The Aging Programmer - Kate Gregory - NDC TechTown 2024

The Aging Programmer - Kate Gregory - NDC TechTown 2024 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVWQQeSOD0M

Well, thank you. Thank you all for coming and thank you all for taking a chance. Even if you're not aging or you don't think of yourself as aging, because this is actually for younger as well as older folk. We are indeed all getting older at 1 second per second. And as you do get older, you start to ask yourself, can I just keep programming? Would that be okay? Can I program my whole life? Or is my body or my mind going to somehow let me down and not let me do that, even though that's what I want to do? And that's really what this talk is about? But I have to start with this disclaimer. I'm going to tell you some things that worked for me or for people that I talked to or that I read about in studies or whatever, but that doesn't mean they're going to work for you. And it's especially true that when people leave, you no longer know what doesn't work for them. Okay? So there could be things that have nothing to do with being a good programmer whatsoever that we kind of enforce on people, and then people who can't do that leave. And then we're like, see, everybody here can do that thing that's called survivor bias. And it's a very common thing that as you get older, people tell you you can't program anymore, so you stop programming, which. Which proves that you can't program when you're older. Except actually it doesn't. It just proves people can be mean. However, I'm not telling you just about my own experience, okay? I did a survey. Hundreds of people answered my survey. If you were one of them, thank you. And I also got super geeky for many months and read studies and articles and summaries of things and extracts from books. And I talked to people who have left the industry, people who are still working well past what you would consider retirement age, still programming on their own terms. But that doesn't prove that this advice is guaranteed to work for you, okay? So please use your judgment. The good thing about getting older is you get more judgment. Now, this is a real picture from earlier this year when I turned 88. No, I did not. My mother turned 88 and. And I turned 63. My mother's very technical. She has retired from her technical career. I'm 63. You may think that since you are neither 88 nor 63, that none of this has anything to do with you. But a big part of what I want to talk about is things you can do in your 20s, in your 30s, in your 40s, in your 50s, that lead towards you being able to do what you want, which could be nothing, or could be programming in your 60s, in your 70s, in your 80s. That's the plan. A happy old age, doing something you enjoy. It doesn't just happen. You want to work towards it. But first, I got some quotes about aging, and I thought I'd start with this one because getting older is not so bad, as they say, when you consider the alternative. Unfortunately, Tom Petty is not getting older anymore. That's kind of the deal. We don't all get to be old programmers. I know that people die because I get phone calls. The only person who understood our C code base has died. Please, could you not be that person? Right? Try to have a goal that you could die at the office and the company could keep going. Because I literally get these calls and emails pretty frequently. I think you'd probably prefer not to die at the office also. And we'll talk a little bit about maybe how to live a little longer. But we also don't all get to keep programming. I know many people who are working, but not as programmers. Some have been forced into management, kicked upstairs. You know the words. Some are like truck drivers, okay? They've just left the industry entirely. And some people are retiring whether they want to or not. It's lovely to retire when you want to. There was an advertising campaign in Canada that ran for decades called Freedom 55, about investing in a way that would let you retire when you were only 55 years old. Whether you want to retire at 55 or at 85, when it's your choice and you've run the numbers and it's good, that's great. When it's, we're laying you off, here's a severance carefully chosen to be just enough that no lawyer will take your case to get you more. And you can't get hired anywhere else. That's usually not a voluntary retirement. It's not bad to change industries. And I do want to point that out. Like, it may turn out that you don't want to be an aging programmer. You might actually want to be an aging baker, you know, or truck driver or, I don't know, rodeo clown. Like, that's cool. But being forced out against your will would be a sadness. So on this survey, I asked, what of these things about your body concerns you? What of these things about your mind concerns you? What are you going to do about this? What are you going to do about that? And the results were a little bit surprising. Three Quarters of the people who responded were concerned about their eyesight. That was their number one body thing, was their eyes. You know, we have this stereotype about carpal tunnel and our wrists and all of that. People were worried about their eyes the most and then just general aches and pains and being able to move around and go up and down the stairs. And I worry a lot about memory. But everyone else on the survey was most worried about emotional things. That they wouldn't feel motivated to work, that they were cynical and didn't care about stuff anymore. They wanted to know how to combat that. And I'm going to talk about the body issues first and then the mental issues. But before I talk about the body issues. Not all problems with your body are actually problems with your body. People told me I have a mobility aid. It could be a cane, could be a brace, any number of things to help them move around. But when I use it, people treat me like I'm stupid. They won't listen to me at work, in a cafe, they won't take my order, they ask my companion what I want. It's really astonishing. The minute you have proof, visual proof to strangers that your body doesn't quite work, people assume your mind doesn't quite work. Okay, but is that a body problem or an environment problem? Right. If you're working in a place that doesn't listen on the days you wear your brace, that's not really about your brace, right? It's about the place you're working. We're quite far north here. It gets dark, right? In the winter it gets dark early. In order to get home, you have to drive home in the dark. If you drive, in order to get in, you have to drive in in the dark. If you drive, there may come a time when you can't drive at night. Well, what will your working hours be here? If that was the case in January. Right, but is that really an I problem or is it a I can't get to work any other way than driving, I can't work from home problem? Tell me if you've been in one of these offices. They're usually designed by the 20 year old CEO who thinks he can design office buildings. All the meeting rooms are on one floor, all the offices are on a different floor. And the coffee and the bathrooms and everything, they're on yet another floor instead of having these things scattered amongst the meeting amongst the offices. So in order to go to a meeting, you got to go up at least one flight of steps in order to go get some coffee. You got to