Several candidates for President are older than I am. I am about to be age 67. Experts on aging pretty much unanimously agree, most old people are cognitively as sharp as they were in their younger days.

I agree, most people my age or older are every bit as smart as we ever were. Yes, some old people get Alzheimer’s or other conditions which affect cognitive ability.  However, most of us of a certain age are, in fact, are as cognitively capable as most younger people.

My personal concern about getting older is not so much about losing my cognitive abilities. My concern about getting older is mostly about staying in touch with the world as it moves forward.  The past is a great place to visit but I want to live in the present. I worry my past life experience is not totally relevant in today’s world.

In the custom built street rod waiting at the stoplight next to me was a person my age or maybe a little older. It was a cool looking car. The Subaru Forester I was driving has cool accident avoidance technology. Today’s cars are different than they used to be. What makes each car cool depends on your assumptions about what cool means in today’s world, I guess.

Periodically one of my Facebook friends posts “Remember the good old days when people had common sense.” Back in the day, it was a different world. Kindergarten kids today read and do math, our goal from kindergarten was to learn the names of the basic colors and count to 10.  Common sense is different now than it used to be.

My 8.5-year-old granddaughter uses my smartphone much better than I do. I asked her how she finds apps so fast. She looked at me like I was an idiot. In her world, everyone knows how to navigate “devices” well. The idea that someone, me, does not, seems totally weird to her. It is not that I am dumb or she is super smart. It is about how required basic skill sets are now different than they were even 10 – 15 years ago.

I am just as smart as I used to be, however, what I am smart about is sometimes not as relevant as it used to be.

It was not many years ago when being smart meant knowing lots of stuff about stuff. Someone would ask a question and the smart people knew the answer. In today’s world, being able to look up most anything about anything is considered a basic skill. Being smart today is maybe more about a deep understanding and experience with a topic.

I do not wish I was younger. Time marches on, like it or not. I choose to like it. I am happy to have made it this far. That said, the primary lesson I learned in my lifetime is the best path forward is found by just moving forward.

I am not worried about lost mental capacity for the old presidential candidates or myself. If it happens to me or them, it needs to be dealt with as appropriate. I do worry about gaining the new life experiences necessary for my assumptions about the world to remain relevant.

Here is an example of how today’s world is different than it used to be. One of Linda’s cousins travels to China to help set up machines the company he works for sells to China. He does not speak Chinese. To communicate, he talks to Google Assistant which understands what he is asking and translates it to the local dialect of Chinese. He said when he is in a different part of China it translates to a different dialect of Chinese. It also works in reverse translating their responses into words he understands. He said it even understood that when he said, “you betcha” it translated it to “yes”.

Not knowing the language is not the barrier it once was. All of those assumptions about speaking or not speaking a language native to an area are mostly, now wrong. Technology made, what my experience taught me was a major problem, mostly irrelevant.

There are thousands of examples of how things are different than they used to be. The world is different than it used to be. I know that for a fact.

What I do not know is how well I understand the realities of the modern age. I am not panicked or anything. I just know I must remain open to learning the ways of the world as they are now.

Just for the record, in my head, the age of the candidate does not matter. For me, whether or not the candidate is in touch with the reality of the modern world is actually a primary criterion I will use to evaluate for whom I vote.

 

What we perceive often depends on how close we look.

Scaleandperception.com