30 Hypothesis

Tomorrow Rohit turns the tender young age of 30. As articulated by Rohit to me a dozen years ago, the 30 Hypothesis is something that has never been proven but remains at the core of his life's philosophy:

This is the belief that one's useful life ends at the age 30. This rule was first proposed by Rohit as the "Mathematician's rule of 25," which states that anything that was ever useful in mathematics was discovered and/or proved by a person by the time s/he was 25. (As an example, Galileo was already Chair of Mathematics at Pisa at 25.) We extend this rule to 30 for all fields besides mathematics; in fact, the number 30 also corresponds to the average person's life expectancy back when the institution of marriage was invented. Let's face it: you make your reputation by 30, and then it's all downhill from there. This comes from an ISI study of citations charting scientists' initial most-cited paper vs age, where the media ranged from very early twenties for mathematicians to early 30s for engineers. If you haven't broken through by the end of your PhD, it's not going to happen. On a Rohit level, Rohit lives his life as if it is literally going to end when he turns 30.

Reading this passage as an almost-35-year-old I am struck by how there are seeds of truth and nontruth contained within the hypothesis. Now, it's certainly true that mathematics is rigged. Heck, they won't give the Fields Medal to anyone over 40. But for other disciplines there's a wisdom, embodying emotional maturity and intellectual insight, that I believe only comes with age. A person can do great things after 30, and the examples are too numerous to count; however, by 30, most people have chosen their life's path and their specialty, and that perspective peppers everything they think and do after 30.

For some more insight, I looked into the Book of Ages: 30 by Joshua Albertson, Lockhart Steele and Jonathan Van Gieson:

This year about four million people in the United States will turn 30. If you’re one of them, the bad news is that you’re older than 42 percent of Americans. You’ve already lost 10 percent of your muscle mass. And, on average, you’re almost $20,000 in debt. But don’t despair. At 30, Harrison Ford was working as a carpenter, and neither Oprah nor Jane Austen had found fame. Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream? Created at 30. And, most heartening, you’re still gettin’ it on—2.24 times a week.

So I bought the book for Rohit; I figure he'll get a kick out of it. Here are some more insights from the book:

1. 15% of Americans are in their 30s.


2. The average age of students graduating from Harvard Divinity School in 2000 was 30.


3. 30-39 is the second most likely age group to use Linux.


4. 3% of people in their 30s prefer to have telemarketers call them by their first name.


5. Median income for a 30-year-old U.S. man: $30,510. For a 30-year-old U.S. woman: $21,473.


6. Average height for U.S. man in his 30s: 5 feet, 10 inches. Average weight: 174 pounds.


7. Average height for U.S. woman in her 30s: 5 feet, 4.6 inches. Average weight: 130 pounds.


8. 43% of 30-year-olds have held their job for 2 years or less. 12% report 10 or more years at their current job. The average 30-year-old has had 7.5 jobs. 19% have had 3 jobs or less. 25% have had more than 10 jobs.


9. 62% of thirtysomethings think they are overweight. 10% of men in their 30s weigh over 226 pounds; 10% of women in their 30s weigh over 212 pounds. Isn't it true that fat people are lazy, stupid, weak-willed, lacking in ambition, selfish, greedy, gluttonous, sedentary, and ugly? No, none of these characterizations have any basis in fact. (Council on Size and Weight Discrimination FAQ)


10. 59% of people in their early 30s drank alcohol in the past month. 27% binged (5 or more drinks on one occasion). 8% are heavy drinkers (binged on 5 separate days). 26% smoke cigarettes. 7% used illicit drugs in the past month.


11. "Psychological health steadily increases from 30 years of age to 40, 50, and 62 years of age." (Psychology and Aging, Volume 15, Number 2)


12. 17% of people in their early 30s say they are extremely happy; 41% very happy; 30% generally satisfied; 9% fairly unhappy; and 3% unhappy most of the time.


13. 45% of thirtysomethings own a firearm. Of those 34% own a rifle; 37% own a shotgun; 31% own a pistol; 23% own all three. More people in their 30s own firearms than those in any other decade of their lives.


14. 47% of people in their 30s watched a NASCAR race in the last year. (vs. 53% in their 20s)


15. "It is well for the world that for most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster and will never soften again." (William James, psychologist and philosopher)


16. 82% of people who visit Yosemite have done so by 30.


17. 26% are less likely to make a New Year's resolution than those in their 20s, but are 26% more likely to keep it.