go up and down at least one flight of steps, maybe two. Maybe everybody runs from the meeting room to the coffee room, up two flights of stairs together as some sort of bonding experience. And if your knees or your ankles or your cardiovascular capacity won't let you do that again, is that actually a body problem or is that a building designed by 20 year olds problem? In other words, are you really too old for the work or just for that workplace? So I'm going to talk about things being harder on your body, but I want you to remember this doesn't always mean that you don't fit. Sometimes it means that the people who have made something for you to fit into haven't thought the way they should. We'll start with eyes, because that was everyone's number one concern. You should be getting your eyes checked regularly. Exactly how regularly, how frequently depends on how old you are and also whether or not you're having problems with them already. But you kind of want to have a baseline. It is perfectly normal that as you age you get short sighted. When I was young, I was the most long sighted person in our whole family. I was always one who could spot the sign or the landmark or whatever first. And it slowly I became that I had normal sight and now I have short sight. That needs correction. This actually has the name presbyopia, Presby meaning elderly. So you can go to drugstore, pharmacy, grocery store, whatever and buy these like cheaters or readers for a very small amount of money. You don't need a prescription, you don't need anybody's permission. You just go in and what I did and continue to do is I grab a bottle of like vitamins or something off the nearby shelf and then you try them until you can read it clearly. Ah, this is the size I need. That's how you do it. That's the entire prescribing process. Okay. Now they don't work at a distance, but they'll work on your screen. They'll work for reading menus in a restaurant, they'll work for reading the backs of vitamin bottles. If eventually you're having trouble reading road signs before they've gone past you, then you will need longer vision type glasses. And that's going to mean seeing an actual person who can measure your eyes and give you some distance glasses and understand it's normal to have different glasses for different things. So these are my driving glasses. I have different computer and reading glasses. I have two granddaughters, they're seven and three. The seven year old is now disabused of this notion, but the three year old is old enough. They think the glasses give the ability, okay, so they'll put my glasses on and say, let's read a book. And then when they found out I had driving glasses. But it's okay to have like your driving glasses, your TV glasses, your computer glasses, your book glasses. And you know, my husband, I love him dearly, but he'd be like, have you seen my glasses? And I'll be on the dining room table. No, not those ones, you know, and he's got like, I don't know, 11 pairs of glasses all over the house for very precise tasks. But if you go back through my YouTube videos, you'll find a time when I wasn't wearing glasses. And then I would pick my cheaters up off, you know, to do a demo or to otherwise look at the screen. Now I've got these ones, I can wear them all the time. As a bonus, if you go and get your eyes checked and then you get corrective lenses, either the cheaters or the proper prescribed ones, you may discover your mystery headaches clear up. I can't tell you how many people have told me this. I thought I could see fine, but then they all made cluck, cluck noises when they measured my vision. And now I have these glasses and I'm not plagued by headaches anymore. Because you're not straining to focus. Some people who can't quite see the slides in a meeting kind of pretend they can. I'll figure it out from context. Someone will say, I'll be able to figure out what that word is. You spend a lot of processing power doing that. When you can actually just clearly read everything, it frees that processing power up. And for those of you who've been bumping your fonts and bumping your fonts and bumping your fonts, you can put a lot more code on the screen. Once again, once you correct your vision, that's important as a programmer. Now, I mentioned night driving. This can kick in in your 50s and there are things that are advertised late at night on tv, yellow sunglasses and whatnot. None of that works. Okay, don't bother. If your night driving problems are specifically caused by cataracts, which is one of the things you get at baseline, every time you get your eyes checked, they see if you're developing cataracts. If you then get your cataract surgery, which is pretty normal and quick these days, you will find it improves your night vision. But that's not the only cause of night vision problems. So don't assume that's how you're going to fix it. The big problem is contrast changes. And the worst thing in the world you can do is look out at the dark that you're driving through and then look close to you at something very bright, such as, you know, a 12 inch tablet screen that you have to control your whole car with and then look out into the dark again compared to just sticking your hand out and twisting a knob or pushing a slider. So think about the car you buy when you're getting into that 5060 zone where this may be an issue for you. You may not want the giant screen that's lit up and glowing. There's a problem with smears and streaks and so you have to be one of those fussy old people. If you're wearing glasses, they need to be super clean. Your windshield's super clean, your headlights super clean. One of the reasons why old people have this reputation about being fuss pots and rubbing things that are perfectly clean already is because the consequences of things being dirty are bigger when you have some challenges to overcome. And the 20 year old can just drive with the smeary windshield and the 70 year old is like, I'm just going to take a minute and clean this windshield now. And that myth about carrots for your eyes is not a myth. Vitamin A in carrots and anything that's not medium green or white. So carrots, red peppers, tomatoes, but also really dark green things helps not with long and short sightedness, but with this contrast and night vision problem. So it will help your eyes to eat your fruits and veg and to eat your rainbow. You can also maybe rearrange your life. Could you go home at three in the afternoon and then when you get home, do the last few hours of your workday so that you're driving home in the light rather than in the dark. Could you work from home more often in the winter? Like, what are things you can do that take night driving out of your life? This could also include being like, I don't drive now. I live somewhere where I can walk to work or I can take transit to work so that I, I don't have to worry about commuting in the dark if you're going to do that. It's the kind of thing that's best planned over a really long period of time rather than kind of sitting in your driveway almost crying saying, I don't know if I can keep working because I can't keep driving. That's not going to lead to careful Slow decisions. Now, I do have bad news, which is that exercise unfortunately works. I mean, I wish this was not true, right? I wish I could have a healthy. It is bad news. I want a healthy, strong body