For years before I had a crazy plan to use a system of digital watches, notes with time stamps, and a Polaroid camera if I ever discover a tattoo on my body indicating I have anterograde amnesia… but senile dementia seems like a much less crazy thing to make plans for because it is predicted to afflict a relatively large percent of the population in the future.
Based on thoughts and conversations around this topic in 2010/2011, it occurred to me that it might be valuable to lay some memories down in my relative youth to help in my declining years. From people who have experience with the elderly in their declining years, I heard that a major problem is that old people can become bitter and untrusting of caregivers and therefore become harder to care for than otherwise. Also they tend to feel like they aren’t in the right place and wander off. So my tentative conclusion is that if and when I “practice having a memory disorder” in advance, I should actively trust seeming strangers who help me, and try not to move around too much if my surroundings aren’t recognizable. But should also probably disable or massively filter my cell phone and email and whatnot, because I’ll probably be easy to scam.
Somehow, this seems all like a failure mode I should plan to avoid if I can, rather than updating in that direction now.
I wonder how much mistrust of caregivers is the result of actual bad experiences. In that case, the important thing would be figuring out procedures to improve the odds of only having good caregivers.
Second thought: avoiding bad caregivers is very important in itself.
Back in 2010 I was looking for data about how my “life in general” was likely to go using base rates from other people. The post was Seeking book about baseline life planning and expectations. Not precisely on target, but related.
For years before I had a crazy plan to use a system of digital watches, notes with time stamps, and a Polaroid camera if I ever discover a tattoo on my body indicating I have anterograde amnesia… but senile dementia seems like a much less crazy thing to make plans for because it is predicted to afflict a relatively large percent of the population in the future.
Based on thoughts and conversations around this topic in 2010/2011, it occurred to me that it might be valuable to lay some memories down in my relative youth to help in my declining years. From people who have experience with the elderly in their declining years, I heard that a major problem is that old people can become bitter and untrusting of caregivers and therefore become harder to care for than otherwise. Also they tend to feel like they aren’t in the right place and wander off. So my tentative conclusion is that if and when I “practice having a memory disorder” in advance, I should actively trust seeming strangers who help me, and try not to move around too much if my surroundings aren’t recognizable. But should also probably disable or massively filter my cell phone and email and whatnot, because I’ll probably be easy to scam.
Somehow, this seems all like a failure mode I should plan to avoid if I can, rather than updating in that direction now.
I wonder how much mistrust of caregivers is the result of actual bad experiences. In that case, the important thing would be figuring out procedures to improve the odds of only having good caregivers.
Second thought: avoiding bad caregivers is very important in itself.