Ask HN: How do you deal with getting older?

Do 20 year olds feel lost when their next big thing is a derivative work from the 70s[0]?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

Agreed. In fact this sounded a lot better than "YOLO".

> As hackers, do you feel like you can hack life and get more years out of it then the average joe?

Yeah, sun screen, good diet, meditation and exercise.

> Or do you feel lost in a culture that hails 20 year olds that are dreaming up the next big thing?

I feel there's a rift.

The market is more competitive and requires people to go to school longer to stay on edge.

For me, it seem you trade your social life, kinda, for a secured or better future prospect by chasing the money instead of enjoyment of life. So the rift I'm seeing is that there are younger people that are poor but more genuine in characters and sociable. I find myself stuck being jealous, not envious mind you, but at the same time working on this aspect of myself. I'm also using my money to buy experiences such as trying new things and creating opportunity to experience things.

As I am closer to 30, soon to be 30 this year, I find myself less risky and more conservative in actions. In term of I now rather have a secure job with better work balance life than a startup job with lots of overtime.

The next big thing for me is not the big thing anymore.

It's what is good enough to bring in passive income with minimum amount of upkeep.

It's not, oh I want to be the next google, but more of I want to create a service that people want -- at the same that enable me to work little so I can enjoy more.

Sometime I feel lost or rather frustrated, the young kid in their 20s adopt bleeding edge technology recklessly and they move on to new job and somebody are stuck with maintaining their mess. Google have Mesos or Kubernetes or Big data, we need it too!

If you young people are reading, please adopt boring technology. Or research more throughly, I guess taking a risk in adoption can pay out, RoR senior are making bank. I chose the PHP route...

Granted, I'm only 30, so take my anecdotal experience as an older person with a grain of salt, but I've found that getting older isn't so hard as everyone seems to get nicer in their 30s. Life's easier when people are nicer.

You're not technically wrong, but having access to a computer (let alone a personal/home computer) in 77 was still quite a niche thing for society. I don't think it started becoming a 'thing' until 81-82 at least. Of course, this is my generation, but my own experience is that the numbers bear that out a bit. Having seen schools adopt computer labs in the 80s where they had none in the 70s tells me it was not until that time that more kids were getting access to computers in the first place.

But.. by the 90s-2000s, we saw the decline of the 'program something on this' computer style - turning on an Atari, Commodore or Apple II and you immediately were thrown in to "start typing in code" mode. The rise in accessible technologies seemed to turn the next generations largely in to application consumers, not developers. Probably have the same number of hacker/developers in each generation, but because 10x as many people used technology/computers of some sort, the aura of 'new frontier' seemed to go away some. And yeah, some of that may be because I got older, but I think there was something unique about the late 70s and early 80s with respect to computers/tech and how it affected those young generations lucky enough to have access to those machines...