I live in a big city but I spend a lot of time alone, because I enjoy solitude, and occasionally I wonder if I have dementia, but am not aware of it, because I don’t have anyone to report whether I seem more demented today than I did yesterday.
I’m in my sixties, which might actually be considered young in a lot of crowds, but I’m at the age where people my age and younger suddenly expire of things that are collectively thought of as age-related, heart issues and cancer and stroke. I’ve also got friends that are close in age who are experiencing major health challenges, and I have my own issues related to my back and neck. Sometimes I wake up and my muscles are all stiff and I feel like I’m a thousand years old.
Other times, I’m more positive. I’m strong enough to carry my groceries and laundry upstairs even though I can’t carry very much for very long. I can walk around for long periods of time at Disneyland, even though I need to stay away from Space Mountain. I’m doing better than a lot of people my age.
I have a brain job. Not going to talk about it, but it requires me to deal with complex ideas and newfangled inventions and the like. Basically there is an amorphous concept known as “litigation” and I try to find better ways to squash it into a spreadsheet. Before that I was director of technology for a plaintiffs’ trial law firm in San Francisco, which was also a brain job. And I have side hustles like writing science fiction, where it helps if you occasionally sling big words and high-faluting concepts around.
(I’ve always wondered why nobody talks about being low-faluting, but I guess that has to do with the mysterious nature of faluting in general.)
So I try to keep my brain in good operating order.
I’m not sure I’ll be expounding on every one of my ten brain tips (fortunately I was able to come up with a nice round number). Most of them are common sense things you’ll hear from most experts: eat a good diet, get some exercise, address your health problems.
In my case, I eat a lot of almonds, pumpkin seeds and yogurt, frequently at the same time. I try to stay on an anti-inflammatory diet, so mostly protein, not much sugar and/or carb. I have done some meticulous planning with regard to the churro I will be consuming on either Sunday or Monday, because that’s not something I often allow myself to do.
Working out is also good, and sometimes you have to balance other shit like chronic pain to get your exercise. I’m a big believer in walking, although you might want to ask me again after two days of Disneyland.
Needless to say, take care of any health issues, even though it’s expensive. Fix your teeth. Lower your blood pressure and your blood sugar. “Healing” is for young people – we seniors aren’t going to get over a bad case of high blood pressure or grow new hip joints. We have to learn to manage what we’ve got.
And learn new things as often as possible. I’m a great believer in constantly acquiring new skills. Right now I’m going through this Labubu obsession and part of that involves making clothes and props for them. I never had a daughter with a doll collection, so I learned that I really enjoy miniature fashion design relatively late in life. Making clothes for humans is laborious but making clothes for Labubus is much faster, so I’ve been teaching myself new sewing techniques and right now I’m doing miniature patchwork with squares that are about an inch wide. I’ve also learned how to make molds and cast things in resin, and have a sizable collection of tiki mugs in UV reactive colors related to this.
Assuming I don’t get dementia, I’m going to be a valuable asset to someone’s dystopia bunker, given my skills at fabricating and repairing protective gear, battle flags, machine parts and other things that I might be able to trade for almonds and chicken nuggets. Plus I can quantify any litigation data that’s lying around.
Appreciate music! Music improves cognitive function! People who are still listening to their teenager music when they have gray hair are boring! Find a new band you like and go see them! Learn a new instrument! Get over your fuddy duddy attitudes about what kind of music is “proper” or “meshes with your values” or “liked by respectable people” and just listen to everything until something clicks.
(Hopefully not as hard as it clicked with Stephen King when he got obsessed with the song Mambo Number Five; getting major cases of earworm/brainworm might be an occupational hazard for writers that may not even be limited to popular music, as anyone who has read Mark Twain’s bit about “punch in the presence of the passenjare” can attest.)
I go to a lot of concerts, and I tell people it’s because musical memories are one thing you’ll never lose, even if you do get dementia. Last concert I saw was Herb Alpert, who is in his nineties and still enjoying music. Before that I saw BTS, who are half my age and filling up stadiums with people of all ages, eager to hear their music. Concerts are the closest we get to heaven on this earth, so go experience them as often as possible.