that just works. I don't want to have to do exercising. What's up with that? But however, it does help. And I don't just mean being an active person. Like, I walk to work or I enjoy this active hobby, like, I don't know, kayaking or something. But in some cases, you actually have to, like, go to a place and make repetitive movements for no other reason than to make the repetitive movements. It helps with aches and pains. A lot of people are like, I have to sit on the couch because my back is sore again. I'm sorry, but they say motion is lotion, okay? Moving around reduces your aches and pains. It increases your stamina. It gives you an ability. If you think about the oldest person, you know, maybe they're 90, maybe they're 95, whatever. Many of them, like, they can't reach the very top shelves of things, or they can't bend down and get stuff off the floor because I won't get back up again. That ability to reach out for stuff, reach up, reach down, get yourself back to vertical after bending over. You keep that. By exercising, it gets worse. Much of your immune system is probably in your muscles. People who exercise more have stronger immune systems, and it helps your mood. And I don't mean because you feel, like, smug that you exercise, but actually your body releases chemicals and it even makes you learn better. They've done tests where they make people exercise and then memorize numbers and so forth. So I like this quote. If you think you don't have time for exercise, you'll have to find time for illness. This was in, you know, the mid-1800s, a very long time ago. Canadian content. This is not the Stanley cup guy, but the Stanley cup guy is his little brother. So it's close. But when I was a student, I knew a young man who claimed to be allergic to chlorophyll, which I thought was a nice trick. So he couldn't eat anything green. And his girlfriend would say, well, he has a very expensive cheese habit, but, you know, he's got to get nutrition somewhere. I was like, I'm not sure there's any amount of cheese you can eat that makes up for not eating any vegetables ever. Like, nutrition isn't like that, and exercise isn't like that either. Different exercises are for a different purpose. You know, if I can lift Something very heavy once and put it down again. That does not increase my ability to run up three flights of stairs. If I can walk for an hour at a very fast pace, faster than anyone else, that doesn't give me the ability to lift up some hundred pound item and put it down again. They're different. So specifically you might be trying to build your strength, so ability to do something very difficult like lifting a heavy thing, or your stamina, which is doing something relatively easy like walking or going upstairs, but doing it for an extended amount of time without getting tired. Or your flexibility to bend over, to reach, to not fall over. Or if you trip and stumble, to pull yourself back to balance, to not to wipe out. Some people want the guns, the visible muscles. I'm not going to talk to that at all. And the good news is you won't accidentally get visible muscles doing things to build your strength, your stamina or your flexibility. They are separate activities. Weight loss, bmi, body mass index. It's nonsense. In fact, it's almost certainly racist nonsense. Okay. But even if you're in the demographic it was built on, it has now been shown to be healthier to be in the group they call overweight than to be in the group they call normal. Doctors have never told me to lose weight and they've sometimes been mad when I have because I was sick. And they're always happy when I gain some back. So your plan to be whatever your dream weight was when you were 17, it's probably not a smart plan. It's good to have some resilience and some reserves for in case you get sick. I'm also not going to talk about like improving your tennis backhand or your golf swing or some other kind of very specific training for a sport or an activity. That's the other reason people exercise. And the good news is that the visible muscles and the getting better at tennis are the things where you have to do 100 of something or a thousand of something. If you don't have those as goals, then whatever your mental picture is of exercise, that's probably not what you actually have to do. So you figure out what goals you want and then that leads what exercises you would do. Assuming you would like to start with being strong, being able to pick up 20 pound thing with one hand, not with two. Being able to get the lid off the proverbial jar of pickles. Okay, you do something hard a small number of times, like 10 push ups. If you can't do 11, if you can do 20 push ups, then maybe you need to choose something that makes your push ups harder because you want to do a small number of things. Hold a plank, but for 30 seconds, not those weird guys who hold them for five minutes. Assuming that like you couldn't do a 35 second plank. Okay? So something that's really pretty hard a small number of times, you don't have to do hundreds of reps. And it can take literally 30 seconds or a minute to do these things. So you might do squats, that's picking up and down your whole body with your leg muscles. You might do push ups, you might do sit ups. The nice thing about bodyweight exercises is you always have your equipment with you, okay? But you don't need to change into special clothes or go to a special place. You could literally do five squats while you were waiting for a meeting to start. Your camera should probably be off now. Some people will be like, excuse me, can't do 11 push ups. I can't do one push up. Which is a valid response. So you can learn how to make them easier. And the key is angles. If you want to do a push up from flat on the floor to your arm length off the floor, that's the hardest possible push up. If you find something like a couch or a bed or my favorite, a stair, and then you're going from like a 45 degree angle to slightly more. A lot of your weight's on your feet, right? So you're removing a fraction of your upper body. You're still working your arms and back. If you were to do this three times a day, minute at a time, within a week or two, you'll discover that you're so much stronger that you can do 11 and you need to move down a step on the staircase or find a slightly lower couch. Like, you get noticeably stronger quite quickly three times a day. Most people cannot do even once a day, you're going to notice that you literally get stronger quickly. If you want to make it harder, then you want to be flatter to the floor or put a weight on yourself or whatever. There are lots of ways to make things harder when you're in your 70s, 80s, 90s. Strength is the key to independence. If you need two hands to carry something, you don't have a hand for the railing. If you can't get the lid off of things, who's opening your pickles? You're just never going to eat pickles again. Being independent, being able to buy your own food, prepare your own food, open things yourself, carry your own laundry, this is the key to being independent. And you build that strength up over your lifetime. People with more muscles have stronger immune systems and in all kinds of studies. So even if you're not using the muscles to open pickle jars, you can use them to get over your cold. Not all exercise is weight bearing exercise. I swim, for example, every day, but