The bell curve of human cognition
My parents are getting older. And as they age I've noticed that their cognitive malleabilty and function have started to decline. Don't get me wrong - they're still perfectly capable of holding a perfectly fine conversation and getting around in their day to day, but their judgement skills and critical thinking have degraded. Or perhaps I've just gotten more opinionated myself and I'm just carving out more stances of disagreement. It's probably both but I do think there's a real drop in reasoning capabilities with age.
I've noticed it myself as I've entered my 40s. I have a harder time doing arithmetic, my reaction times are slower, my tendons are tighter, it takes me longer to learn things. I can only imagine what it's like at 70.
I listened to this article on Apple News yesterday about how the author's dad got scammed out of 45k by various "women" on a dating site. This is a man who - when he eventually passed away got a 12,000 word obituary written about him by the NYT. A man of enviable intellect, who despite repeated failed attempts to meet these women in person, who despite continuous last minute cancellations, never put one and one together - over the protestations of his kids.
They took him early on to a neurologist (before he fell deep into the rabbit hole and their relationship was not yet acrimononious), and the neurologist found a sharp decline in cognitive and reasoning capabilities, which are not obvious on the surface - their dad still seemed sharp and capable of functioning in the day to day.
I imagine this to be akin to a human being operating through muscle memory and previously established mental procedures. No longer capable of adapting - seemingly functional but the predictability leading to vulnerability from exploitation and bad actors.
And then that got me thinking - 2 days fresh from a huge argument with my mom... where Dana has argued a pretty effective point with me that I should show more understanding and grace - I can't hold my mom to the same bar of reasonableness anymore, she simply may not be capable of it. The human cognition looks maybe like a bell curve. On one end you have my daughter at the bottom, in the middle you have myself (sadly on the declining end of the peak), and on the other end you have my parents. I mean - I don't hold it against Summer if she throws a tantrum or cries when we take her toys away. I understand that this is simply cognitively where she's at. And I'm now starting to realize that my parents aren't infallible - they can't be the capable, mature adults to look up to forever. And that in a way the human life ends with a reversion back to where we started. I remember reading somewhere that Alzheimer's patients over time regress and lose the mental and physical control of their bodies, like babies but progressing in reverse.
I'm learning to need to show this similar level of grace and understanding to my parents. And that we as a society strangely do not account for this. There is so much understanding and literature and support for how to raise a baby. But very little acknowledgement and resources and norms for how to handle the aging members of society. They're left to fend for themselves, or to check themselves into assisted care facilities. But that to me feels more like a bandaid over what is viewed as a symptom versus a deep embrace of the fact that this is inevitable and something to be planned for and scheduled into your life.
I'm sure I'm not being completely articulate here, so I'm going to try to put it a different way. When you're growing up - every one tells you about getting married, having kids... it's something society has planned for. There are all these milestones to guide you from being a baby cognitively speaking to a functional member of society. Laws that grant additional rights at certain ages, licenses that let you operate machinery etc as you grow. And then when you have a kid, there are again all these universally adopted norms and systems and procedures - a track you get put on with well paved roads. Pregant? Go see an OB on these dates. Take these classes to learn what to expect. Bring the kids to the doctor on this schedule, begin tummy time on these dates.
In contrast, there seems to be very little intentional thought put into the twilight years of human life. There almost seems to be an assumption that "hey once you've graduated through these checklist items, you're good! Congrats - you're done with the system!". There is an onramp to a road that is assumed to continue forever... but it doesn't - it overhangs a steep cliff. And people fall off the end of it if they don't find or craft a suitable off ramp for themselves.
How would society look like if we designed it for the entire user human lifecycle? As a PM, where you haven't just optimized it for onboarding but offboarding too? As a family unit, folding aging members back into the fold for their adult childen to care for. Having there be explicit tests and recognition of cognitive decline (just like how there are exams and degrees for the opposite). Providing government institutions for caring for the elderly - putting dollars in play for the elderly, like how we spend money on education for the youth.