And also ... consider that your teenager music might not be the absolute pinnacle of music ever produced. People who say things like that are silly. Others mock them when they're not around.
For my last four brain tips … these are opinions. The ones above this paragraph are backed by science (and/or common sense). These are just my little quirks.
I have a big quirk: I have a retro urbanite lifestyle that’s out of the 1920s or something as far as most Americans are concerned – walk a lot, take public transit, don’t buy a lot of newfangled gadgets, stairs are good exercise. I don’t often watch television, I don’t have climate control, I can go months without laying eyes on a “freeway.” That’s definitely not for everyone, but it suits me, and I think there’s a lot of wisdom to the whole concept of walkable cities.
Therefore I don’t spend a lot of time in the sun. I did when I was a kid in the tropics, getting burned – sometimes to the blistering point – more times than I can count but as an adult I’m an indoorsy type who lives in a fogbank, and I don’t get a lot of direct ultraviolet. People of my ethnic background are susceptible to melanoma if we get too much exposure, and I’m not interested in that.
There’s more sunshine out there now than when I was a kid. We don’t really know if it increases risks of things like melanoma, but as far as my skin is concerned, the tattoo I got ten years ago still has its bright colors and my face doesn’t have a lot of wrinkles. And while I can’t prove hiding from the sun has had any effect whatsoever on my cognitive abilities, it seems beneficial to me, and I endorse it.
I also don’t drink much alcohol. Without going into explicit detail, I think cannabis and occasional psilocybin can be helpful for some people who enjoy being intoxicated and still want to be on top of their cognitive game. I also think there are some people who are just physically adapted to drinking large amounts of booze; they know who they are and I know my metabolism doesn’t work that way.
And that’s an important point in all this advice giving: people are different. Some people tend to think of us as mostly identical, but different bodies age differently. Some people are more susceptible to things like melanoma, or can tolerate substances that would poison others. Not everyone is going to thrive on my almonds-and-yogurt based diet. Not everyone can just walk around, or climb stairs.
It can be good to have genetic relatives that you can observe, so you can draw your own conclusions about what works best for people like you. Not everyone has access to that information, so sometimes you have to get creative. DNA services can tell you a lot about potential risks and so can basic data science -- just researching which risks are more likely for people like you based on where you live, and your other basic demographics.
My last two suggestions are even more idiosyncratic: spend time with younger people and avoid cortisol spikes.
In spending time with young people, I do NOT mean in the context of giving them advice, instructing them, or otherwise acting like a wise adult. I mean talking to the other adults as peers, even if there's a 40-year gap.
Once upon a time, old people had a greater stock of information than younger ones, and a lot of their cross-generational interaction was in the role of wise elder sharing lore. As far as a lot of contexts are concerned, that ended recently. The idea of some old man explaining Cobol to people who are trying to generate a report in Salesforce is just a little bit ludicrous, although grannies are still good sources of advice as to things like why your baby would rather scream than go to sleep.
Our social behaviors evolved over a long period of time though, as did our language, and our egos, are not completely adjusting to the change. Here’s a great example: I am also on a panel about neurodiversity, a word which was born in 2015 when Steve Silberman wrote NeuroTribes.
There are respected elders – at this very convention!! (gasp) – who have put me on ignore for things like telling them their information about neurodivergence is dated, autistics are not all nonverbal little boys, the term “Asperger’s” is no longer in use because he was a nazi, people with ADHD don’t have to be committed to a lunatic asylum, most people with schizophrenia are not serial killers, people with Tourette’s are not expressing their Freudian subconscious – in fact, Freud isn’t even science anymore, and your dick size joke that you think is clever and keep on repeating is merely body shaming.
Meanwhile I was reading NeuroTribes and thinking “oh, this makes sense! I want to know more! This describes so many people I have known throughout my life!” I made some efforts to put neurodivergent characters in my stories, and I worked with neurodivergent sensitivity readers. I’ve got a lot of friends my generation who never got diagnosed but their kids turned out to be autistic and then they started the self-examination process.
