Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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I think I topped out as a writer in highschool and things have been slightly downhill since then. I'm usually pretty happy with all my old writing and some of it seems even clearer than my current stuff.
I'm sorry to learn about the early-onset dementia. But c'mon, that can't be true? Unless you had a lot of time to devote to writing back then, and none later. Most people do improve with time and effort, particularly when they receive clear feedback signals, I'd be surprised if that was genuinely not the case for you.
If you have a copy of something you wrote way back then, and you want to share, I can take a look.
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6z1t8d/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_following_sept_9/dn276ge/?context=1
That is the oldest good thing I could easily find. Because it was posted above.
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I think about this a lot. In purely abstract domains (mathematics, music), people tend to produce their best work at a young age. Basically every notable popular musician in this century and the one before it produced their most recognisable work in their twenties: there are precious few examples of a rock band whose seventh album is widely considered their magnum opus. No one in the world would take Lennon or McCartney's solo material over their Beatles material. The Fields Medal is awarded to mathematicians under the age of forty, in part because there has basically never been a mathematician producing valuable maths when they were older than that.
For less abstract domains like writing fiction, a certain amount of life experience seems to be necessary to composing something that really works (Douglas Coupland once said that almost no one is prepared to write a novel before the age of thirty). Unlike in music, there have been cases of novelists producing what is widely considered their best work in their forties or fifties.
From a personal perspective, while I still consider myself musical, I know that I'm far less musically creative than I used to be, and think it's increasingly unlikely I'll ever top the mathcore EP I recorded when I was 24.
Yitang Zhang didn't prove that the lim inf of the prime gap was 2 (which would have verified a 150 year old conjecture), but he was the first to prove it was finite, at age 58. Listing and Moëbius were in their 50s when they formalized the idea of non-orientable surfaces (which I would consider to be literally "producing" math rather than just "solving" it). The first version of the Weierstrass Approximation Theorem (which led to whole fields of the most economically valuable results in mathematics, in my biased applied-math+engineering opinion) was proven when Weierstrass was 70.
But, damn, are they the exceptions who prove the rule, so long as we leave that "basically" qualifier intact? Kolmogorov was in his 50s when he solved Hilbert's thirteenth problem, but that was in joint work with a 19 year old student. Euler, Gauss, and Cauchy were doing great work in their old age, but arguably only after doing greater work as younger men. Searching for mathematical discoveries by importance and then looking up age (rather than searching specifically for discoveries made at older ages), the bulk do seem to be between 25 and 45.
I wonder if the trend is moving older (because things that were groundbreaking discoveries 300 years ago are basic undergrad background today and you need to learn much more to get to the cutting edge) or younger (because subsidized institutional math research gets more output but at the cost of making older mathematicians spend all their time teaching and mentoring and writing proposals and hiring and so on, while their grad students and postdocs are the ones who can actually focus on the work).
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