Preparing for middle age
| life, planningMy peer group's not yet at the point of discussing maintenance meds, but they often discuss brain fog, fatigue, and strategies for dealing with perimenopause. Since I'll be turning 40 in a few months, I figured it would be a good idea to start anticipating some of the changes that come with age. If I look for ways to improve my systems, workflows, and habits, I might be able to age more gracefully. Here's are some age-related changes and quick thoughts about what I can do about them.
Changing relationships, losing people: Throughout the years, I'll need to deal with the loss of people close to me, whether it's because of natural development (like A+ going off and living her own life), changing situations (drifting in and out of playgroups based on her interests), or old age and death. I can prepare for that by making the most of the time I do have with people, learning more life skills, staying engaged, and laying the groundwork for more relationships that might turn into old friendships.
It's a little complicated because I think I'll continue to be cautious about spending a lot of time indoors around other people. Fortunately, there are a lot of outdoor socialization opportunities. Eventually, when A+'s off and doesn't want her mom hanging around when she's out with her friends, I can join some of the walking clubs out of the nearby park.
I like the Emacs community, and I'm looking forward to maturing into some sort of community grandmother. I imagine it'll be mostly about oohing and aahing over people's cool projects and suggesting that they go talk to so-and-so who was curious about something similar.
Brain fog, slower processing: I got a sneak preview of this during the early years of parenting, and I still have many days where I either feel slower or I don't have lots of focused time. I think dealing with this is about being kind to myself (since there's no point in wasting even more energy on beating myself up), managing my expectations, and managing my tasks so that when I do have some focused time, I can do whatever I needed to do at the time that it's good to do it.
I've gotten a lot of use out of speed-reading, but in case that slows down, I can also get a lot from reading more slowly. I can take more sketchnotes and try to make more connections to other things I know.
Summarization seems to be one of the things that current natural language processing systems are getting pretty good at, so that might also be useful.
- Fading memories: I hope habits of journaling, taking pictures, and drawing sketches will help me appreciate these moments that fill my years so that things don't feel like as much of a blur. Backups are important, of course. Also, converting thoughts and memories into a form that other people can bump into means that it's not limited to my brain: blog posts about things I've been learning, photo albums that A+ can flip through whenever she likes, things like that. Retrieving memories and organizing them into narratives/stories helps make sense of them too.
- Less working memory: Working memory is useful for being able to see the connections between things and solving problems quickly. I'm beginning to appreciate the difficulty of keeping lots of things in my head, especially when someone's trying to talk to me at the same time. That's cool. I can reduce multitasking and minimize commitments. I can refile information so that it's close to related information. I can chunk information differently and then spread them out side-by-side, like the way index cards and sketchnotes help me build up thoughts and Org Mode helps me compare shopping choices. External monitors help, and I can print things out if I need to. Remembrance agents might be able to suggest related things, too.
- Lower recall of words, details: It doesn't matter much if the memory is there, if I don't have a way of getting back to it. Stuff inside my brain is likely to get lost. Maintaining a centralized note-taking habit (especially if information is fragmented over different apps and devices) will probably help with this. Mnemonic techniques can help with making things more vivid. I hope that natural language search will be useful too, and I'm looking forward to seeing what large-language models for artificial intelligence can do when applied to personal datasets. Episodic search might become more viable, too, if I can use things I remember to narrow down where to find something. Recognition is easier than recall, so even having something suggest a few options might be enough to unstick my brain. If I take pictures or notes of where I've stored infrequently-used things, that might make searching easier too.
Inattention: I occasionally get brain hiccups, and stress or low sleep makes it worse. Slowing down and not rushing helps. Processes, checklists, and repeating TODOs helps. Organizing our physical space so that there's a home for things helps when I'm on autopilot, although I still get attentional blips and put things in the wrong place. Keeping an oops fund helps.
Cubing might be a way for me to track this. Sometimes I make a mistake and my solve time goes way up, so that's a way to check how often my attention wanders when I mean to be paying attention.
- Less energy: I'm becoming more protective of my sleep, and I've got a good mix of things I can do even when I have low energy. Walking is good, and I can ramp up to other forms of exercise slowly. There are lots of long-term hobbies I can enjoy well into old age, so there's plenty to explore.
- Hormonal disruption: I think this is mostly about getting a sense of what to expect, having good relationships with doctors and other health professionals, and being open to adapting my lifestyle as things change. My friends have mentioned a fair bit of sleep disruption, so that's probably something to watch out for too.
- Changing priorities and perspectives: This is one of the good benefits of all of this. Constraints make things clearer. Looking forward to growing wiser.
I'll also keep assistive technology in mind, since there are all sorts of interesting ways tech might be able to help with age-related cognitive or physical decline.
Going to happen anyway, if all goes well. Might as well have fun!
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