Age, Decline and Memory

Issue #52

This is not a political post.

Recently I played tennis. It didn’t go well.

I had played a bit growing up, but it was more of a spectator sport for me (with cricket as my first, second and third love). And I certainly didn’t have the benefit of coaching.

But in American suburbia there tends to be an abundance of largely empty, high-quality tennis courts (except now they’ve been pickled). So, I spent a decent amount of time hacking away at tennis balls with friends. How good was my game? Let’s just say I consistently walloped the tape on top of the net (which, I came to realize later, is what happens with flat, topspin-less shots). ????????

Then I found a coach (my friend Arvind). With his coach also chipping in, my (lack of) game was broken down and reconstructed over a period of many months. It took a lot of effort, practice and patience. But finally, I could display some deft hand(i)work (fore and back), and sometimes even get all components of a serve to work together well enough to smoothly bang it in.

I didn’t play often enough to get consistency – but after four years I was thrilled with my sweet strokes. I daresay my friends, and most importantly my coach, also agreed.

Then came the pandemic that shut everything down. By the time things opened up, I had moved on from tennis – and here we are four years later with me on the court with three boys aged 18-23 who had all played high school tennis.

It was ugly.

Even though only one of them was an active player (and luckily, he was on my side of the net), I was distressed by how badly I played. It wasn’t just the lack of those sweet strokes. It was also the inability to reach balls or generate power, and the general lack of hand-eye coordination.

At this point you’re thinking, “Of course, dummy, you hadn’t played in four years! What did you expect?”

True. But my ego would argue that I’m a fit guy who played a lot of sports in my day, blah, blah, blah. And then . . . memory enters the scene. ?

Memory researchers will wax eloquent about how tricky and slippery memory can be. In my mind’s eye, I see and feel my silky, one-handed backhand (Fed-like my memory proclaims). I don’t remember the awful hacks and complete misses, just the effortless contact and propulsive topspin carrying the ball over the rapidly backpedaling opponent. ?

From actuarial tables to naked eyes there’s confirmation of my decline over just four years. But my memory sings the siren songs of my finest moments, deluding me into thinking that all I have to do is to step back on court to recreate that magic. My memory doesn’t want to admit that reality is a grainy, tattered, black-and-white film, not the 4K Ultra HD it has in storage. ?

In his wonderful book, Scale, Geoffrey West outlines the metronomic decline in various physical abilities over time. For example, lung capacity peaks in the mid-twenties and monotonically declines ever after (which is why I can’t get to balls I could before). Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity) and others have discussed the consistent, yearly loss of muscle mass and bone density from our thirties forward. ?????

If this can happen with physical skill, can it happen with mental skill? Of course.

If this can happen in one’s fifties, should we think it won’t happen much more precipitously in one’s eighties? To borrow a famous presidential exasperation: “C’mon man!”

?

End Notes

The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard famously said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards.” Unfortunately, memory and pride muck up that first part pretty badly even if one is the most powerful person in the world. ??

#age, #memory, #insight, #learning