that doesn't involve weight on my bones. However, squats and push ups and so forth are. And they strengthen your bones as well as your muscles, which means you're less likely to break a bone if you do fall or otherwise hurt yourself. Stronger people live longer. They used hand grip as a proxy for overall strength, partly because almost every exercise requires hand grip. Like if you're going to do chin ups and pull ups, you, you need strong hands to hold your whole body weight up with. If you're going to lift weights, you have to hold them with your hands. And so people with strong hands generally were strong all over, and people with very, very weak hands generally were weak all over. And they were 50% more likely to die because they can't hold a walker, they can't open a doorknob. This level of weakness means someone else has to look after you all the time. You do not want to end up there. Now, lifting a heavy thing and putting it down again will not help you with your stamina. Right? For that, you need to do something that makes you a little out of breath. Just level, nothing more than that. But do it for quite a while. The Canadian government would be super happy if you did that for 20 minutes a day, 150 minutes a week. I know that doesn't math, but there you go. That's what they say. But study after study has shown that any amount helps. Okay, that 20 minutes every other day is better than nothing. That 10 minutes every other day is better than Nothing. That five minutes twice a week is still better than nothing. Do something that gets you a little bit out of breath. And they've shown that adult neurogenesis, which is making new connections in your brain, is improved by sustained aerobic exercise. Aerobic meaning you have to breathe heavily to do it. So when you lift something heavy, you're probably holding your breath. But if you think about walking up stairs or going on a brisk hike, you're breathing firmly the whole time. That's what helps you build new neurons, which makes sense. Like if you were chasing some prey and you worked really hard and you ran and ran and ran, and in the end you either got it or you didn't. Now would be a great time to learn Right from that experience. So it makes sense that we're wired up to learn better after we've been exerting ourselves for a while. People with none or mild cognitive impairment who had moderate exercise had less chance of that mild cognitive impairment getting worse. And they could actually improve cognitive function in people over 50, regardless of whether it was good or bad at the beginning. So that's not just aerobic, but also resistance, meaning lifting heavy things, any kind of exercise help to improve cognitive function. And then when you do these stamina type things, little molecules called messengers go out into your blood and do stuff. You probably have heard of some of these myokines, dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin. These are all things that make you feel happy, especially dopamine. Most of us are slightly addicted to dopamine, and serotonin really helps you to learn. If you're young, you probably don't think flexibility and balance matter, but it can sneak up on you that you're stiff. It can sneak up on you that you trip and fall instead of just having a stumble and keeping going. And this generally will not improve from just something you happen to be doing. So if you ride your bike to work, or you go for hikes all the time, or you're, I don't know, an avid squash player or something, you can get your stamina type exercise. But for flexibility, you're going to probably have to do stretching exercises. For balance, you're going to have to practice balancing and pulling yourself on and off of balance. If you build a habit now, it will stick with you and you will stay flexible throughout your life. And boy, oh boy, are you going to need it eventually to reach things, to not fall, to catch yourself on a railing, you know, to not sprain an ankle or strain a wrist. I've taught stretching exercises to a lot of people, and the number one thing they say is, hey, this is pleasant. Because, like, if you're not an exerciser, you know, feel the burn, no pain, no gain. But imagine someone waking up in bed and going, well, that's all stretching exercises is. Okay, that feels nice. And then afterwards you feel better, you stand a little taller, right? So you're just deliberately doing like this arm, then this leg, maybe bending over, standing up again, it's not unpleasant at all. And you can kind of carry that enjoyment through your day. To get specific about wrists, because most of us are worried about our wrists at one point in time or another. Show of hands. If you sleep like this, with your hands under your chin and your wrists Curled up like shrimp. Who does that? Yeah. So that's the number one actual cause of carpal tunnel. Never mind typing or working a cash register. If you sleep with your hands all curled up like that, you'll have wrist problems. And if you can teach yourself to keep your wrists flat, I tucked mine under the pillow. Then suddenly my wrist problems evaporated and I went from having a sore wrist almost every day to like, once or twice a year. I'd be like, oh, my wrist is kind of sore today. I must be overdoing it. You can buy braces, and if you do, because I did, it says, wear this to sleep. Okay. They don't expect you to wear it while you're typing. It interferes with your movements too much. But it's a way to keep your wrists flat while you sleep. So if you can keep them flat without buying the brace while you're ahead of the game. Scott Hanselman, very wise man, says, you only have so many keystrokes in your hands and wrists to last you your whole life. Do not waste some of them on people who are wrong on the Internet. It's good advice, not just for your wrists, but you know what? Like, if you think your mouse is hurting you, your keyboard is hurting you, you'd better off with a trackball. Like, I'm not going to argue. Absolutely. That is cheap compared to what you're potentially facing if you can't type anymore. So do feel free to play with hardware. It can hurt to get older, metaphorically, but also just literally, things do ache. Sometimes People have, like, a bad knee that hurts when it's rainy and all that kind of. That's all true. I'm sorry. So if you are experiencing some short term, literal pain, please understand there are no medals for pain. The only time doctors have ever had an opinion about me and painkillers was to tell me off for not taking them. I remember sitting in a doctor's office rubbing my leg while we were talking, and he's like, why are you rubbing your leg? I'm not. He's like, yes, you are. It hurts, doesn't it? No, no, it's fine, really. Like, painkillers have been invented to kill pain as a temporary thing. Take them. Here's a weird thing. There's about a dozen drugs that, for reasons that literally nobody really gets right now, are associated with aging. Well, one of them is a diabetes drug called Metformin. People on Metformin do better than people who are not on Metformin, even after accounting for the diabetes part. If they're on a different diabetes drug. Or if they have uncontrolled diabetes, you could say, well, it's just a better drug. But it just seems like no matter what, people who are on metformin experience less aging problems. And naproxen, which is an anti inflammatory, is