The Douglas Adams Principle

There’s a great quote from Douglas Adams’ posthumous final novel, The Salmon of Doubt:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

This is applicable to a lot of things - politics, say. There’s a common stereotype that people become more conservative as they age. Logically we could see most people becoming more politically aware in their late teens/twenties, and then seeing those new politics as the way forward. As they become older, newer innovations just seem wrong. I think I recall Paul Krugman saying on a podcast that older members of the Federal Reserve are more opposed to keeping interest rates low, because they remember the high interest rates of the ’70s. Younger members, who have never experienced high inflation, are more concerned about the labour market and willing to consider low rates in the longer term. Even though this seems like a simple, easily noticed cognitive bias, it can be hard to countermand.

In a more prosaic sense, I find as I get older that I am less and less interested in discovering new music. It isn’t that I think new music is less good; I just know enough music! And likewise, to a lesser extent, with TV and movies: I have enough to get by, I don’t need any more. Of course one could make an effort to overcome this, by constantly exposing oneself to new stuff, it just takes work - there are plenty of people who keep up with new gadgets or music well into old age. But it doesn’t seem worth it to most people. Perhaps in the political sphere the effort is more worthwhile.