Is it just me, or was there was a generation where it was hit or miss whether they regarded learning entirely new technologies as a routine part of the job? Am

Is it just me, or was there was a generation where it was hit or miss whether they regarded learning entirely new technologies as a routine part of the job? Among people who would be over, say, roughly 60-65 years old right now, it would be pretty cool to meet someone who kept abreast of developments in the field and were excited when they spotted something that could be an improvement on the tech they currently worked with. Those people were exceptional, and they were always pretty smart. The norm was to want to spend the next ten years working on the same thing you spent the last ten years on. I think people younger than that (people under 60 now) have internalized the ethos of always being ready to roll with change. Who moved my cheese, all that stuff. Even if it's hard for them, they at least accept it as fact and give it lip service. It's been a huge cultural shift to an attitude that everyone has to spend their whole lives learning and adapting. That attitude is native for my generation; in school we read about the Rust Belt and the collapse of American manufacturing and we all said, "What was wrong with those people? Why didn't they adapt, move to a different economic sector, and move where the jobs were?" That's the way we were programmed to think. My father's generation understood the Rust Belt differently. They all hoped they would have done better, but failing to adapt was a normal response that they could easily sympathize with. That generation was not on notice to always be ready for change. I think this cultural shift is going to result in a decline in ageism. The older engineers I've worked with in the last ten years have behaved like any other engineers, except they happen to have a lot of experience. Unlike many older people I worked with early in my career, they aren't cranky about their favorite tools declining in popularity. They don't drag their feet learning the team's new tech stack and rationalize their refusal by predicting widespread failure and a mass return to last decade's technology. There was a time when that was the way older people were supposed to act and there was no embarrassment about it. In a younger worker behavior like that could be treated as an attitude problem, but in an older worker, it was tricky, because social norms said they were entitled to act that way. Now the expectations for older people have utterly changed. I can't imagine a 55-year-old engineer pulling that shit in 2017, so there's no reason to be afraid of hiring them.