also on that list. People who take a fair amount of naproxen are aging better even though you think like, well, they're in pain all the time and taking painkillers, so they shouldn't be. But inflammation is a relatively dangerous thing. So if you are in pain and you want to take an anti inflammatory, don't think of yourself as like, oh, I'm so weak, I'm such a fool, I have to rely on this crutch to live my life and instead think this pain is a symptom of inflammation in my body and I'm going to suppress the inflammation and feel better now. And you're actually, probably actually helping longer term. You're unfortunately back to exercising as a way to reduce that joint and muscle pain. And it really does work and make you more flexible too. But many of us started working from home during the pandemic and never looked back. But if you think about those early days when you suddenly had to work from home, what did you decide to sit on? Like just some random chair that was kicking around your home, maybe even at like a dining chair or something. And some of you might be sitting at a desk and some of you might have some like dresser that used to be in the basement or something, like a lot of substandard equipment being used. And if you're still using some really non ergonomic equipment, do think about your back and your knees and your wrists and think about investing in chairs, desks, wrist rests, whatever that help to keep you more comfortable. People were concerned about hearing and so they should be. People who only have a small hearing loss may not know they have a small hearing loss, but they don't always follow what's happening in the meeting. And like the person who can't quite read the diagram, they figure they'll pick it up from context later. Sometimes they just pull back. I'm just going to let them talk. I can't really follow. I'm just going to let them deal with this. It's generally not a great thing to do at work or in your social life. And I'm not going to go there because I won't be able to hear anything anybody's saying. It's going to maybe lead to you feeling isolated and left out. So you should get your hearing checked again fairly regularly. The pace depends on your current age. You can't get it back. When it's gone, it's gone. You can, however, get hearing aids. And for those who don't know, hearing aids are not like those cheater glasses, just simple magnifiers, okay? They have a ton of software in them and they actually pick out, say, conversation over background noise, that kind of thing. And they even are optimized by what language you would like to listen to. And they really are more than just magnifying the sounds you can't hear anymore. But the key, of course, is prevention. Minimize the really loud noises that you put into your ears. Wear ear protection, whether that's earplugs or the full on over the ear muffy things, as much as you can. I wear earplugs, for example, on the plane. I don't need to hear any of those noises whatsoever. And I sleep better and I have less headaches and it's all generally positive. And you know when you're turning the volume up on your phone and there's that dialogue about how you shouldn't go up above, whatever, because. And you just. That's actually a good, valid, true dialogue. Don't crank your headphones too loud. Health in general. Most people who were young on my survey didn't really worry much about catching the flu or some other infection or about, you know, straining their wrist or breaking their ankle. Every single person I know who died over the age of 90 died of a lung infection, a respiratory infection, 100%. Your families may have other things, but that's the deal in my family. And overall, that's what you're probably going to die of. Heart attacks and strokes happen younger. When you get up to be old, it's about respiratory infections or falling, breaking something, losing your mobility because of what you've broken, and then losing your independence. And it all kind of, I'm sorry, it goes downhill from there. If you have more muscles, you're less likely to fall in the first place. You have the strength maybe in your core to pull yourself back up, or you have the strength in your arm to catch yourself and not fall. But you're also more likely to recover because of that immune system effect. So prevention is really key here. You know, wearing sensible shoes, holding a railing, even if there's people watching who might be like, oh, look who's holding the railing. Do it anyway. Vaccinations. Had this conversation just this week. A lot of people don't know there are Vaccinations that adults are supposed to be getting every 10 years or so. So talk to your doctor. You're not done. When you turn 8, stay vaccinated. If you're sick, mask. That's to be polite to other people. If you're in crowds, mask. That's for your own protection. And wash your hands. You know, in the early days of COVID we thought hand washing was going to save us. It turned out to be completely irrelevant to Covid, but we eliminated a whole strain of flu. Like that flu is gone because for a year, the whole world was washing their hands constantly. And that's what happened. So that's pretty cool. Why would we stop doing that and go back to, like, ah, whatever, Just touch everything. Just lick all the light switches. You may feel like you don't need checkups if you're a healthy person. But establishing baselines for later measurements can indicate whether something's changing slowly or quickly and how much it is to worry about. So get screened. Include in the slightly uncomfortable and embarrassing screenings. I'm not going to list them for you. Get things done. This is another part of aging may not have occurred to some of this room, but half of us are going to go through this. And it can start in your 40s, depending on your exact definition of perimenopause. So it can go on for a long time. And I could do two hours on it. I'm not going to. I'm just going to tell you this. It's not funny. The person who's going through it is welcome to make jokes. But if you find yourself ready to make a really smart and witty remark at someone, like, if they take their sweater off and you're like, oh, is that a hot flash? Please don't do that. There's a couple reasons for it. First of all, like, you should really not tease anybody about anything. But when your thermometer control is not working and you desperately need to take some clothes off, if someone embarrasses you, which makes you flush, the resulting double whammy is physically painful. I mean, I used to think, like, am I actually bleeding? Is there? No. No drops of blood. Okay. But that's what it felt like. So save your charmingly funny teasings for some different thing. If you're in charge of office policies, dress codes that make it wrong to take your sweater off are not helpful. But also, people don't talk about it as much. But there's a ton of sleep disturbances associated with menopause also. And so flexible hours that let somebody get up and put in a bunch of time in the middle of the night if they're not sleeping, and then some other day not come in because they hadn't slept. Like, those really help. And you want to develop some habits as young as you can and stick with them your whole life. Please don't smoke, please. And I say this as a melanoma survivor, please wear sunscreen. Okay? And even better, hats. Sunscreen washes