I'm 42, turning 43 somewhere in the coming months. What I gather from your question is actually a more general property of aging imho. As we get older we actual

I'm 42, turning 43 somewhere in the coming months. What I gather from your question is actually a more general property of aging imho. As we get older we actually have seen quite a few things before; we've burned our hands a few times and naturally've become more careful and considerate when evaluating choices. The big advantage of youth is its naïveté; to be able to dive head first into a new idea, uncompromised enthusiasm, strong believe in your abilities because why the hell not! All the patterns are new. The big advantage of our later years is experience, wisdom, recognizing certain things a viable and others as not so much because we recognize the patterns. I think that one should be wary of our more negative experiences leading us to cynicism, imho the opposite of youthful enthusiasm. You see, we have the tendency to think we really do know the outcomes of certain things based on our wisdom, but the way the world works, sometimes that is totally counter-intuitive. Case in point: when I was about 21, I got a 25000 loan to buy a Silicon Graphics O2 with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator + MIPSPro Compiler license (I kid you not) because I wanted to learn about this awesome computer and operating system. It was not a well-thought-out descision (it took me 6 years to pay of that debt). I couldn't afford software for it (hell, Alias Wavefront PowerAnimator was 35000 a seat!) so I decided to call companies that were releasing software for IRIX and bluntly ask them if I could test their software for them. I got on the phone with one guy and he said: "wait. are you telling me you bought a 25k computer just to learn?". I got a job interview the next day. Funnily enough, by buying that O2, I got a job at a graphics software company (my first programming job), I travelled the world because of that descision, met a whole bunch of awesome people and essentially, that thing kickstarted my life + career in a way that I could not have anticipated. My point is: when you think you've seen it all before, or something seems like a bad idea, keep in mind that you often can't really tell the consequences of something. At least, that's what I tell myself and it helps keep the cynical part of me in check. I think my advice would be: kill cynicism, dive in something new head first without over-analyzing, just for the heck of it, try to find the fringes of your knowledge and push the boundary outward a bit more. Don't over-analyze try to re-connect that enthousiasm you feel/felt when discovering/exploring/coding/inventing.