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>problem is that by 35 you can't get by on novelty anymore because you've seen some version of everything there is to see I'm 68 and this is self-limiting B.S.

• Aeolun 5y ago
  You don’t feel the amount of new things you see slows down considerably as you grow older? It’s not that you can’t find novel things any more if you go looking for them, but most everyday things hold no more (or less) excitement. I notice this especially much with my 3 year old son, for whom everything is fascinating. He’ll find out that sticking a bowl upside down in the water and turning it face up will make a lot of bubbles and he’s tremendously excited. I’m excited to see him being excited (which is novel’ish), but the fact that bubbles appear is incredibly mundane now.
  • indymike 5y ago
    > You don’t feel the amount of new things you see slows down considerably as you grow older? Only if you stop exploring. When you think there's nothing new left to learn, nothing novel to experience, well, you stop looking. Start looking again. > I notice this especially much with my 3 year old son, for whom everything is fascinating. Spending time with kids is the best way there is to rediscover your sense of wonder.
  • jimt222 5y ago
    Just one example: All my life I have been curious about human pre-history and ancient history. Never learned much about it along the way. Now that I have time, I find an incredible wealth of knowledge and insight about early human history has been developed. I feel like a dim area of my understanding is being illuminated, like exploring a dark attic with a bright flashlight, it is very satisfying, and particularly when pieces fall into place and I have an "aha! so that is what that was all about" moment, it is exciting as well.
  • diamondage 5y ago
    I'd add that it's about detail - if you thin slice reality for efficiency, reality becomes more simplistic. But you can also discover infinitely more detail. walking into a library reveals that there is an infinite amount of things to know, and there are all kinds of differences between two similar glasses of wine etc. Perhaps its more about the spare energy of the individual available for learning and discovery
    • learc83 5y ago
      Exactly. The way I think about it is that anything is interesting if studied in enough detail. A single square inch of lawn could provide material for multiple PhDs.
      • contingencies 5y ago
        Added as Learc's Lamentation to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
      • erwincoumans 5y ago
        Indeed. Just studying your last sentence could provide inspiration of finding funny alternative sayings to 'get off my lawn'.
    • MegaDeKay 5y ago
      I'm into my sixth decade, and I will agree with you that it's about detail. I find more and more rabbit holes to go down that are just fascinating. I make ice cream, but how can I make really good ice cream? What are the pros and cons of regular switches vs. leaf switches for the retro arcade controller I want to build? Why does putting a bunch of wood mulch around my fruit trees do so much to improve the soil ecology? The list goes on. I am never bored. I think many people take the availability of information we have at our fingertips today for granted. It wasn't always this way. Dig into it, learn something, rinse and repeat.
  • 300bps 5y ago
    You don’t feel the amount of new things you see slows down considerably as you grow older? Not OP but I don’t feel this way at all. My oldest son is starting college next year. That alone has been a learning experience! I coach his robotics team, that has been tremendously new experiences. I’ve gotten three cloud certifications in the past year. I have a huge list of things I want to learn about - assembly language on Linux, FPGAs and about 20 other things. I could spend 10,000 lifetimes and not scratch the surface of what this world has to offer.
    • jhanschoo 5y ago
      I don't see how this is an adequate counterexample to OP's experience. The novel things you mention have happened to you take are rarer occurrences than a 3 year old experiencing basic physics. Despite the pleas in responses to continue to explore and experience new things, it seems to me that the experience of being surprised at new things becomes rarer as one ages, with exploration yielding diminishing returns with respect solely to that experience.
      • j4yav 5y ago
        I think maybe it’s easier to get stuck in a rut, go on autopilot, rely on what you know and then end up feeling like there’s no novelty in the world any more as you get older and comfortable. Maybe you can fall so deeply into it that you can’t even tell you’re in a rut any more and just think that that’s how the world is, which is a puzzling perspective to those outside of the rut because the complexity and novelty of the world really is literally everywhere. Not that endless novelty seeking is the be all end all, but it’s there if you want it.
        • np- 5y ago
          For me I have found that traveling helps break that "tunnel vision" which I occasionally find myself stuck in. And it's very hard to realize you're stuck in it until you break out of it. Traveling helps me realize that there's an entire world out there where people are not just living, but thriving. That always helps stir up my curiosity to dig deeper into things.