off, sweats off, has to be reapplied. Hats don't have that. Plus they protect your eyes and sunscreen does not. So please be careful with your skin. It is a big deal. If you're going to drink alcohol, don't drink a lot of it. Like, if you must have poisoned, you don't have to have poison every day and don't have a lot of poison. Just have a little bit of poison at a time. Water is great. I see less of this in Europe than I see in North America. The whole like, oh, ding, time to drink a liter of water. Don't do that. There's no benefit to that. Learn how to drink when you're thirsty and drink when you're thirsty. And if someone tells you that coffee or wine or Coca Cola don't count because they contain diuretics, you know that's nonsense. You all have some relative who all they drink is whiskey and tea, right? And they're alive. Those things are a little bit diuretic. You will lose some of the water you've taken in, but not to the extent that it was like not drinking. Okay, so drink something you like to drink. Water is a great choice, but it's not the only choice. I mentioned before that you want to eat vegetables to help your eyes, also fruit. But I want to tell you a story about studies. So in the 60s, they were doing these things about vitamin C and they compared people who ate a lot of vitamin C and people who didn't eat so much vitamin C. And the people who ate a lot of vitamin C were so much healthier. Cancer, heart disease, stroke, on any measure, they were just healthy, healthy, healthy. And they tried changing people's diets, like literally giving people free vegetables and then monitoring them. And they got healthier. And they were like, wow, this is amazing. This is the rise of public health. We're going to make everybody healthy and happy. And eventually they isolated vitamin C and they started giving people vitamin C pills. And they couldn't repro all the studies. They repro'd some, but most would not have the same effect with the vitamin C. Pill because it turns out the fiber in the fruit and veg was, was actually causing most of those marvelous effects. So your apple juice, your orange juice and your vitamin C pill, probably not as good as eating an apple, eating an orange and, I don't know, have a glass of water. Ultra processed food is a spectrum, right? So an apple is not processed apple sauce. Okay? It's cooked. Took the seeds out, it's processed a little bit. Ultra smooth apple puree in a foil pouch with artificial strawberry flavor and extra sugar. Not quite. Right. We're on to the ultra processed end. A piece of meat versus a sausage versus a hot dog which has been emulsified. And again, it's got maybe extra salt and extra fat added to make it taste nicer. Depends where you live. Some places it's still pretty pure even when it's gone through a lot of processing. In some places, not so much. So you are the one in charge of defining what is ultra processed. But try to stay on the less processed end of the scale. Don't work too hard. You know, they say nobody ever sat on their deathbed. Boy, I wish I'd spent more time at the office. But also don't obsess on any of this, right? Everything in moderation, including moderation. Now, in my survey, I asked about age discrimination. We talked a little bit about workplace environments that are just not right for bodies that are getting older. But people told me about a bunch of other things too. They said they didn't ask me if I wanted to learn it or not. They just assumed I couldn't. Everybody said if I was any good, I would be a manager by now. And that by not being a manager, I was hurting my brand and making people think I wasn't a good programmer and shouldn't be listened to. More than one person told me about going through a hiring process through emails and voice calls. And then when they got on a video call over, no more interest because they saw their hair. And then there's the old, we don't think you'd be a culture fit. We know what that really means. We think you're too old. And men and women alike told me that it's worse for women that men occasionally get the distinguished card, they occasionally get the experienced card, and women almost never do. Now, if you work in a really small company, then you may not be that person in their 60s. You're just Kate or whoever. In a bigger company, people are more likely to be clumping you into arbitrary categories. However, bigger companies sometimes offer technical ladders where you can become distinguished and senior and all of that in your technical preference. This is also why some people go into consulting. Because when you're 63, people are like, why would I send you on a course? How much longer are you even going to be here for me to benefit from that course? But when you're coming in from outside, they're like, wow, 63, you must know a lot. So something to think about. But also, what if you are those other people? What if you think old people can't learn? What if you think old people aren't a good culture fit? What if you think running up four flights of stairs is a really important part of your software development process? You don't want to hire people who can't do that. I'm not going to tell you that that's mean and wrong. I'm going to tell you what's in it for you. If you think being old is horrible, you will have a horrible old age. And I don't just mean that you'll be sad and lonely. Like, they gathered people up according to whether or not they believed negative stereotypes about old age. And the most negative people, they had a higher chance of having a heart attack or a stroke. That's not about emotions. Their hearts gave out. And a 50% greater chance of being hospitalized later compared to people who think positively about aging. Now, why there's suggestions of stress, valid. But there's also suggestions that if you think it's all just a 30 year slide to the grave. As soon as you can't do something, you're like, well, I can't do that. And your world is going to shrink and shrink and shrink and shrink and you're going to have a horrible old age. But if you think, hey, I can learn a way to do that, I can adapt this to be something I can still do, I still have a lot to contribute. You feel really positive about being older. You, you're going to have less stress, less misery, and you will end up with a healthier old age. So your mind for me, like, I could lie in bed and work, but I gotta be able to remember things. I gotta be able to think, this is how I make my living. So the idea that it would be slipping away from me and maybe I wouldn't even notice, it's not inevitable. Like, I saw something recently that said people who are 90, one in three of them have dementia. 