Switch to mobile version

October 2014

kitten

If a thousand people “Like” this post, Mark Zuckerberg will spare this kitten. Please share!

Chances are you have a friend or relative who is constantly posting dubious “facts” on social media: that you can charge your electronic devices by plugging them into an onion, that entering your PIN in reverse at an ATM summons the police, or that this year Halloween falls on a Friday the 13th for the first time in 666 years. (Think about that one for a moment.)

We can laugh all day at our paranoid friends and computer-illiterate aunts for falling for Facebook hoaxes, but the basic offense here — passing along information without any attempt to verify it — is something most of us probably do all the time.

Bad information isn’t always obvious, and it probably wouldn’t occur to you to investigate a claim unless it sounded untrue to you from the beginning. There’s pretty good evidence that we’re much more gullible than we think: we tend to believe what we hear, unless it initially strikes us as unlikely.

After a belief passes the front door, it usually doesn’t get much scrutiny. It becomes part of your “body of knowledge,” which is just another name for your impression of the way the world is, and it remains there until some new belief utterly clashes with it and you’re forced to reconsider. We easily forget our reasons (if we ever had any) for believing what we believe, and we’re seldom asked for them.

Don’t take my word for it, but you can be almost certain that a lot of the things you “know” aren’t really true. I would bet money that some of the facts of life you currently feel certain about can be found on this list of common misconceptions. It may surprise you to hear for example, that sugar doesn’t cause hyperactivity in children, and that fortune cookies are actually Danish in origin, not Chinese or Japanese or American.

We do learn quite a bit about the world from direct experience. But clearly, most of our learning amounts to believing the beliefs of other people, whether they’re expressed in a Facebook post or in a textbook. You hear or read something, and if it seems true you’ll probably believe it. In all likelihood you’ll never try to verify that belief unless someone else challenges it, and it may never occur to you that it might be wrong. Once a belief has established itself, we freely tell others what we know, or think we know, and the process repeats.  Read More

Post image for The Cure for Aging

Here’s a depressing reality that everyone eventually notices: time goes faster as you age. The days and years seem to get behind you with increasing speed, and it’s easy to understand why: to a one-year-old, a year is a lifetime, while to a 40-year-old it’s only one-fortieth of a lifetime.

This means we are, essentially, accelerating towards our graves — but there’s something we can do to make this a non-issue, and I’ll explain how.

I turned 34 last week, and when I think about that number, it seems to belong to an entirely different stage of life than 33 does. A 33 year-old is a just a 31 year-old you haven’t checked in on for a bit, and a 31 year-old is just a 29 year-old plus a quick pair of summers, and 29 is what everyone wants to be anyway.

But 34 is the mark at which the rounding begins to go the other way. We know that 34 might as well be 35, and one president later you’re 39, which is the same as 40. And at that point, while you’re nowhere near old age, you’re probably on the leeward side of the mountain of time that is your life, and your days of being a young person are over.

All of this is just a pointless thinking exercise though. It doesn’t mean anything. Numbers make fools of us. That’s why retail prices still end in 99, statistics mislead us relatively easily, and the Monty Hall Problem still blows people’s minds.

When I put the numbers aside, and look at my actual experience of aging, life has gotten consistently better, not worse. I am calmer, happier, more confident, wiser. I get more enjoyment out of ordinary moments, I experience fewer crises and less fear. I have just as many problems but I dispatch them more quickly. I find it easier to do hard things as I get older.

Yet it’s suggested repeatedly to us, that aging is something to be feared — that an older you is a worse you, and that any birthday beyond your 29th is a small tragedy.

I am also aware that I only turned 34 and not 64, and that I’ve barely begun to experience the effects of aging. But I have every reason to believe that all of the improving qualities listed above will continue to improve until I’m about dead.

There are tradeoffs of course. When I was five I could fall down and probably not hurt myself. I used to be able to drink Slurpees for lunch and not feel like crap afterward. My skin was clearer. And eventually I’ll probably experience joint pain and other goodies. But I believe that with age I will gain vastly more than I lose.

What do we really lose as we age? Why do we think it’s such a bad thing?

Well first of all, what we’re most afraid of isn’t aging, but the thing that happens when we’re done aging — and we often confuse the two. Death and aging aren’t really the same problem, and I don’t think it makes sense to worry that aging is bringing you closer to death. The fact that life ends has been a part of the deal from the beginning, and you knew that. And death, whenever it comes, will render all of the problems of aging irrelevant.  Read More

Desktop version

Raptitude is an independent blog by . Some links on this page may be affiliate links, which means I might earn a commission if you buy certain things I link to. In such cases the cost to the visitor remains the same.