The Endgame

Newsletter #32 - Get off my lawn!

Port Medway, Nova Scotia, July 23, 2023

Get off my lawn!

The other day, just as I turned 79, my wife sent me a link to an article in The Atlantic by Faith Hill. It’s about how personality changes in old age. It refers to the “stereotype that older people are grumpy shut-ins—withering away inside while yelling at some kid to get off their lawn.” (Why on earth would my wife send me a link to this article?)

Hill argues that when people lose the ability to control their personal circumstances they adapt to their loss by evolving. Psychological studies, she says, show that after the age of 60 “people seem to decrease, on average, in openness to experience, conscientiousness, and extroversion—particularly a subcategory of extroversion called ‘social vitality.’ And neuroticism tends to increase, especially closer to the end of one’s life.”

But it’s not all bad news.  Personality changes don’t always result from a sense of helplessness or an endlessly shrinking life. Hill writes, “Research has shown that when people get older, they commonly recalibrate their goals; though they might be doing less, they tend to prioritize what they find meaningful and really appreciate it. A decline in openness to experience, then, could reflect someone relishing their routine rather than seeking new thrills; a decline in extroversion could indicate that they’re satisfied spending time with the people they already love.”

I’ve got a bit of a different take on this. Generally speaking I don’t think that personality changes or evolves much during old age. What happens, for better or worse, is that you become freer to express your essential nature, a nature that hitherto has been largely suppressed. In old age, with a bit of luck, most people are able to cast off the mitigating and constraining circumstances that plagued them for most of their life—the demands of the work place, the need to earn a living, the desire to make their way in the world, the pressure to meet unreasonable social and career expectations that others impose on them, the necessity of resumé building, the wish to be well thought of by their fellow citizens. In old age, largely free from these constraints, they can present themselves as they really are and have always been.

Want to yell at that kid to get off your lawn? If you’re an old person, go right ahead. Who cares if folks think you’re some kind of nut? (Note that this advice to act as you wish does not apply if you’re a psychopath. And, of course, it assumes a modicum of economic security, good health, and other favourable circumstances. Not everyone, even in old age, is free to be themselves.)

There’s a tangential issue of basic identity here. What makes you the person you are? Do humans have a core, immutable being?

I’ve sometimes puzzled over those stories that pop up from time to time about someone convicted of a horrible crime committed decades ago. In June, 2022, Josef Schütz, age 101, a former Nazi concentration camp guard, was sentenced by a German court to five years in prison for complicity in murders at Sachsenhausen between 1942 and 1945. Did it make sense to hold Josef Schütz accountable for what “he” did 80 years ago? (Schütz, who worked for most of his life as a farmer and a locksmith, died this spring.) Who was Josef Schütz?

Virtually all the cells in a human body are replaced every seven to ten years. Personalities and characters are transformed over time. Memories fade and die. Are we, in any sense, the person we were many years before? Or do we have an immutable personality and identity, that sometimes express themselves more than at other times, and for which we can always be held accountable?