Staying Sharp and Staying Moving: Notes on Getting Older

Keep your mind and your body moving at all times

I want to talk a little bit about keeping yourself mentally and physically fit as an older person. Let’s be honest: the body starts failing you, and there isn’t a lot of time on your hands. That’s not because you’re lazy — it’s because of everything else pulling at you. Work. Extended family. A spouse, kids, maybe even grandchildren. Fitness, in both senses, has to compete for whatever time is left.

Staying mentally fit

For me, mental fitness has always come down to one thing: going deeper into whatever subject grabs me. There’s a touch of ADHD in my family — something we only figured out later in life — and once I understood that a little better, a lot of my own habits made more sense. I don’t think of it as a disorder. It’s just how I’m wired. I get interested in something, or even a little frightened by it, and I want to know.

My mom likes to tell the family that she got so tired of fielding questions from me and my brother that she bought us an encyclopedia — and I read every volume, cover to cover, over the course of my childhood.

So when the internet came along and information exploded, I was in my element. We all know what happened next, too — a flood of disinformation and content deliberately designed to mislead. It got harder to tell what was true. But it also got easier to strip away the noise and find sources worth trusting, if you knew what to look for.

More recently, AI has become a genuinely interesting tool for me — both as someone who’s just curious about the world, and in my day job as a software engineer. That deserves its own post, so I’ll leave it there for now.

Staying physically fit

Now for the harder half. One of the biggest challenges as we get older is that we simply can’t work out the way we used to — our bodies can’t take the punishment, and recovery takes a lot longer. I think that’s the real reason competitive athletes eventually have to walk away from their sport: not that they’ve lost the skill, but that they can’t put in the preparation anymore.

Over time I’ve developed one trick that’s actually made a real difference, and it connects back to that same attention-span issue I mentioned earlier. I’ll also admit something else here: I’ve struggled with anxiety, with “future-tripping,” and with catastrophizing things before they’ve even happened. Applied to exercise, that means when I think about working out, my mind jumps straight to all the effort I’m about to have to put in. I lose touch with the payoff — the part that actually feels good.

For most of my life I’ve studied rhetorical devices and logical fallacies, both formal and informal. I’ve talked to my son, who’s 18 now, about how important it is to understand how people construct arguments — and how people try to manipulate each other with them.

Here’s the twist: it turns out you can manipulate yourself with a logical fallacy, on purpose, for your own good. The one I use is the sunk cost fallacy.

If you’re not familiar with it, the sunk cost fallacy is a common error in reasoning where, instead of judging a decision on its actual future value, you let yourself be swayed by how much you’ve already invested — time, money, effort — in getting to this point. You keep going not because it still makes sense, but because you’ve already put so much in.

Here’s how I use that against my own resistance to exercise. Instead of confronting the decision “should I work out today?” as one big, effort-loaded question, I break it down into its smallest, most concrete steps. Get out of bed. Take off the pajamas. Put on workout clothes. Walk to the gym, or step outside. Each one of those is small and undemanding on its own — nobody dreads putting on socks. But once I’ve done two or three of them, I’ve already sunk cost into the process. Quitting now would mean the getting-dressed part was for nothing, and that’s usually enough to carry me the rest of the way into an actual workout.

It’s a small trick, but it works because it sidesteps the part of my brain that wants to catastrophize the whole effort up front. By the time that part of my brain notices what’s happening, I’m already at the gym.

If you’ve got a mind that likes to future-trip the way mine does, it might be worth trying on yourself too.