In developed countries, people in their sixties are enormously healthier than their peers from, say, 100 years ago (or from today’s Ukraine). They are active, energetic, engaged, they look and feel young. Good healthcare, good cosmetics, good hygiene, and good abundant food retard physical aging dramatically. I remember the feeling of complete shock when my mother and I traveled to her native village in Ukraine and met an ancient old lady who turned out to be my mother’s former classmate. The woman looked like she could easily be my mother’s grandmother.
The greatest problem of aging lies in the area where you can’t buy off disintegration with money or technological advances. A tendency towards intellectual rigidity sets in human beings at around the age of 35. If very specific efforts are not made to combat it, we see beautiful, physically agile and spry 60-year-olds who, sadly, are nowhere nearly as agile intellectually.
Intellectual labor doesn’t stave off this rigidity. All of those professors who keep teaching pretty much the same thing for decades, scholars who keep rewriting the same idea they had 30 years ago, and intellectuals who recycle the old instead of generating the new are all products of this affliction.
Intellectual rigidity makes people incapable of finding fresh solutions to problems, gets them bogged down in endless feuds that last forever and start because of something incredibly trivial, and makes them an intolerable burden on collagues and family members. Since these folks possess a lot of physical energy, they can create quite a lot of disruption.
It is very important to start battling intellectual rigidity as early as possible. Most people don’t even notice the moment when their reading list begins to slide more and more towards the Franzens, the Wolitzers, mystery, sci fi, fantasy, or YA. I know several academics who honestly believe they read a lot but who have not read more than 3 serious books last year. And this is just one area where rigidity sets in. What people watch, what they talk about, what they do in their free time – it is easy to get bogged down but it’s hard to get one’s intellect back to full-time work once it’s been idling for a while.
Clarissa's Blog 
Leave a comment