Expanding networks and idea generation

With Adam out of town, I realized I needed to diversify my exercise portfolio, so I reached out to Daniel about walking. We did it this morning, setting out at around 9 from his place on the north side of the lake.

After a while the conversation wended its way around to the subject of meeting more people, seemingly random lunches and coffees, etc. He allowed that at the tender age of 61 or so, he was more or less done with meeting with no people for no particular purpose. On the one hand, I get it. At our age the novelty of that kind of encounter is pretty much played out and if it doesn't feel like it's worth the time, then fuck it.

On the other hand, there are relatively few ways for new ideas and new vectors to enter into our thought streams. We can read books and journalism, watch TV and movies, listen to music, etc. In an era of highly siloed lives which are further constrained by algorithms which replicate our innate tendencies to limit ourselves, the odds of seeing much that's novel is low. So there is some utility to meeting new people, even if they themselves tend to be more or less like us. At least they have independently firing brains and mouths, out of which something out of the ordinary might just issue.

Not long ago The Economist published an article about global demography which said, basically, that the long anticipated slowdown in global population growth was arriving sooner than anyone anticipated. The dancing numbers of Hans Rosling's TED talk all those years ago, which showed that as societies got richer, family sizes became smaller, were coming to pass sooner than expected. Which means that the world population was aging more quickly than expected. Which is not a bad thing from an ecological perspective but is not good from the perspective of innovation, since older people are poorer idea generators than younger people.

Which to me argues that we are better off fighting against our resistance to meeting new people as we age. If we don't meet more people, we doom ourselves to marinating in the same old ideas.