Ask HN: How do you deal with professional jealousy and getting older?

You need to read The War of Art.

> “Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.”

> “Every sun casts a shadow, and genius's shadow is Resistance. As powerful as is our soul's call to realization, so potent are the forces of Resistance arrayed against it. Resistance is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, harder to kick than crack cocaine. We're not alone if we've been mowed down by Resistance; millions of good men and women have bitten the dust before us. And here's the biggest bitch: We don't even know what hit us. I never did. From age twenty-four to thirty-two, Resistance kicked my ass from East Coast to West and back again thirteen times and I never even knew it existed. I looked everywhere for the enemy and failed to see it right in front of my face.”

That book is a treasure trove in how to change your thinking and defeat this. But it does require changing your thinking and a great deal of discipline.

I don't know what to tell you. I'll be 50 in less than a year, and I am learning new things on my own constantly as I have been since I started programming 35 years ago. The only difference I feel is that I am able to learn faster (and a deeper level) then when I was half my age. One thing I've really gotten good at is learning. I know how to do it.

I don't expect my behavior to change any time soon.

I think if you have have the attitude that learning is only something you do to prepare for work, but then when work starts, you don't have to learn as much as you did before, then you're going to get frustrated really soon.

What you know now will be half as useful in 5 years, and practically useless in 10 -- for the most part.

But if you embrace life-long learning, you will adjust how you live your life. You'll allocate time to do, and allocate time to learn. Give yourself goals such as, "learn a new programming language each year" -- or whatever your passion is. If you're a DBA, then learn a new Database each year.

The mistake a lot of people make is they only learn things that they believe they need for their immediate job rather than learn things for the sake of learning. The latter is when you get the "aha" moments, that bit of spark that makes you realize you've not only learned something new, but something that can be practical in your daily job.

As one example, last year I spent time learning Haskell. It has made me a better C# and JavaScript developer.

Don't beat yourself up for watching TV. Just set small achievable goals with a reasonable time-frame, and stick to it. You say you don't have a fancy web-site, well make it your goal to create the best one you can possibly create in 2015. Make the goal real. Tell yourself that you'll blog about it and talk about it at local meet-ups in 2016 -- talk about your experience creating it.. from the initial goals all the way to completion, including what you've learned from the experience. Then it becomes something real and tangible.

The only thing that fits this discription for me would be sex. Now what ?

> Let's think strategically: if your first project is curing aging and achieving immortality, then every other project after that is just a matter of time. Just sayin'.

Actually, if you "cure mortality" first, you will exacerbate all the other problems related to population overshot, environmental damage, wealth distributions, etc. Then elf-style immortality will find itself cured, at gunpoint, or in more gruesome ways.

On the other hand, you can accept that both of us (along with every human alive today) will die. Once you are free of that burden, you may identify a worthy project, push it as further as possible within your lifetime, and take the time to train some younger replacements that can take over later on.

And of course, I might be wrong, so you might end up enjoying amazingly extended lifecycle. I just don't think it is a good idea to count on it.

> I ask them "Do you like learning? Are you prepared to lea ...

you should have been more honest and instead asked them whether they are prepared to sit in front of a computer 95% of the time - whether they like to learn new technologies in their spare time just for the sake of staying competitive no matter if it bears real practical relevance and if they are cool with earning less than their fellow key account manager ...