  • matwood 5y ago
    > You don’t feel the amount of new things you see slows down considerably as you grow older? At 44 I have the opposite problem. The more I learn, the more I realize I don't know. When I was younger I had the ego of a young person and thought I was always on the cusp of knowing it all. As I got older I realized I was simply unaware. It's a bit cliché, but I started approaching everything, even things I 'knew' with a beginners mindset. One of activities that really helped trigger this shift was finding something brand new to me at ~40 that I also became passionate about. In my case it was jiu-jitsu, but it can be anything where you're drinking from the firehose again. That mindset spread through everything else in my life.
    • dragonsky67 5y ago
      54, this is my life. There is so much out there to know and experience and it makes me sad to realise that there is no way that I'm going to be able to do everything. I've a history of every couple of years diving deep into an interest. Woodwork was a thing for a few years, then wood turning. Gardening has come and gone a few times. We spend a lot of time travelling and seeing new areas, slowly in a caravan, we never get to see it all. Recently I've started running a Dungeons and Dragons game for a couple of my kids and their friends, there can be a lot more depth to that than you may think. I've got to agree with you that you start to see a lot more things that you are familiar with. This is not really surprising if you are staying in the same environment. Cycles of initiatives at work seem to come back every 5 or 6 years and they always ignore the same problems... sigh. There is truth in the idea that history repeats and the more things change the more they stay the same. My suggestion for dealing with the feeling that nothing is new is much the same as everybody. If your world is getting boring and feels like everything is just on repeat, just change your world. Even if that means you are stepping into the unknown or you are taking risks, you are still going to change your experience.
    • mcv 5y ago
      > At 44 I have the opposite problem. The more I learn, the more I realize I don't know. I'm 47 and in the same place. I have only recently come to grips with the fact that I am a good programmer and I do know what I'm talking about, but there's also so much that I still don't know. I keep learning, but you've got to pick your focus, because you can't possibly learn everything.
  • jlokier 5y ago
    > You don’t feel the amount of new things you see slows down considerably as you grow older? I don't feel that at all. I've always felt there was a lot to know. I don't think I ever felt the "ego on the cusp of knowing everything" when I was younger, because I knew I hadn't studied most fields and that there was much more I didn't know about. But I did feel like I was getting that way within a few narrow technical fields. But as I get older the awareness that there's so much still to see, learn and do in just about every area, including those where I'd become something of an expert, just grows and grows, and it is depressing. As time passes I feel more and more the limited bandwidth of my capabilities, and that nothing I can do begins to scratch the surface of what there is. Some people seem to find a joy in learning. I enjoy it, indeed I can't help it, but I feel so small and my future life feels so short, it gets me down. Most things I take an interest in, it feels like it will take 300 years to get to grips with them. If anything, I feel an almighty rush to see what tiny part of what there is I can see, be around, and even better, understand and work with, while it's still possible. So much to see, so little time.
• coldcode 5y ago
  I'm 64 and retired last year. I spent 4 decades programming, and everything changes all the time, and I always learned new things. I am still learning new things, and still writing code to support my generative art. Admittedly I was finally burned out of the grind of working as a programmer, but it took a whole lifetime. But to truly approach new things you have to be willing to let go of the old, even programming if necessary, but without forgetting what you learned. A lifetime is a long time; you really don't need to just do one thing the whole time. A quote from a novel has always been an inspiration since I read it in high school - "An artist must leave a body of work" from The Agony And The Ecstasy, about Michelangelo. If your programming no longer excites you, learn something new in programming, or even learn something that isn't programming and do that. It's not easy, and might cost you money, but wasting your life doing something you no longer care about is not worth it. Of course some people can deal with a terrible job, and just spend the non-working time doing what they love, and that's OK if you can deal with it. I could never do that; I didn't turn to art until the last few years.
  • wruza 5y ago
    spent 4 decades programming, and everything changes all the time A half-aged kid here. This is the source of my anxiety, that all I’ve done and learned will age, slip through fingers and become forgotten. I wish our craft could stabilize on something, but it just doesn’t.
    • joshspankit 5y ago
      It does if you specialize in something that barely moves (AS/400, COBOL, others), but the experience of that career is almost the exact opposite of why many people get in to programming (lots of paperwork, consensus-based decisions, lots of waiting around trying to look busy, little new growth or exploration). However, there is some light at the end of the “everything changes” tunnel: as you learn different frameworks and languages you’re gaining new perspectives on the deeper concepts, and for the most part those deeper concepts don’t change. In OOP the “gang of four” is practically as relevant now as it was then, for example.
    • benkkey 5y ago
• erwincoumans 5y ago
  I agree, a curious mind never runs out of interesting things to see or do. How do we help the original poster becoming more curious and motivated?
  • Tempest1981 5y ago
    When you're burned out, it's hard to simply be curious. And burnout is demotivating.