18. 78% of families headed by people under 35 own a vehicle. It's worth, on average, $8900.


19. 55% of people in their early 30s own a home, including 71% of married couples.


20. "The only time you really live fully is from thirty to sixty... The young are slaves to dreams; the old servants of regrets. Only the middle-aged have all their five senses in the keeping of their wits." (Hervey Allen)


21. At age 30, Harriet Tubman made her first trip to the South as a free woman to help bring other slaves to freedom.


22. The most common age of identity-theft victims is 30.


23. George Clooney starred in 15 failed series or pilots before hitting it big as a star of ER; he was 33 when the show premiered.
 

24. Harrison Ford at 30 was discouraged by his $500 weekly salary for American Graffiti and returned to carpentry; four years later, George Lucas convinced him to play Han Solo.


25. On the day of his 30th birthday, Samuel Langhorne Clemens found himself unemployed in San Francisco. A few months earlier, he had left his job at a local newspaper. Unknown to Clemens, 12 days previously the Saturday Press in New York City had published a short story of his (under the pen name Mark Twain) that would later come to be called "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Response to the story won Twain nationwide acclaim and launched his fiction-writing career.
 

26. One method to allocate a retirement portfolio: the Rule of 100. It suggests that you subtract your age from 100. The resulting number is how much of your portfolio should be invested in stocks. For example, at 30 years old, 100 minus 30 is 70, so 70% of your portfolio should be allocated to stocks, with the rest in bonds and cash.
 

27. "I have always looked to about thirty as the barrier of any real or fierce delight in the passions." (Lord Byron)


28. 20% of women in their early 30s are single.


29. "I'm sorry, if a man is over 30 and single, there's something wrong with him. It's Darwinian -- they're being weeded out from propagating the species." (Miranda, Sex in the City)


30. 1 in 33 30-year-old men is a virgin. 1 in 25 30-year-old women is a virgin.
 

31. 81% of women in their early 30s have been married. 71% of men in their early 30s have people married.


32. 28 days after turning 30, Marilyn Monroe tied the knot with playwright Arthur Miller, a man ten years her senior. It was Monroe's third, and weirdest, marriage, but it did not halt her increasing dependence on drugs and alcohol. Less than five years later, the couple divorced, and Monroe died the following year at 36.


33. On his 30th birthday, Franz Kafka revealed to his mother that he was engaged. He'd proposed to Felice Bauer, a secretarial assistant, a few months earlier. Some say Kafka wanted to marry to prove to his father that he was "normal". The relationship lasted five yeas and resulted in two broken engagements, but the despair spurred Kafka on. Between 29 and 33, he wrote most of his major works.


34. "Bureaucrats: they are dead at 30 and buried at 60. They are like custard pies; you can't nail them to a wall." (Frank Lloyd Wright)


35. Bill Gates was 30 years, four months, and 16 days old on the day of Microsoft's IPO (March 13, 1986). On that day, he was worth $233,982,000.


36. "At 30 years of age it is not good for anyone, no matter how well balanced, to have things come his way too fast and too consistently." (Edward William Bok, The Americanization of Edward Bok)


37. People at 30 on average expect to retire by age 61.


38. 25% of college students think that they'll be millionaires by 30. The mean net worth for families headed by people under 35 is $65,900. 81% of families headed by people under 35 carry debt.


39. 30-year-olds should expect only a 2.4% annual raise over their next five years.


40. At 30, Martha Stewart was a Wall Street stockbroker. Two years later, she purchased an old farmhouse in Connecticut with her husband. She supervised its restoration and launched a custom catering business, starting her on the path to becoming a home-life media mogul.


41. At 30, Oprah Winfrey left her television job in Baltimore and moved to Chicago to take over the ailing half-hour TV talk show AM Chicago. Within a month, the show became the highest-rated talk show in Chicago. The following year, AM Chicago was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show. When she was 32, Oprah's show went national. 17 years later, she was a billionaire.


42. At 30, Steve Case was running Quantum Computer Services, a company he co-founded at 27. At 31, he renamed Quantum's online services, and America Online was born. Ten years later, he signaled the end of the Internet era by buying Time Warner and running it into the ground.


43. "No person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty years." (U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 3)


44. "Never trust anyone over 30." (Mario Savio, 1960s U.C. Berkeley activist)


45. George W. Bush was busted for drunk driving. He pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of driving under the influence, was fined $150, and had his driving privileges suspended. Bush acknowledges that when he was 30 he was "drinking and carousing and fumbling around".


