Comment by AIorNot

Well a couple of points as a senior techie over 50 now - considering the youth culture of the tech world, first of all this “hacking youth, hacking life” is all mostly ineffective in my opinion, it’s not so much a metric based existence that helps counter life’s speed but living better and learning the common wisdom of past generations that is more useful in my opinion :

1. Youth is wasted on the young - people in their twenties generally have not found their identities and this means they will often ‘discover’ and change their outlook into their 30s, 40s etc- things well known to older generations and why so many hippies become square, why so liberals become conservative, why so many skeptics take on religion. It’s human nature to rebel and discover the same lessons that past generations did and then pretend like their generation is the first to gain wisdom..

2. A substantial amount of life is not planned for, do not make the mistake of assuming your plans will bear fruition -life is what happens while you are making other plans -

3. Older age often means the things That gave you pleasure in your 20/30s will not as you age- that is part of your journey

4. Again life is a journey not a destination- live your life with optimism and instead of crazy ambitious year by year plans focused on achievement instead focus on the moment and your own personal health: I often see young people afraid to be adventurous, and young men in particular, fail to take care of their bodies, fail to take care of their mental needs and instead take on the road of overwork, stress, isolation and bad health (especially with the sedentary and isolating nature of programming)

5. As you really grow old (I’m not talking about you kids in your 20/30s here, you will find your tolerance for learning new things will lower, as will your skepticism of the new stuff, , it’s natural but it’s the antithesis of this industry- you will be yesterdays news and ageism in this industry is not something I see ending anytime soon. So find a way to stay relevant, maybe that means a career change, location change etc.. honestly the tech world as it today is not the insular but friendly optmistic and often artistic place of the 70s, 80s and 90s - when programming was as much an art as a corporate discipline, now it’s vastly larger industrialized and corporatized and corrupted by endless metrics, VC capitalism and social media doomscrolling and hype. (And Who really knows, how fast AI will change these modalities either negatively or positively)

5. A spiritual life of some kind is worthwhile- this article was about how fast life moves: IT DOES, I cannot believe how old I am, for example. The only counter to how fast life moves is savoring the moment - I think that an inward view is important in that regard, especially if you are an agnostic/atheist. That doesn’t mean to go out and adopt a dogma wholesale, but don’t be close minded and exclusionary and willfully obtuse, be willing to open yourself to others, be willing to forgive yourself too, above all Know Thyself… that takes decades