How To Stay Young At Heart Forever

Japanese snow monkeys taught me a lesson about aging well.

The monkeys were cute and clever, but that wasn’t what mattered in my high school animal behavior class. A young female monkey washed her potatoes in the sea before eating them. No other monkey had done this before. Soon many copied her. 

All except the older monkeys, who refused to change.

Whether a monkey would salt a potato in the sea or not was a generational fault line. I’m guessing this was insurance against a new behavior wiping out  the species.

I’ve never forgotten that lesson in behavioral conservatism. I vowed to resist an old monkey mindset as I aged. The survival of our species depends on things more complex than salting potatoes. But we can strive to overcome generational fault lines and stay young mentally.

How to eat potatoes when you’re an elder? 

Go out of your way to read contemporary fiction written by people in their twenties. Fiction drops you into someone else’s head and into their world. It develops compassion.

Deliberately consume media geared to a different  psychographic. Reading Teen Vogue today shows me how different the world is today from the time I read Seventeen magazine in the ’70s.

Watch things that weren’t around when you were young, like E-Sports, and all the newly designated Olympic sports. 

Read more about new business forms — you can apply your life experience to new trends like Bitcoin, the creator economy or No Code (whatever that is, need to look it up!).

If something seems stupid or doesn’t make sense, that’s a sure sign to be curious. Find out who loves it and why. If you ban judginess, you will be open to learning new things and stay forever a young monkey at heart.

Photo credit: Kevin Goodrich on Unsplash