46. "Nothing else is new except my cold." (Pablo Picasso, age 30)


47. "If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a capitalist then you have no brains." (attributed to George Bernard Shaw)


48. By 30, David Goldhaber-Gordon of Stanford University had won the inaugural George E. Valley Prize "for the discovery and elucidation of the physics of the Kondo Effect in Single Electron Transistors." In addition to studying quantum phenomena in mesoscopic semiconductor structures, David also enjoys nanoelectronics.


49. At 30, Thomas Edison changed the world -- for the first time. Working to perfect the telephone transmitter, he was tinkering around with tinfoil when it occurred to him that sound could be recorded on a rapidly moving surface. He assembled a crude instrument and spoke "Mary had a little lamb" into a mouthpiece. The device played the verse back to him -- the world's first recorded sound. At age 31, Edison upped the ante, inventing the electric lightbulb.


50. His father struck candy-bar gold with the creation of Milky Way and Snickers in the 1920s, but Forrest Mars Sr. wanted more. By 30, he had distanced himself from his family firm and decamped to Britain, where he was manufacturing chocolate for European tastes. Soon after, Mars visited Spain and saw soldiers in the Spanish Civil War eating chocolates encased in a hard coating to stop them from melting. That inspired his creation of M & M chocolate candies, which debuted in 1941 to wide acclaim -- and no sticky fingers.


51. Three weeks after his 30th birthday, Eminem's first movie 8 Mile opened. The film grossed $54.5 million its opening weekend, doubling studio expectations and establishing the controversial rapper as a box-office draw. Two months later, his album The Eminem Show was named the top-selling album of the year, with self-analytic lyrics like "Full of controversy, until I retire my jersey, 'til the fire inside dies and expires at thirty" and "So let me just revel and bask, in the fact that I got everyone kissing my ass."


52. At 30, Jane Fonda played the titular hero in the 1968 film Barbarella. In the movie, it's the year 40,000 A.D. and an evil scientist named Duran Duran is bent on wreaking havoc. Barbarella must save the day. Two years later, Fonda ditched the catsuit and received her first of six Best Actress Oscar nominations.


53. At 30, Henry David Thoreau left his hand-hewn home after more than two years of living life on the shores of Walden Pond. He moved into the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson in downtown Concord, Massachusetts, and then later back to his parents' pad. "I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything, to the purpose," wrote Thoreau in Walden.


54. At 30, Jack Kerouac was in the middle of the greatest creative push of his life. He wrote Doctor Sax and spent most of the next few years writing more than half of his major works. Unfortunately, he spent the rest of his time opening rejection letters from editors who didn't understand his "spontaneous prose." Though he wrote his most famous work, On the Road, before he was 30, it sat in his rucksack unpublished until he was 35. Kerouac wrote in a letter written on his 30th birthday, "I have completely reached my peak maturity now and am blowing such mad poetry and literature that I'll look back years later with amazement and chagrin that I can't do it anymore."


55. At 30, Elvis Presley was in a rut, John Lennon recorded Imagine, Paul Simon went solo, Pat Benatar wrote "Love is a Battlefield", Bruce Springsteen recorded "Hungry Heart", and Bono wrote the lyrics to U2's Achtung Baby.


56. Having left the theater world for several years to work on his poetry, William Shakespeare returned to to theater as a founding member of the theater troupe Lord Chamberlain's Men. By that time, he had written eleven plays, including Richard III and The Comedy of Errors, and had gained a valuable sponsor in the Earl of Southampton. At 30 he would write Titus Andronicus; at 36, he would write Hamlet.


57. On a long train ride in her mid-20s, J.K. Rowling came up with the idea for a story about a boy wizard who lives a normal life, unaware of his own powers. A single mother at 30, she was forging ahead with that character now named Harry Potter, stealing seconds of writing time in coffee shops while her daughter slept in a carriage nearby. The book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, would be published just before Rowling turned 32.


58. "At 20 years of age the will reigns, at 30 the wit, and at 40 the judgement." (Benjamin Franklin)


59. "There is a difference between twenty-nine and thirty. When you are twenty-nine it can be the beginning of everything. When you are thirty it can be the end of everything." (Gertrude Stein)


60. At 30 your body begins a slow fade to the grave. Bone density thins up to 10% per decade. Stamina decreases by one minute from your 20s. Muscle mass is down 10% per decade, starting now. Lung capacity peaked at 25. Oxygen intake goes down 1% per year, starting now. Flexibility fades.


