If you ever work for Google, you will find out that young people are very valued there, and even inexperienced people have more chance to get a job than senior people with 15 years of experience. This is not always understood, because people don’t realize that psychologically speaking, inexperience is not the only trait characterizing young people in companies. What happens deep down is that old people with lots of years of experience have a strong probability of becoming (excuse my language) an « old fart ».
It means that they often tend to say « It will never work », « it’s not serious » and « you don’t have enough years of experience to be able to do that ». The problem with these people is not just that they tend to avoid risk at all times and ossify their life force in ancient ideas and mental schemes, it’s also that they usually spread their fossilism to other people, like telling a junior that the brand new project he is working on « will never work », that they should imitate what experienced people did before because any deviation from sacred canon is a sign of « incompetence ».
Google didn’t become the company it is now thanks to proper adherence to sacred scriptures. Google became a top tech company because there, younglings full of novel ideas could freely express themselves in the wild without inquisitors hiding in every corner in order to ambush their hopes and projects. And google knows this, they know that if they let « old farts » spreading throughout their workforce, they will become a fossile company, unable to create new habits and ideals in tech, losing their global impact.
One of the most archetypal illustration of this is the late Leonardo Da Vinci. Leonardo would often have trouble fulfilling the commissions of Florentine nobility to make various art pieces. In the end, instead of becoming a reliable thus priced executor, he will slowly turn into a dependent protégé of patrons, allowing himself to freely paint when he wants instead of strictly adhering to deadlines, all the while enjoying safety. The main reason for this can be seen when he painted his famous masterpiece « The Last Supper ». While being commissioned to make it, he would actually exasperate and enrage his customer as one day he would work up from dusk till dawn without eating, and for the next 3 days he might not come painting at all. You might wonder what he would do during his leisure when he wouldn’t paint ? He actually explored so many new ways of artistic expressions and vast domains of knowledge, like biology, botany, optics, flying machines and even war instruments, in the small time window between mundanely enumerating his needed groceries, and recording all his current debtors. All of this because as a man who appreciated life and culture so much, both his art and thought were much more important than his social status or reputation. An even more spectacular example, was when he created his magnum opus, the Mona Lisa; it was an order from a famous noble to make a portrait of his wife. But while the painting was supposed to take 3 years to be completed, Leonardo, being overly unsatisfied and extremely perfectionist, would instead keep painting and sometimes even rectify already achieved features of the « Joconde » for over 15 years up until his death, definitely neglecting the previously guaranteed remuneration of his customer. That’s because while this painting started as a regular job, Leonardo seem to have actually fallen in love with it, and tended to it like to a small child. While both customers became angry that their immediate requests went unfulfilled, both these paintings became sort of immortal creations, still being revered today. In a sense while the customers cared about their immediate fleeting life in the the 15th century Florence, Leonardo cared about intangible and eternal beauty. If he hadn’t had a patron, he would have been a bohemian. Dependence, mostly emotional, novelty and safety seeking, romanticism,… All of these are the very traits of neoteny we were talking about, although at a much much higher magnitude than the regular young, but their simultaneous occurence is not the result of pure chance, at all.
Truth is that this culture and novelty-seeking mental state is not a randomly occurring propensity throughout animal kingdom, it’s actually an enduring feature of mammals. When you are a regular adult mammal, most of your everyday activity can be summed up as a daily economy : every day you use some energy to keep your body functioning and you have to earn more energy than you use, or else you die. When you have an offspring, part of that energy must be allocated to it, increasing the amount of energy to be gathered. But the offspring itself has a very, very different life dynamic : he spends much of his energy roaming around and playing, reinventing old behaviors, exploring uncharted territories and regularly coming back to mom when enough safety is not guaranteed anymore. The whole cycle always alternates between exploring more or less far ventures from parents nest and actively coming back to it when in need of both resupplying and protection, and at all times there is a maximum distance to « caretakers » which cannot be breached and the whole wonder is that the closer you are to your parents the less you will fear adventure. It’s the attachment theory of Bowlby. But while the offspring needs energy to live, he doesn’t spend any time actively hunting for it, and as a result he is completely dependent on his progenitors to get it. That’s why he is also emotionally dependent on them because if they cannot look after him then he can’t survive. All of these characteristics are actually what discriminate us from animals, they are actually what is so craved after by google, and the culmination of these are what characterizes the most the life of Leonard Da Vinci, Mozart and all the other great artists. And these biological mechanisms explain why they are generally (though not always) only found in juvenile people, not senior.
The young/artist can only be fully himself and play/create as freely as possible if he feels secured with his parents/patron, if there is not enough safety then he won’t be himself and will remain stressed, refrained, and frozen in body and mind.
But that thirst for novelty actually also reminds me of the very reason human beings are not immortal. If you look at the few immortal beings on Earth like bacteria and jellyfish, and compare them to mortal animals, anyone can identify right away that the main tradeoff is that they have very basic living functions. They lack the tremendous development of body appendages and traits like dashing ability or intelligence and that’s actually the main reason mortality can be appreciated by a certain point of view. You see that’s why we are mortal : old beings need to die in order to relinquish living space to brand new offsprings. It’s the price to pay to let evolution be able to fully reinvent our ontogenesis, testing new apparatuses while dropping obsolete characteristics, and let us become advanced intelligent beings. Or else we would have remained subaquatic planktons.
It also calls to mind the concept of creative destruction of famed economist Schumpeter. Schumpeter thought that there was only a finite maximum efficiency over which you cannot improve any given economic complex anymore. When this threshold is reached, there is only one way to keep growth going : by destroying what is already made and build brand new wealth from scratch. When economic actors fail to identify this sort of petrification, it only leads to their economic downfall.
In the end just like with biology, one cannot expect to be able to revert the cycle of life. People, concepts and ideas can only walk forward, die and be born again, so let’s keep going forward shall we ?