[Xcelerate]

I feel like we still don’t have great research on how much of this is due to biological factors related to age and how much is due to confounding factors.

I suspect that sustained creativity may be a result of continuous exposure to new experiences and concepts (which younger people are naturally situated to encounter quite often), so I try to consistently add novelty to my life as I get older, specifically targeting things way outside my comfort zone or previous interests.

For example, I’ve always been sort of uneasy with flying, so I figured I would sign up for general aviation classes and learn to fly myself, which is something I never would have had the slightest inclination toward when I was younger. I ultimately didn’t go through with it, as while signing up, my wife strongly insisted that I find a different form of “novelty” to pursue, but I think it decently illustrates what I was attempting to accomplish.

Some more mundane examples include listening to music that I don’t enjoy, completely mixing up how I dress after decades of wearing the same thing, reading books opposite my interests, taking classes in fields different than what my degree was in, and trying to constantly meet people who are very different from myself.

I guess we’ll see if this has any effect or not.

[idiotsecant]

I'm not sure old farts doing experience tourism is recreating the conditions of youth, and I say that as a fellow old fart.

It seems to me that being young and stupid has the advantage of making people hungry for success damn the consequences in a way that is more subdued as we age. This partly is a thing of biology, I think, and partly a thing of understanding consequence.

[behringer]

no need to go up in a plane, just learn to fly in a flight simulator. It's not quite the same but they are very realistic.