THREE: Getting older
Didn’t we already cover this? Sort of. I recently listened to a podcast on Sam Harris’s Making Sense with Aurthur C. Brooks called “Where is Happiness?” Brooks is a Harvard professor, author, and lecturer who knows a lot about love and happiness. What’s especially interesting about Brooks, though, is that he was a classical musician phenom as a kid, only to have his ability plateau, he says, in his late twenties, earlier than expected. He ended up turning to other things, and has spent a lot of his career focusing on ambition, and how the brain changes with time.
According to Brooks’s research, in roughly the first half of our lives, we use a more “fluid intelligence,” meaning we’re able to juggle lots of concept and complexity as we do very creative things — like write a novel, maybe, deftly keeping all those characters and plot strands in our heads.
As we age, though, we transition to “crystallized intelligence”, which is more about what we know. We’ve learned all of these things in the first half of our lives, done a lot of this good work, and now we have some wisdom to offer.
Brooks suggests, and has research and evidence to support, that people who try to persist with fluid intelligence in their later years, that is, people who have ambitions to do those same things they could do when they were younger, are less likely to find happiness.
While those people who embrace their crystallized intelligence and turn outward, more toward their fellow humans, sharing what they know, helping people, teaching — these types tend to be happier.
It’s worth a listen, for sure.
Okay that’s it! I can’t believe I’ve written this and it’s just now turning nine a.m. Normally, I’d be driving the girls to school, but we decided to instead put them on the bus. I love my mornings with them, and our talks on the way to school, and it kind of kills me not to do it, but it’s an hour of my morning and I have a lot of energy that time of day I could be channeling into work. Like now.
But don’t worry, I pick them up every afternoon and we still manage to drive each other bonkers all evening long! Just kidding, I have amazing girls I’m so grateful for an a wife that’s beyond belief. I’m a very fortunate man. I hope to start paying all of that back in my life now, so please, never hesitate to reach out if there’s anything I can do for you.
~T.J. (aka Tim)
