convinced him to take a pottery class with me. He had no interest in pottery; none. He had never dreamed of becoming a potter. He had no secret artistic calling that had been suppressed for seventy-eight years. As far as he was concerned, making a mug was simply another pointless activity taking time away from the very important business of sitting in front of the television and being bored until his next nap. 

Somehow I got him there. He made a mug. Then he went back to glaze it. By the time his first mug was ready to be fired, something had happened that neither of us expected. He had fallen in love with pottery. 

He recently turned eighty and everyone in his life has one of his mugs. He goes to the clay center three days a week, sometimes four, and he has become quite good at it. More importantly, he has something to look forward to.

Once he began looking forward to pottery, he began looking forward to other things. Gardening became interesting. Bird watching became interesting. Life became interesting.

One change, one willingness to try something he was absolutely certain he would not enjoy, opened a door he had apparently decided was already closed.

That experience stayed with me. We become remarkably certain about things we have never tried. We say things like: I wouldn't like that. I'm not artistic. I'm too old. I'm not that kind of person. I've never been good at things like that. How do you know? Maybe you are right. You may take the pottery class and hate every second of it. Fine, now you know; try something else.

I have become unwilling to allow an imagined failure to make a decision for me that reality has not yet proven to be true. I was fifty-one years old when I decided to write my first book. I had never written a book before. People around me told me I wouldn't finish it. There was some excellent evidence supporting their position. I had an impressive history of beginning large projects and failing to finish them. I wrote it anyway.

Around the same period of my life, I began reconsidering my career and many of the assumptions I had made about what the rest of my life was supposed to look like. It would have been very easy to say: You should have done this twenty years ago. Perhaps I should have. What exactly am I supposed to do with that information? I cannot get into my time machine and go back twenty years. I have no access to thirty-year-old Joshua. I only have access to today and my current self.

Spending the next ten years regretting the previous twenty seems like an exceptionally efficient way to waste another ten. So I stopped worrying about the life I might have lived and became much more interested in the life I could still live. Where will I be next? What will I do? Who will I become? Perhaps I will succeed, perhaps I will fail spectacularly. Failure does not frighten me nearly as much as spending the rest of my life wondering what would have happened if I had tried. I have failed many times, probably more often than I have succeeded and I am still alive. 

One of the great discoveries of my life has been that failure is usually not final. You try something, it doesn't work; now you know something you did not know before. Perhaps you try again. Perhaps you alter the plan. Perhaps you discover that you hated the thing and never want to do it again. Excellent; that is information. What frightens me much more is the person who spends twenty years miserable because they are terrified that the alternative might be worse.

I have known people who remained in jobs they hated year after year, counting the time until retirement, convinced that happiness would finally begin once they were permitted to stop. Sometimes it did. Sometimes they discovered that retirement did not automatically create a life worth living.

This is why I am increasingly interested in trying rather than waiting. You do not need to burn your life down tomorrow. You do not need to quit your job, move across the world, sell everything you own, and become a seventy-year-old circus performer - unless you want to. Change can be small. Take a class. Visit a place. Try a hobby. Apply for a job. Meet different people. Learn something badly. Make an ugly mug; then make another one.

Your body will change as you age. Your abilities will change. Some possibilities genuinely close, and pretending otherwise would be foolish. Different is not the same thing as finished. At eighty years old, a man who thought most of his interesting life was behind him discovered clay. At fifty-one, a man decided to write a book. Neither of us went backward and repaired the years we wished had been different. We changed what happened next. Forward is the only direction in which you have any power! I used to tell my students that we were traveling in a broken time machine going forward through time at a rate of one second per second. I would say, “Until we can repair that time machine and make it go rapidly in reverse, we had better just do what we can.” You are not too old until you are dead; there is always the possibility of a new adventure.