Baby Operating System - The Updates That Make Us Grow Old

Another day has passed. This morning I woke up with pain all over my body, muscle soreness. Yesterday I had the ingenious idea of working out more to compensate for the break over the weekend. Now I'm suffering the consequences of my actions. I wonder if this is how you feel when someone offers you black tea in Morocco and then beats you with a camel. I don't have time, however, to focus on exactly which muscles hurt because Laura is already all over me. The little one had a new update yesterday. Today she's running Laura Operating System – OS 2.7. She speaks differently, looks at things differently, and tries to communicate her feelings and ideas differently. Luca is on the couch. He's still making spit bubbles using Luca Operating System OS 0.3. Yesterday he had an update too, but in his case it was a hardware update as well, not just software. After we walked around Colmar and I kept him sitting upright in his little seat so he could see, he came home like a MiG aircraft in a nosedive. He crashed from exhaustion and didn't move for three hours. It was only when he woke up that I noticed his clothes were too small for him. At the same time, when he woke up, he looked at things differently, smiled differently.

My wife has a saying that she's been using ever since Laura was little: "We have to say goodbye to our children." With every major developmental leap children make, they change significantly. When Laura was little, for example, she used to say "boky" instead of broccoli. We were both so sad when we asked her if she wanted boky and she replied that it's called broccoli. It was as if someone had stolen our vacation. Luca is currently on a similar path. I mean, he's still trying to put his sock in his mouth, but this time he's doing it with both hands. Last night he made his first joke. He grabbed my face with his hands and started pulling my nose, smiling the whole time at my reaction. Then he moved closer to my face and pulled away again. Because my reaction was to laugh and smile, he then gave my nose a quick bite and immediately pulled back, starting to laugh. This little bundle wrapped in diapers is actually making jokes with me.

Imagine a satellite somewhere that is connected to all the children in the world. This satellite runs a Baby Operating System. Baby OS is activated on demand. Every child goes through life and has their own experiences. When they're ready to move to a new version, they perform an update. Parents only realize it after the update has already happened. Probably the experiences children have every day prepare them for these cognitive leaps. For Luca yesterday, for example, the leap was probably triggered by the fact that he sat upright in his little seat. For the first time, he could see everything around him. He could admire the shop windows and the people on the street, see how cyclists navigate traffic and how dogs pull on their owners' leashes.

With all these updates, I was wondering last night whether something might be lost along the way. Immediately after waking up last night, Luca was very curious about everything around him. He tried to interact with everything around him and with all the people he saw. He's not even six months old yet. I tried to compare him with Laura and how she was when she was little, but my old-man memory doesn't allow me to scroll that far back into the past. So I settled for analyzing Laura as she is today. One trait they both seem to share is curiosity about everything around them.

That's it! The curiosity children have is slowly lost with every update that gets downloaded. Think for a moment about how a child interacts with the world around them. And we don't have to stop at a certain age. Think about yourselves when you were 10 or even 15 years old. At those ages, we no longer have the curiosity to put socks left around the house into our mouths, but we're still curious about how the world works. We're still at the stage where we want to ask questions and understand what's happening. Perhaps our rebellious spirit prevents us from asking our own parents, but that doesn't mean our curiosity doesn't exist. Maybe the reason we no longer ask our parents as we did before is that we don't consider their answers or experience sufficient, or maybe we're trying to hide our thoughts and curiosities from them. You know that expression, "Ask me a question so I can figure out what you're thinking"? It makes sense that young people don't want to involve their parents the way they did when they were little. Probably the more nagging parents are in discussions with their children at the age of 8 or 10, the sooner this switch toward distancing themselves will happen. It will happen anyway.

I don't necessarily see a problem with that. After all, children choose to change the radio station they're listening to. As long as we've taught them sufficiently what the inviolable core values are, they should be able to find good radio stations on their own. But let's return to childhood curiosity. I think this is what changes with every update children make. That innocent curiosity, that thirst for knowledge, begins to disappear as we move through life. I think this is what kills our spirit as adults and what turns us into old, grumpy Grinches. How do we manage to do that? I'm not saying we necessarily need to preserve the desire to put socks in our mouths, but I think it's important to preserve a thirst for knowledge and new experiences. I think it's even vital to preserve a desire to do things differently from the way we know them.

And what do we generally hear from people older than us? "I've always done it this way." The older we get, the more content we become with repeating the actions we're comfortable with. Why? Why are old people afraid of experiencing new things? Or why, when they do, are they so judgmental? Even when they do try something, they start from the assumption that it will be rubbish anyway, something they shouldn't be doing and that they certainly won't like. This even prevents them from enjoying the moment. Someone who is determined not to eat pasta or risotto will never try to see whether the food is good.

Probably, if we plotted a curve of personal development, we would see that everyone's peak is somewhere around the age of 20–30. Why? Probably because after that age we limit ourselves in our experiences. Probably because we no longer learn anything new. Our brains slowly atrophy, but even more importantly, we lose the happiness of life. We lose the energy with which we get out of bed and with which we want to explore the world around us. This thought crossed my mind last night and made me sad. Am I a grumpy old man too? Most likely. Why would I be any different from everyone else? But I don't want to be an old Grinch. I want to remain curious forever. But I don't know how to do that.

I don't have an answer for you. If you're expecting blogs and podcasts from gurus, from know-it-alls who are trying to sell you something, you'd better change the channel. This radio program isn't for you, and I don't have all the answers. For now, I'm content with pointing out this problem.

In my analysis, the most pragmatic solution would be to force ourselves to experience new things every day, and by that I don't mean starting to take drugs or anything like that. I mean experimenting with small things that we would otherwise have done differently in our routine. That could mean putting onion instead of garlic in our food, or changing the oil we cook with. And the routine can extend all the way to taking trips we wouldn't normally take, or going skydiving. Anything that is new and anything that helps us step outside our comfort zone. If we manage to do this regularly, perhaps our appetite for life will return, that thirst for life we had at 15 that kept us from staying in bed on weekends. That thirst with which any child will get up at six in the morning simply because they're awake and want to keep playing.

How would we know that what we're doing is good? That it's enough? Do you remember how, when we were little, we dreamed every day? Every evening we went to bed and dreamed about something. A part of me, around the age of 10, was happy to go to sleep because I knew I was going to dream about something, and so my adventure would continue in my sleep. Sleep may be a form of neuronal reorganization. The experiences you have during the day create a "neuronal map," if you like, where each neuron fires at a certain frequency and in a certain order. During sleep, these discharges are repeated to strengthen the neuronal connections. It's like a subcortical storm taking place in the archaic or native nervous structures, those that regulate breathing, for example. Our cortex, or the "modern," higher part of the brain, the part of the brain that allows us to think and function as human beings, indirectly perceives these electrical signals without being able to decode them. Most often, there is no clear signal, just rubbish. But in the attempt to decode them, dreams appear.

A dream we have at night is merely the testimony of such a storm in the brainstem, for example, most likely due to new neuronal activity experienced that day. Most likely, the reappearance of dreams should be used as a benchmark of success. My recommendation therefore remains that we should try to return to Baby OS and attempt to reinstall older versions of our operating software. There is only one question left to clarify: how many of you are willing to put a sock in your mouth?