90, okay, two in three do not. And that's 90, not 52, right? At 80, it's one in five. So 80% do not have dementia. It is not inevitable that you're going to lose your faculties. People worry because, you know, you go somewhere and then you're like, wait, why am I here? Like, not just like philosophy, but like, why did I come to the basement? I don't know. Then you go back upstairs, then you remember why you came to the basement. I mean, it's a real phenomenon. Sometimes if this is happening to you a lot, it's actually that you can't read the list. You didn't hear what the person asked you to get, but you hoped you'd figure it out when you got there. Or you're not sleeping properly. So you start with the physical things and then you build habits and you build routines and you build checklists and you build process. And these things help you a little more reassured and a little less likely to forget. Not a simple 27 step procedure that, like, try to smooth things out and make things easier so you don't have to remember that you're on step 14 when the phone rings and you get interrupted. Many people say that there's a phase in their life when they can multitask and a phase in their life when they need to stop doing that and focus on one thing at a time. Just put the resources they have on what they're doing. I know that for a long time I would listen to conference talks and I would alt tab away and do something else. Sorting emails, doom scrolling Twitter, whatever. And then if I could tell by what the person was talking about that maybe there was code on the screen or a diagram, I'd flip back and I'd look for a little while and then I'd go back to whatever I was doing and I was processing and I was listening until I wasn't. Until I was like, what? Wait, who said anything about modules? And it's like I have to rewind. So now what I do is I watch those videos at a faster speed. Fast enough that I can only follow if that's all I'm doing. I have to look at the screen. I need the extra cues of the words on the slide. I have to listen closely. Now, I can't flip away because it takes all my processing power to listen. But guess what? I listen to the whole talk. And in less time, right from watching it at 1.5 speed. I don't need a whole hour to watch an hour talk. So think about ways to maybe not multitask. Maybe over the course of your life it's come to you that you might have ADHD because You met someone who has adhd or you might be on the autism spectrum because you met someone who's on the autism spectrum. I think it's a really good bet that a lot of us identify with that. But even if you haven't thought about it for yourself, you probably know some people. Those people are rich in coping techniques. How can you get stuff done when your brain doesn't help you get stuff done? Oh, they can tell you things that would never have occurred to you. So search the Internet, talk to friends, whatever. There are tons of techniques out there to help you cope with. I can't remember more than three steps at a time. Or if I'm trying to do a 10 step process, I always stop before I finish. Or whatever your particular issue might be. You've probably seen ads for those games where you're matching colors or finding words or whatever, and they claim they help you. You do get better at the games, but you don't get better at any other measure of your processing power. Okay, does not help. What does help is reading for fun or any kind of learning you enjoy. You could learn to paint, you could learn to stand up paddleboard, you could read fiction. Like, that's all fine. And that will actually help all your overall processing power. So if your family is forbidden from giving you more books, maybe lift that and let them give you more books and take some time and read them. And I'm not talking about chores. Like, I have to learn another programming language because you get enough of that at work. Many people complain that it's keeping up with new stuff, keeping up with new stuff. And maybe not even for any good reason. Just like, oh, we're moving to a whole new paradigm because we been in this paradigm for eight years, so it's time for another one. You know, you could learn it if you wanted to. That's usually not the issue. If you're in your 50s or 60s or 70s and you're like, I don't feel like learning git. It's really not about git, right? We know how to learn. We know how to quickly skim over things and connect it to things that we know from before. Oh, this is just like the stuff we used back when I was in university. For many of us, we have an identity. Like, I don't do web things. I'm a desktop person, I'm a C person. I don't want your dumb web stuff. Don't talk to me about that. Well then you're resisting moving to new things if you're able to Embrace that change could be new language, could be new frameworks, could be new paradigms, tools, new ways of thinking, and define your identity by what you achieve, what you get done, whose problems you solve, rather than by the tools you get that done with. Then actually learning the tools is really not the hard part. People worried, they said they would be grumpy, they'd be impatient, they'd be cynical, be distractible. Many people, I think, had a. A specific person in mind. You know, I don't want to be like that person. But just like the dementia, it is not inevitable. People who are sweet and generous when they're 20 are sweet and generous generally when they are 80. Okay, one caveat. It's easy to be warm and generous and kind and giving when you have what you need. It is very hard to do those things when you are living hand to mouth. When you're worried you're going to lose your home, when you've lost everyone you cared about and not been able to make any new people to be supportive around, then that person would be pretty grumpy because they're miserable. So the planning that you lay down early in your life to ensure a comfortable old age gives you that space from which to be generous and warm. But if you're not nice now, you're not going to magically get hit with a nice wand later. Okay? So if you wish you were nicer, start being nicer. You don't need a license. Sleeping is the best debugger there is. We all know this. It is also when we actually heal cuts and scrapes and strains and all that kind of stuff. It's normal to need more as you get older. It's also normal to need less. There's no good or bad. The people who need more are not lazy. My mother, I told you, she's 88. She sets an alarm every day for six. Why are you doing that? I'm not some lazy slugabed who stays, you know, in bed till 8 or 9. Like, I had nothing to do all day. Like, okay, I do. Some people need more, some people need less. You're not virtuous if you need less. And you're not lazy if you need more. Get as much as you need. They did a study where they helped people get better sleep. One month of good sleep made people feel six years younger and just two nights of bad sleep made them feel four and a half years older. Okay, so get the sleep you need. We have a saying in our house. It's not always thing one. This came about when I was busy dying of cancer. Don't worry, I got better. But anything that I was experiencing was like, oh, maybe my tumors are back. Whatever you're coping with. Cancer, diabetes, being 63, being 88. Not everything that happens to you is caused by that. Okay, you can still hurt your knee, right? I went. I went to my doctor. Boy, my knee is really bad. Like, it's always been kind of bad, but it's really bad. And she did a few things. She's like, you injured your knee. People injure their knees. You can go and get this fixed. Oh, okay. There's a concept. People catch viruses, okay? Like, these are things that happen. So you don't just go, well, you know, I'm old, so I'm in pain all the time. That's normal. That's how you live. I guess I can't think. I guess I can't do that thing. It's not always caused by being old or whatever your thing one is, and you can develop. I gave this talk at the end of July, and I've come to realize in the intervening less than two months, I have a food allergy I didn't used to have. And