On a January afternoon in 2019, a 97-year-old driver pulled out of a side road near Sandringham, in Norfolk, into the low winter sun.
His Land Rover hit a passing Kia, flipped, and came to rest on its side. In the Kia, a woman broke her wrist. A nine-month-old baby was unhurt.
The driver was Prince Philip. He had flown nearly six thousand hours in fifty-nine types of aircraft, and spent a lifetime handling machines and judging risk.
Two days later he was photographed at the wheel of a new Land Rover, without a seatbelt. Less than a month after that, he gave up his licence.
It was the right decision. It came from the wrong place: a crash, and a stranger's broken wrist.
The car keys are only the most visible case. Everybody holds keys of some kind, and the same story plays out wherever judgement is doing the steering.
The investor at seventy-eight, still picking stocks, who wires his savings to a stranger with a sure thing.
The fifty-year-old still training on a programme written at twenty-five, right up to the morning the Achilles goes.
The club chairman thirty years in, the only one who cannot see the members drifting away.
Every one of them felt fine at the time. That is the whole problem.
Some things you have to decide in advance, while the one deciding can still see clearly.
Whatever damages your judgement also damages your ability to notice it.
THE LAST TO KNOW
Eyesight, reactions, memory and the ability to weigh a complicated decision all fade with age, by degrees. To notice the fading, you would need those same faculties in good working order.
THE INSPECTOR WEARS OUT ALONG WITH THE MACHINE.
The decline is also too gradual to see. You never compare yourself with who you were at forty. You compare yourself with yesterday, and yesterday was almost identical.
It is why the urge to plan for your own decline never arrives on its own. From the inside, there is nothing to plan for.
Money shows it. Research on financial mistakes across adult life found people making their best decisions around fifty-three. A study of more than 3,800 people over sixty found their financial knowledge falling year after year, while confidence in their own decisions held steady and, on some subjects, rose.
Less skill. The same certainty.
And noticing is only half of it. Suppose the signs are obvious. They will appear on the day you most want to carry on, because the question is never abstract. It is when to stop doing something you love, and the stronger the need, the longer you hesitate.
A decision left to that day has two chances to fail.
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