Ask HN: How do you deal with getting older?

"Hack life"...please, just stop with this. Can we coin a new phrase?

That cultural description is only true in so far as you believe it.

Friend of mine just got hired at Apple to work on HealthKit and he's over 40. I don't understand why everyone is so preoccupied with their age.

I personally think age has less to do with this 'culture'. It is mostly your attitude towards new things that surface and whether you're willing to accept the change.

Personally, I've lost interest in the past 4-5 years where there have been significant changes.

I'm 25 and feels lost in a culture that hails 20 year olds that are dreaming up the next big thing.

I don't think age is the important thing here, I have worked with people of all ages (15-70 or so) that I look up to and learned a lot from. Experience is important, and it is hard to have experienced a lot of things if you are 20.

On a semi-related note, all my best bosses have been parents, having kids seem to teach you something about the value of time.

There's an (spanish) old saying that goes: The devil knows more because he's old than he does because he's the devil. (Or Más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo.) HTH.

Just make sure you get better as you get older and make sure to cultivate relationships based upon mutual respect. Work should be guaranteed provided our economy is strong enough to sustain it.

I feel like my programming career gets better and better with age - I really have not felt the discrimination that others have (or worry about). I just keep on keeping on and make it a focus to spend 5-10 hours a week improving my skills and staying current.

I'm working on a time machine. This is how I'm dealing with it.

I'm 34 and I believe I'm dreaming up the next big thing.

Many entrepreneurs become succesful at an older age... the famous Coronel Sanders became succesful in his 60s !!

In the tech field, Jeff Bezos started Amazon in his 30s.

I am less driven by the prospect of becoming an old expensive programmer, and more concerned about missing out on gaining management experience. I have conversed with many programmers who express concern that they have no management aspirations, and yet the longer they remain pure programmers, they find they have fewer options as they age, instead, as one might imagine, more.

Maybe it's because it's harder to convince a 40-year old programmer to work bullshit hours for a few slices of free pizza.

40 year olds today were the first generation to grow up with computers. 10 years ago, 40 year olds were "old" in computer parlance. The myth of the 20 year old hacker will go away over time, as more and more people grow up immersed in technology (and thus possess the necessary skillset).

I would even go so far as to say that our culture's preoccupation with youth presents an opportunity for disruptive ideas/startups, based in "wisdom and experience."

  "6502?"
  "Aye"
  "You were lucky.  There were 19 of us all crowded round a
   single Z80 processor with a hexadecimal display..."
  
  ...
  
  "Of course when I say keyboard I mean a 8 high voltage bootstrap
   connectors with rusty razorblades for switches.  But it was 
   a keyboard to us..."

Why do you have to be 20 to be doing something interesting? Also why is it assumed that every new innovation that some 20 year old ivy league drop comes up with is good for our society and our culture? To me most start ups are just superfluous, these apps and such are created just to make our lives slightly more convenient in most cases, they rarely improve the human condition or outlook. Go ahead and glorify the startup culture but I have more respect for the grizzled old devs that have created the foundation we stand on today and the people moving things forward incrementally.

Come on man, let me give you a hug. You seem to need it. Do you feel better now?

Acceptance.

Get off my lawn!

Generally I wrinkle slightly more each year, moan about my joints seizing up and grow more cynical.

On a more serious note I am becoming better at what I do because I understand much more of pretty much everything in far greater depth than I used to. And while I perhaps don't have the stamina or raw LoC output ability of a 21 year old any more, I can usually achieve tasks much faster because I know what I'm doing and I make fewer mistakes.

I'm definitely much more cynical about flavour of the week languages and frameworks though. And I find it very funny that things get reinvented every few years as a new generation decides some thing is too cumbersome (often SQL or DMBSs) and needs to be thrown out, only to be slowly reinvented as all the edge cases that lead to the abstraction are discovered...

And I'm only 36.

Career-wise, no discrimination noticed yet.

Your comment seems to bridge two things: hacking life and staying relevant in technology. For the former, I'm 42 and doing just fine. I try to keep up with the latest trends though I don't buy into everything just to keep my sanity. I write as much code as I can. I've learned though that someone who listens with empathy and attempts to understand a business' problems will always be relevant.

For the former, I read a lot on diet, nutrition and exercise. I believe in 50 years, we will look back at the time when our diets were largely based on sugary carbohydrates and wonder what the hell we were thinking. I experiment with fasting. I do different kinds of exercises. We don't have total control over our health but so many of us make regular poor decisions that even tiny improvements have to help. Of course, I could walk out in front of a bus tomorrow but attempting to improve each day goes a long way.

From a health perspective, I subscribe to Nassim Taleb's idea of reduction instead of addition. High cholesterol? Don't start taking statins, start eliminating things like sugar and processed carbs and wheat. High blood pressure? Don't add blood pressure medicine, try exercising regularly, don't smoke, eat vegetables. Etc, etc.

Long story longer, if all you do technology and health wise is exactly what everyone else has always done or always told you to do, you'll get what everyone else has always gotten. True, experimenting and hacking may not help at all but there is plenty of evidence out there that walking a different path can get you different results.

> As hackers, do you feel like you can hack life and get more years out of it then the average joe?

Hackers we'll die earlier, obese and with mobility problems, and probably sitting, while trying to hack "life". :)

I'm not a big fan of the whole "hack life" mentality. We aren't used to deal with complex systems, such as organisms or life. Despite the echo chamber we live in, the systems we deal with are simple; way simpler than life, and deterministic. Every time we think we "hacked life", we're just ignoring the complexity of the problem at hand (just think about the "hack nutrition" ideas around...).

It's inevitable. Why worry about it?

There's nothing about age that prevents you from understanding or coming up with the next big thing. Keep your mind open and eyes open for stuff that's happening in whatever field you're interested.

Avoid cultures that hail 20 year olds dreaming up the next big thing. Outside of a few (toxic) pockets, those cultures are in the minority in my experience.

Old age is the single most surprising thing that happens to a person.

But I don't think getting hailed is the driver for success. What you accomplish is a lot more important. And age definitely does not prevent that.

I try to maintain my mental vitality by limiting nostalgia and intentionally seeking out new things.

For example, I do this thing periodically with my music collection where I create a playlist of only music made in the past 5 years. If that playlist is too sparse, I go looking for more.

A lot of what's bad about aging strikes me as almost an ideology. The cynicism of age is an ideology. It's like a belief system where you adopt a retrograde view of time -- things are getting worse, they were better in the old days, etc. This isn't how time actually works. Things evolve over time. Some things get better, some get worse, but mostly there's just change.

I'm 35 and overall am feeling at the top of my game. I don't envy the 20 years olds or feel lost. I've learned so much, not just technically but around user and enterprise needs, inter-personal skills, and about myself since I was 18-20 that I absolutely feel better suited for success.

I've started eating right and working out, which has helped both body and mind, and I've developed task and time management techniques that work for me. While I admit my mind might not be 100% as quick as it was when i was 20, I do feel remarkably more productive.

Although to be fair, I'm not in the SV ecosystem, and run my startup (although after 8 years maybe not a startup any longer?) from outside of Boston (a location where a strong business model still beats a profitless pitch deck), so perhaps the environment is one reason I feel the way I do.