I've stopped eating that food, and I feel so much better. And I'm like, yeah, duh. It's not always thing one. You can get new conditions and new allergies and new all kinds of things. So don't assume that this is just an inevitable thing. Oh, well, I'm older. No, not necessarily. Now. I talked about making plans, and it's very important to make plans, but you have to know that you don't always get to fulfill those plans. Stuff does happen. The phone rings, there's a knock at the door, and you have to cope with something. I've watched other people cope with lots of different things, and I've coped with lots of different things myself. You have no idea how important it is to have a base of resources, literally, to have the physical strength to be able to, say, stay up all night by someone's bedside in the hospital, to have the emotional strength to help somebody through something. Very difficult to have a line of credit. I knew some people whose house burned down and the emergency services put them in a nasty hotel, and they didn't have any money for anything better, and they had to live in this really nasty place. Whereas if you had a line of credit, you might say, you know what? We're going to stay in this different hotel, which costs some money. But it's not nasty having money, having assets that's okay, my car works. That's okay. I have a second car. Like whatever. These things occasionally become very important, as do skills. The ability to search for things on the Internet. The ability to have a persuasive conversation with some kind of a gatekeeper. You build these skills up over your whole life and you never know when they're going to step to the fore and be super useful because something else is suddenly on your schedule. And look, here's the thing. There's loss ahead for all of us. You are going to go to funerals. Companies are going to close. Maybe you liked working for them, maybe you liked buying things from them. Whatever, they're gone. You'll lose friends. They may move away, they may change in a way that you can't be friends with them anymore. They may tell you that you've done that. You're going to lose some people. They're going to stop making your favorite ice cream. Yeah, it's true. There'll be something you really like doing, like, I don't know, mountain climbing or free skiing or something that you no longer have the physical ability eventually to do. The only cure for loss is gain. And this is a line from Joni Mitchell. She wrote this in her twenties so you would think, what does she know about life? But by then she had moved from the middle of Canada to the biggest city, Toronto, had a baby, married someone partly for her career and partly to get the baby out of foster care, divorced him when it turned out he wasn't interested in the baby. Given the then toddler up for adoption, moved to New York, then moved to California. Then she wrote this song. So okay, maybe she doesn't know a little bit about loss and gain. But much later she had an aneurysm that left her unable to walk or talk. And she's fought her way back from that to stand on a stage and sing this line and boy, then you really feel it. But here's the deal. Loss happens to you. Gain, you do. You're going to have to gain something every day, but that's on you. So get out there and make some new friends. That's the best thing to do. Many of us make our friends at work, but as our working days wind down or we've been working with the same people for a really long time, that becomes not such a rich place in order to make new friends. So you're going to want friends who are a whack younger than you. If you are 85, your 86 year old friend cannot help you carry in your Heavy groceries or open the pickle jar for you, but your 60 year old friend can, or your 40 year old friend and they'll appreciate your wisdom. It'll be fine. So if you're 20, please go out and make friends with someone who's 30 or 40 years older than you. And if someone who is currently 30 or 40 years younger than you is at least 20, let's not start befriending 4 year olds. Start making some younger friends. You can make friends through your hobbies in your own neighborhood and even find out that that cousin who you see every other year at the Big Family G is kind of an interesting person whose company you enjoy. Could happen and try new stuff, right? New things to do, new things to watch, new things to play, new things to eat, new people, new places to go. They won't all stick, but some will. And that's where your gains are going to come from. I like this quote all the more because of who it's from. If you're old enough to know who Ingrid Bergman is, she says getting old is like climbing a mountain. You're a little out of breath, but the view is so much better. And there are good things about getting really older. Most of us have more time and more money. We've had some raises, we've stopped buying certain things. After a while you're like, that couch is fine, right? If you had kids, you're at least not paying for daycare. And you may not even be feeding them anymore. They play Fleetwood Mac in the grocery store now. Sometimes people look at you and think, that person is probably a force to be reckoned with. And they would be correct. So that can help. You can kind of get away with stuff. I remember going into the bank when they first brought in, you know, the cards where you had to sign into your card to do anything. And the guy in front of me, I'm waiting and the teller says, could you put your card in the reader, sir? Oh, I don't hold with that nonsense. And the cashier is like, what? And some other cashier comes over, presumably, you know, that's old Mr. Whoever and we know him and it's fine, just give him his money, right? You can get away with stuff. Be like, I'm not learning, git. If you guys want my files, you can come and get them. You'd be amazed what works. Partly because you're not scared. Like, what are you going to do, fire me? I'm not even sure if I want to be here anymore, right? And also, like reorg, do you know how many reorgs I've seen? It's not going to be that bad. They don't have power over you. As you get older, you have built up those resources, you have built up those strengths. You don't tower. And if you want to quit stuff, you don't need a good reason. If you're 23 and you've been doing something for five years, you know, you might want to move into a new phase of your life. I'm an adult now, but people will be like, no, we really need you. You're the only one who. Blah, blah, blah. If you're 63 and you've been doing something for 50 years and you don't want to do it anymore, people are like, yeah, it was a good run. They don't argue, so take advantage of that. My overall advice to you is this. I'm sorry again. I really am. But you got to exercise for your body, for your brain. Build up money. Not to the extent that you don't do anything now. You should enjoy your life now, but you want to want those resources eventually. Eat well. Look after your body. It is not your enemy. And make friends. Keep making friends. Don't stop. And find a purpose and a reason for what you're doing. No matter how young you are. It is not too soon. But also, I swear, it's also never too late to be a happy and healthy aging programmer. Thank you. We don't officially have time for questions, but you're welcome to come up and talk to me one on one. Thank you. No code.