[wistlo]

You are 63% of my age (there's a coincidence there, do the math).

A point I haven't yet seen in the comments: how much the advancement of civilization owes to 20-30 somethings. Take The Beatles, Alexander Hamiliton, even Anthony Fauci (who had the rare reprise late in life) as examples. At around 40 I gave up any illusion I might do something illustrious, and accepted that from then on, I would just work for a living. My best work became my children, and I'm happy to have done that.

Many of the other comments line up with my own observations at this sage old age:

* more distractions (my house seems to be aging much faster than me, and taking up much more time to maintain)

* bigger responsibilities (more savings to manage with less time until retirement to fix investment errors, offspring where simple existential needs like food and diapers have been replaced by tuition, aging in-laws with real decline issues like eyesight and bad joints)

* less energy. true, and most especially I can't skip sleep like I could 20 or 40 years ago.

* burnout ( this stuff does get old, and "boring" as noted by one commenter)

* underestimating the value of my experience. Not writing that really clever code when a simpler solution will suffice, for example. The ability to tell people a realistic estimate of work, not my old optimistic "couple of days" estimate that was almost always 10x short

* ADD, not helped by social media (stay off it when working, or always) and a trying to ignore the constant stream of news (except HN of course lol). But a great help in being open to new methods where I find myself evangelizing about git to people half my age.

* exercise, fitness, diet: need to up my game after covid isolation and increasingly creakey joints. It does make a difference. In my case living in The Big Easy doesn't help.

* Did I mention sleep? Why yes I did, forgive my forgetfulness....no, actually I put it here intentionally because it is that important. Exercise helps with getting quality sleep.

I am still writing code and I "provide value" (their words) in that I can solve complex data analysis problems that come to me after co-workers reach the limits of using vlookups and pivot tables in Excel. I'm not the fastest and I'm always fighting imposter syndrome, but that's quashed whenever I catch a glimpse of production code written by pricey consultants and realize they make the same mistakes and use truly ugly workarounds even I wouldn't consider.