That’s just one example of how we old people really want the ego thrill of being considered a wise sage but are trying to back it up solely with experience . Frankly you don’t get as many ego thrills as you age out of being considered sexy, so this is one way people compensate. However, on the subject of neurodivergence, all the knowledge is new. You’re either conversant with the current science or you’re stroking your ego by making up bullshit.
So I’m telling my fellow olds to put their egos aside. Accept that kids these days actually know a lot more about some things, such as recent developments in science. Don’t turn into one of those assholes who goes around saying shit like “in my day we didn’t have vaccines, we just ate an apple every day.”
Instead, put yourself in a context where younguns are your teammates, peers, colleagues, associates, fellow members. This doesn’t mean to totally shun the benefits that might go along with being an elder in your family or community. It means don’t carry that role into all your interactions, instead learn to communicate with people from other generations as equals.
(And you should always ask for a senior discount, sometimes there is one! Also, you should let the young healthy people do the tasks that involve things like carrying heavy stuff, or running.)
And the final suggestion … cortisol is bad.
This is a simplification, but the brain chemicals that start squirting when someone shares ragebait with you, or yells at you, or threatens you, or looks like they’re about to road rage – that shit will kill you if you keep on taking hits off the pipe.
Probably everyone knows someone who is addicted to ragebait. You can’t even have a conversation with them that doesn’t involve them trying to provoke you into saying “yes, I, too. am outraged by this outrageous conduct you complain of.”
There was a woman in one of my groups who was constantly posting about books getting censored and removed from school libraries. Sometimes it was recent news, sometimes it was bait based on something that happened a decade ago and got overturned, sometimes it was merely the suggestion it might happen. It could be magas trying to ban books with gay characters, or liberals talking about problematic themes in the Little House books, it was all the same to her. If you tried to engage her with ideas like “well maybe that book does include some dated stereotypes” she’d blow up and rage at you, because that was the game – she posts bait, and either you pay the positive-reaction toll, or you’re in league with the outrage machine and she therefore has a good reason to get angry.
I’ve lost friends over statistics-based ragebait. They’ll post a wild-eyed article claiming 117% of all women will be slain by serial killers next year, and I have this bad habit of questioning that 117%. Which makes me basically equivalent to a serial killer.
Cortisol is just part of the chemical reaction happening in your brain when you go on a ragebait holiday but it’s a useful phrase to encompass the idea that constantly reinforcing anger is bad for you. For lots of reasons. It’s addictive though, and lots of tabloids and even skeevier sources make bank pushing peoples’ emotional triggers. We even have robots writing it now.
And in fact, the robots are only going to get smarter. And more dishonest. People who have a high resistance to dishonest robots are going to be in a lot better shape than people who fly off the handle because they’re only raising awareness about serial killers and if you can’t handle that you’re probably a serial killer.
So manage your cortisol exposure. Unfollow friends whose entire personality consists of spamming doomer propaganda. Hide posts that trigger you.
No doubt there’s someone in your life who will get angry and start ranting about how you have some kind of social duty to read and validate any and all ragebait. They’re wrong. Mute them. If they bother you in public, take them to court and get a restraining order. Nobody is obliged to provide a cortisol spike on demand. That’s assault. They’re being manipulative and dark triad-ish; either they’re malicious or they need therapy.
That doesn’t mean you should stick your head in the sand and go into denial about the state of the world. You can deal with the cortisol-inducing stuff at your own pace, on your own terms. Maybe have an outrage hour on Thursdays before you work out.
I have a friend I love dearly (compassionate! Smart! Excellent taste in music!) whom I can’t follow on social media because she really loves posting stuff like “LISTEN UP YOU STUPID MORONS I’M GOING TO EXPLAIN WHAT SOCIALISM IS” and my immediate reaction to that sort of message is something along the lines of “go eat a bag of locally sourced and income adjusted dicks and take your subliterate ‘splain-requiring friends with you.” Hands off my cortisol, skag, that’s for me and me alone. If you want to huff recreational cortisol, keep it on your own timeline. That shit’s worse than meth and it'll age you.
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| No brain, no pain! |
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