If you’re lucky, you’ll be old one day. Your mental faculties will deteriorate, especially your memory and your ability to adapt to new conditions. Your personality, however, is likely to stay about the same. Which raises a serious question: What will life be like for someone who has (a) poor memory, (b) low flexibility, and (c) your personality?
Before sorrow overwhelms you, remember: You’ll probably have younger people around to help you. Which raises a more specific question: How will younger people treat someone who has (a) poor memory, (b) low flexibility, and (c) your personality?
It’s tempting to quip, “Poorly!” But there’s a wide range of possible outcomes. A know-it-all with severe memory loss is far more aggravating than an equally forgetful person who admits his own amnesia. A self-aware inflexible person is more pleasant company than a dismissively inflexible person. A person with failing health who naturally looks on the bright side is more pleasant than a person who was miserable even in the best of times. And like it or not, the more pleasant your company, the more company you’ll have – and the better care you’ll get.
So what? Well, while your personality is unlikely to change when you’re 80, most readers are not 80 yet. You can, perhaps with great effort, reform yourself. Unless you’ve previously factored the contents of this post into your character, why not marginally change course? Be more modest about your mental faculties – especially your memory. You can even formally test your memory to see how you compare to the rest of the population – and periodically re-test yourself to see how your memory is holding up. Try not to be so stubborn – or at least be mindful of how your stubbornness burdens those around you. And yes, strive to be positive and pleasant to others. Train yourself to look on the bright side of life, forget about the news, and steer conversation to subjects that the people around you enjoy. If this seems hard, compare it to the challenge of being old, bitter, and isolated.
“I’m too old to change.” The elderly routinely use this as an excuse for the aggravation they cause. Yet if you look down the game tree and do backwards induction, you’ll find not an excuse, but a blueprint for a better senescence. One day, you’ll be too old to change? Very well; then repair your personality now before it’s too late!
READER COMMENTS
Kevin Erdmann
Jun 6 2019 at 2:26pm
This describes my great aunt Elvira, who became senile in her final years. She would say, very sweetly, of her daughter/caretaker, “I don’t know who this young woman is, but she tells me she’s my daughter, so I guess she must be.” I can’t imagine being so gracious in such a state of confusion, but it is possible.
JFA
Jun 6 2019 at 3:11pm
So I’m all about self-improvement, but Bryan’s constant exhortations about improving oneself (e.g. this post and his writings on poor people) seem (at the very least) in tension with his beliefs that parenting (within certain bounds) doesn’t make a difference in life outcomes for children. Bryan’s claim: you spend the first 18 or so years with people who love you and probably exhort you to be a better person, yet this has no impact on how you behave or how you respond to the world (based on personality measures that Bryan claims are greatly determined by genes (or at the very least not affected by parenting). Why, then, does Bryan think that a person can change (even gradually) how his/her personality and outlook on life?
BC
Jun 6 2019 at 7:41pm
Maybe, someone can choose to change themselves even if they can’t change their children.
JFA
Jun 6 2019 at 8:07pm
I think that’s true. I just don’t think that is consistent with the strong relationship between personality and genetics Bryan professes.
Bedarz Iliachi
Jun 7 2019 at 12:18am
Exhortations are only meaningful if we possess free will. Thus, Caplan must believe in free will. Perhaps children are less likely to respond to parental exhortations in the modern America (where these studies were conducted).
Matthias Görgens
Jun 8 2019 at 2:44am
If you exhort a robot, and the robot changes behavior, the exhortion was in some sense meaningful.
No matter whether the robot had free will, or just reacted mechanically.
(I don’t really think the existence of free will can be empirically testsed / would have much practical consequence either way.)
RPLong
Jun 7 2019 at 9:04am
There is certainly tension between the two ideas, but not necessarily a large contradiction. As far as I can remember, Bryan never claimed that parents cannot change a child’s behavior. Rather, he claims that parenting styles don’t tend to change personality or long-term life outcomes. It’s a subtle, but substantial, difference. You might never be able to change the fact that your child prefers football to video games, but you can certainly teach your child to behave respectfully toward people with the opposite preference.
Furthermore, the advice Bryan has expressed above involves making changes at the margins, which is the bread-and-butter of any economist worth his/her salt. Just because parenting can’t define a child’s life course doesn’t mean we can’t all make marginal changes toward better behavior. There’s no contradiction in that.