61. "Nothing is so discreet as a young face, for nothing is less mobile; it has the serenity, the surface smoothness, and the freshness of a lake. There is no character in women's faces before the age of thirty." (Honore de Balzac, A Woman of Thirty)


62. "Thirty -- the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair." (F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, published when he was 28)


63. Most common ways to die at 30: 29% accidents, 12% suicide, 10% homicide, 10% cancer, 7% heart disease. Patsy Cline, Andy Gibb, and Jim Croce died at 30. Then again, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain died at 27.


64. On her 30th birthday, Sylvia Plath was in the middle of a two-month period of productivity during which she wrote the forty poems "of rage, despair, love, and vengeance" for which she is best remembered. On that same birthday, she and her husband Ted Hughes had been separated for a few weeks. She moved to London where she saw her novel The Bell Jar published, and gassed herself to death. Lines from her final poem written a week before her death said, "Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment."


65. Orson Welles debuted on Broadway at 19, was a radio star with War of the Worlds at 23, and made Citizen Kane at 25. Kane was lambasted by critics, tanked at the box office, and was booed at the Oscars. His next movies fared no better, so at 33 he exiled himself to Europe. He never lived up to the promise of his youth.


66. "The only thing you can't have in this perfect world of total pleasure is your 30th birthday. Logan is 29." (Logan's Run, 1976... though the original book and the remake reduce the age to 21...)


67. At 30, Michael Jordan signed a contract to play for the Birmingham Barrons, a minor league baseball team. Earlier that year he'd led the Chicago Bulls to their third straight NBA championship -- and then walked away from the game. But in his baseball rookie season, he struck out 114 times. After a season and a half, he returned to the court; by 35, he had won another three NBA titles.


68. At 30, Steve Jobs resigned in a huff from Apple Computer after a dispute with the CEO he'd hired. He immediately formed NeXT and bought a majority stake in Pixar. Ten years later Pixar released Toy Story and a year after that Apple bought NeXT to bring Jobs back.


69. The odds a 30-year-old will live to see his or her late 30s: 99.003%. (From "Five Year Survival Rates", U.S. Census, 1996; stat is middle mortality assumption in 2000-2005 for people ages 30-34 living to ages 35-39.)

Before I close, I'd like to cite a survey by Perseus about recent statistics about the Blogosphere, I see that only 241,000 blogs (5.8%) are by people 30-39. (Almost 93% of blogs are maintained by people under 30.) But no worries.

A lot can happen in 30 years; human life itself seems to like to flow 0, 30, 60, 90. So Rohit, here's to your NeXT 30 and 60 years... en route to 90...

Comments

[Timboy]

The rule of 30 or 25 is notoriously true in mathematics, and not so true in other fields. In writing, it's almost the opposite. What's the last great novel you read by a 25-year-old?

(So, if Rohit lives his life as though it's ending at 30, does that mean that he'll now act as though he's dead? Quite the lifestyle change.)

[Adam]

Your point is well-taken. I did enjoy The Great Gatsby, which F. Scott Fitzgerald penned when he was 27, but he's the exception, not the rule.

I wonder what Rohit-acting-dead will be like. And if it will mellow him out at all.

By the way, there's a nice trackback by Brian Dear on this post and the next one...

[Kevin Werbach]

It's all relative. At speeds approaching c, time dilation becomes significant. As anyone who has spoken to the man can attest, Rohit inhabits a parallel quantum universe that moves at a substantially higher speed than our own.

Therefore, even though 30 years have passed for the rest of us since Rohit's birth, he is actually much younger. For all we know, it could be centuries before Rohit turns 30. ;-)

See you guys next week.

[Adam]

There are at least three things about Kevin's comment that made Rohit smile: the invocation of physics, the notion that 30 is relative, and the thought of seeing you next week.

[Greg]

Everyone knows that it's 2^5 and not 2^5 - 2 (+/- 10 months).

Greg

[Tara]

Just wanted to say, you really lifted my spirits. I have been feeling very bad lately and will be 30 in only a few months. Unfortunitly I think a lot like Rohit. Thank you so much for the inspiring words!

[Adam]

Tara, you are very welcome.

Happy birthday, and I wish you much happiness in life past 30.

[Account Deleted]

There are at least three things about Kevin's comment that made Rohit smile: the invocation of physics, the notion that 30 is relative, and the thought of seeing you next week.

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