Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?

I’m 60, and still learning new stuff, every day; but I’m highly motivated.

That being said, I just played around with it for a few days. Some people praise it, after having gone through a few years on and off:

> I wasn’t convinced right away. It took a few years. But after the usual stumbling around and frustration, I began to realize that this language was the easiest, most elegant, least imposing language I had ever used – and not by a small margin.

https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2019/08/22/WhyClojure....

I also explored the language landscape, and Clojure projects on GitHub seem to have a low density of commits matching "fix OR fixed OR bugfix":

https://danuker.go.ro/frequency-of-bugfix-commits.html

It's also on the brevity-popularity Pareto front of my bug-ridden analysis:

https://danuker.go.ro/programming-languages.html

So I plan to look at it some more.

It's not getting older, but the fact that time heals most brains just like exercise and antidepressants do. About 70% recover within 12 months [1]

[1] - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12204924/

Edit:

OP said "Was depressed that [...]" and also mentions death of a loved one. Even if I'm wrong, personally I really wish someone mentioned MDD as a possibility to me earlier.

I felt similarly, and I thought all my focus and motivation problems were because I was lazy; but it was quite the opposite, I was fighting depression very hard.

I lost so many years of my life reading about death coping skills, optimizing diet and exercise, learning how to be less lazy (?) when it had absolutely nothing to do with any of those.

I’ve spent a great deal of time analyzing this — and I still don’t have great answers — but here’s an internet-friendly numbered list of random strategies and perspectives I’ve had success with:

1/ be open with your boss. They may be able to offer strategies to help.

2/ set short-term goals and force accountability. For me, that was making promises to my manager and asking them to hold me accountable at regular intervals (micro-management as a service).

3/ if it works, it’s fine. I had a lot of my self worth bound up in my ability to deliver clever hacks. I’ve come to the realization that most of my useful output has been simple, obvious, and quite ugly.

4/ the only people who care about your code are you and the peers who have to engage with it. I want to write clever code, but (at work) I want to read really, really dumb code.

5/ I’ve moved from caring about tech to caring about business impact to caring about what that impact has on humans. This helps make decisions about code easy, since in my work humans never care about the framework or elegant code unless that framework or code causes them to have a bad time.