JFA
Jun 7 2019 at 11:48am
Just to clarify, when I wrote “has no impact on how you behave or how you respond to the world”, I was also referring to long-term outcomes.
I think changes at the margin are perfectly wise and attainable, though consistently doing this over many years (in order to achieve a large change in personality might be a little tough). What Bryan seems to be suggesting are consistent changes at the margin over time without changing the underlying constraints (i.e. personality). Be less stubborn, strive to be positive, look on the bright side: how large would the changes need to be to achieve any difference observable by others or be picked up on a personality test? I’m going to imagine those margins are larger than Bryan thinks. Can a person go from making snarky comments or complaining about ailments 70 percent of the time to 68 percent? Sure. Would this make a difference to caretakers? If you think personality is heritable, I don’t know why you would also think people can make noticeable improvements in personality.
If I recall correctly, Bryan describes the effect of parenting on children’s behavior as a finger on a plastic cup: once the finger is removed, the plastic cup goes back to its original form. This is inconsistent with your statement: “You might never be able to change the fact that your child prefers football to video games, but you can certainly teach your child to behave respectfully toward people with the opposite preference”. How you behave towards others is directly affected by your levels of aggression, agreeableness, conscientiousness, etc., which are key factors to one’s personality that you and Bryan say are not affected by parenting. [Just anecdotally (if you think parenting doesn’t affect much): given the control parents have over resources and exposure to various activities, it seems to me that a parent would have a better chance determining a child’s long-term preferences over activities (since those tend to develop overtime through exposure) than how children end up treating others when they become adults.]
You inherit whatever personality you inherit. That includes agreeableness and conscientiousness. I don’t know if Bryan has offered a comprehensive theory of personality development, but I’m not sure a theory of personality that says “20+ years of exhortation by people who love you and see you everyday has no long term impact on your personality” can be consistent with “people have the ability (just by sheer will) to change their own personality at the margin consistently over many years that would be noticeable by others”. They might not be necessarily inconsistent, but I haven’t seen Bryan or anyone defending his views come up with an argument that actually bridges the gap.
John Alcorn
Jun 6 2019 at 4:03pm
As people get older, they get more so.
Steve Horwitz
Jun 6 2019 at 5:13pm
I think there is much truth here. Facing a currently (See that optimism?) incurable though treatable disease, I commend in particular focusing on the good as a way to keep friends and family around you. No one wants to hear me complain or offer the worst case scenario for my future. My optimism might be overly optimistic but that’s a better mistake than the reverse.
Being agreeable and self conscious about your mental and physical abilities seems very wise as death gets closer.
Niko Davor
Jun 7 2019 at 3:43pm
This is wise advice that I intend to fully heed.
Colin Baker
Jun 7 2019 at 8:01pm
At 75 I have been brought back to lecture at University. I continue to wonder why? The memory is not quite what it was and my computer skills are not up to the task.
On a more general note I am constantly told I am too old to do the things I can do and encouraged to attempt the things I can not. Am I alone in this?
As far as staying competitive my best help is reverse mentoring. Grandson and his friends the biggest help with IT and the young staff at University do look after me.
Cheers,
Colin
Nick Ronalds
Jun 8 2019 at 10:21am
Wise words Bryan, and a nice change of pace. (Not that your other entries aren’t wise too!)
Weir
Jun 9 2019 at 5:50am
Let’s say you fought off a zombie, but you got bit, and you don’t have long to live. Everybody else in the basement with you is safe for the moment, but in an hour you’ll turn.
So you spend that hour pulling out your teeth?
A harmless zombie, sans teeth, can be kept in the corner forever. So you plead with the others: “All you have to do is, please, pull out my teeth.”
And that’s why, in a hundred years, or two hundred years, that zombie will still be there, shuffling on a leash, and that’s what you want.
The zombie won’t really look like you. He’ll have your cheek bones, but he won’t have your cheeks. He won’t have your flexibility or your inflexibility. No personality at all. No memory of anything. He’ll be wearing your clothes.
He’ll be about the same height as you were at your death. Your corpse will have this prolonged existence after you’ve died. And that seemed important to you when you were still alive.
More important than your teeth, obviously. And more important than your dignity or anything else. If you define yourself by your bones and sinew and shirt, you’ll want this zombie in your shirt to be upright and groaning centuries after you’ve ceased to exist. Because the alternative was too horrible to contemplate?
Comments are closed.