Last Tuesday my father sent me a track by a Nigerian singer I had never heard of. His whole message was four words. “Bass. Play it loud.”
He was right about the bass. He is usually right about the bass.
He is sixty-eight. He lives on his own in Vancouver, up a flight of stairs he refuses to complain about, and when friends of mine hear about the music texts they get a certain look. Isn’t that sweet, they say. Your dad’s keeping up.
He is not keeping up. Keeping up would mean he fell behind and is now jogging after the pack, slightly out of breath, hoping nobody notices. He never stopped walking. The rest of us pulled over.
Most of us stop looking at about 30
There is a name for the pulling over, and it is less flattering than you would hope. Deezer surveyed a thousand people in the UK and landed on thirty years and six months as the average onset of musical paralysis, the point where you stop finding new artists and start rotating the same forty songs until you die. Sixty per cent of respondents said they felt stuck in a rut. Around a quarter said they would be unlikely to try anything outside their preferred genres.
The reasons people gave were not about having grown wise and settled. They were about too much choice, a demanding job, small children. Ordinary tiredness. Nobody decides to stop being curious. You get busy. The not-looking becomes a habit. The habit quietly becomes a personality.
Mine set in around thirty-four. I was running restaurants at the time and I told myself that keeping half an eye on culture was a business expense, which is a generous way of describing having no life. When I sold up I discovered my music library had been in a coma since roughly 2013.
Curiosity has better numbers than you would expect
Here is the part that changed how I read my dad’s texts.
In 1996 two researchers measured how curious 1,118 men were, average age seventy, then followed them for five years to see who was still alive. The ones who survived had scored higher on curiosity at the start, and the link held up after adjusting for the usual mortality risks. This does not prove curiosity keeps you breathing. Healthier people may simply have more appetite for the world to begin with. But it is a real signal, and thirty years of follow-up work has not made it go away.
A longer study tracked more than 2,000 adults for thirteen years, testing them repeatedly, and found the ones who scored high on openness, the psychologists’ term for liking new ideas and unfamiliar things, held onto their thinking skills better as they aged. The explanation on offer is unglamorous and convincing. Novelty is a workout. Either you give your brain something strange to chew on, or you don’t.
A new song is an excuse to talk to a stranger
This is the bit that gets missed when people call him a young soul, or whatever the phrase is these days.
Nostalgia is a closed loop. You cannot invite anyone into a song from 1974 unless they were also there, and the pool of people who were there shrinks every single year. That is the arithmetic of loneliness in your late sixties, and no amount of family group chat fixes it.
A new thing is an open question. My dad asks the man at the coffee place what he has on. He asks taxi drivers what film they last saw. He goes to a record shop on Main Street and argues with twenty-somethings about pressings. Two of the people he sees most weeks are forty years younger than him, and he met them the way anyone meets anyone, by having something to ask about.
There is no strategy in this. He is just still interested, and being interested is legible to other people. It reads as an invitation.
That’s the thing worth noticing. Staying curious, staying independent and still making friends at sixty-eight are not three separate achievements he happens to be pulling off at once. They run on one engine. The new record gets him talking to strangers, those conversations keep him out of the flat, and staying out is most of what independence actually is.
What he actually does
None of it is impressive, which is probably why it works.
He listens to one unfamiliar album a week, all the way through, once, without deciding in advance whether it is any good. He watches films that were not made for him. When someone under thirty mentions a name he doesn’t know, he asks what it is rather than making the joke about being old. That joke is an exit door, and he never takes it.
Then he says something out loud. He texts me about the bass. He tells the barista the record was better than he expected. Small acts of public enthusiasm, at sixty-eight.
I have started copying him, badly. One album a week, no verdict, and a real question when someone mentions something I have never heard of. It is not much of a system. But my dad is up those stairs on his own, arguing about pressings with strangers four decades younger, and I have stopped filing that under luck.