Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Does life end after 35?

kzhu.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 228 posts

Re: Does life end after 35?

#11

Post by japhyr »

I turned 40 last year, and I am loving it. I miss the physical resilience of being in my 20s, but I wouldn't trade where I am now to go back to my 20s.

I grew up relatively sheltered in New England, and moved to NYC to teach as soon as I graduated from college. I spent my 20s teaching in the city and bicycling around North America in the summers.

At 29, I moved to Alaska. I spent my 30's climbing mountains, doing mountain rescue work, and continuing to teach.

I just turned 40, and I feel like this decade is about building some things that last. I feel like I came into more serious hacking at just the right time in my life. I now have the experience to know exactly what I want to build, and I have the long-term mindset needed to build important things. After having stood in front of NYC public school classrooms, bicycled around the continent, faced bears in the wild, and dropped out of helicopters onto steep mountains, dealing with servers and such is just another satisfying challenge to play with.

Life is wonderful if you keep right on living.

Re: Does life end after 35?

#14

Post by Codhisattva »

I'm almost fifty and I feel like I'm just hitting my stride. But then I felt that as I approached 30 and 40 too.

So yeah, you might not see it while in your 20s but nothing feels better than the combination of intelligence and experience. That is, the result of learning how to learn.

Re: Does life end after 35?

#15

Post by [deleted] »

antjanus wrote: post #5

Awesome read. I feel like I struggle with that issue as well. As I'm approaching my birthday next week, I keep thinking about the 18 year olds that made multi-million dollar Apps, and those 20 year olds that revolutionized the tech industry with one idea or another. It's taking a lot of effort on my side to sit down and relax and realize that everyone on the planet has some achievements to show. Not just the "young".…

[deleted]

Re: Does life end after 35?

#16

Post by jmsduran »

Very inspiring article. Being 24, almost half-way to 30, these past few months I've been thinking to myself "what have I really accomplished outside of work and school"? I think this is due partly to the high expectations I set for myself, but I also believe part of it is due to the current tech culture, where it's easy for those new to the field to misinterpret that if they aren't moving as fast as everyone else, they must be doing something wrong.

I'm coming to understand that everyone is unique, one's career/life progress is no better than another's. Thanks for the refreshing perspective OP.

Re: Does life end after 35?

#17

Post by steven777400 »

Unfortunately, there are aspects to our culture that conflate personal value with success; that is, your value as a human being is based on your success. So it's easy to compare to the very visible milestones; Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, etc. Or to compare to people we know personally; the successful start-up founder with a nice exit, the entrepreneur who got his lifestyle business off the ground and now pays the bills with it.

For me, it's easy to think "I am a failure" compared to these people, especially as the years pass and the number of successes I know increases, but I'm not "one of them". This is a severe error of conflating my external success with internal value.

I prefer to recall the old Taoist saying, "Work is done, then forgotten."

Re: Does life end after 35?

#18

Post by wobbleblob »

digitalsushi wrote: post #7

35 seems like a nice round number for people to self-sort into two bins: people that decided yes, it's time to stop trying, there will be no more sunrises... and then the other set, who think this is just ridiculous and roll their eyes that age has anything to do with it. And even if the second set is wrong, and there is actually something about getting older that actually slows us down or makes us worth less, it's a…

Here's how I look at it. It's not the decimal number of years since your birth, but the phase in your life that closes doors.

In tech, you constantly need to keep up to date on the latest technologies, read publications and go to conferences, because experience gets stale very fast. It's also easier (than in fields like medicine or law) for junior techies to get up to speed in experience, because they can skip the decades of now obsolete tech and fast forward to roughly where you are at. This is fine. It can be fun and it's definitely rewarding.

Then by your early thirties, three things change at the same time: you get promoted to a busier, more responsible position, you have small kids, and you get fat. The (waking) time you have for yourself shrinks from 8-10 hrs to about an hour if you're lucky. You can use that hour to study and keep up to date, to do something about that gut and exercise, or you're so tired you just want to relax. Pick one.

In my opinion, this is why middle aged people seem so lazy and boring.

Re: Does life end after 35?

#19

Post by sophacles »

digitalsushi wrote: post #7

35 seems like a nice round number for people to self-sort into two bins: people that decided yes, it's time to stop trying, there will be no more sunrises... and then the other set, who think this is just ridiculous and roll their eyes that age has anything to do with it. And even if the second set is wrong, and there is actually something about getting older that actually slows us down or makes us worth less, it's a…

It's possible that I have an advanced case of "peter pan syndrome", but when I turned 30 things started to take off for me. At 33, I'm just starting to get little hints that I may in fact be a grown-up. I'm working at my first startup right now, having previously worked at more established companies and research institutions. If somehow in 1.75 years I just stop being able to do that, and start fading into a decline, I would be very sad. It's also pretty unlikely.

My personal theory is that it's all about ensuring continued personal and professional growth. I know plenty of people who stoped those in their 20s and seem "old". I also know plenty of people in their 60s and 70s who didn't stop them and I find myself surprised regularly when I remember the number of years they've been alive.

Basically just supporting digitalsushi's point with anecdotal evidence.

Re: Does life end after 35?

#20

Post by kyro »

I often worry about whether my startup clock is running out. I'm closer to 30 than 20, finishing up graduate school, and for the most part feel young. But other than the pediatrics ward, the only other time I start to feel my age is when attending some of these startup events.

What I try to keep conscious of is knowing what's reported in the media and what isn't, which are often 2 completely different worlds. On TechCrunch, "kid genius makes $100m" is the story they want. It fits this age-old narrative of a child prodigy reaching success in half the time it takes a "normally smart" person to, like Mozart, Einstein.

And that media draws in huge amounts of young people hoping to fit that narrative. But what's not reported are the companies that are typically working on much harder and more boring problems -- problems that require an understanding by people who've been in industries for years. Look at any CrunchBase newsletter about the day's fundraising and acquisitions, and you'll find yourself surprised at how many medical/B2B/etc companies are being bought for $100m+. These aren't companies started by 22yo grads, but by people with extensive industry experience. And the (startup) media doesn't really give a damn about them.

That's not, in any way, to devalue startups started by younger people. There's little-to-no barrier to starting social apps and the like. They have their place in society and have shown to be successful, so I don't blame a fresh grad who wants to try his/her hand at it. But there is a whole world of other startups and companies that are working in more complicated and boring industries that could not have been started by people in their early 20s.

Experience still matters, as unsexy as it is.

Post reply on HN