Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

This article is, from my perspective as a 36 year old, a poorly aimed arrow from a far away location. It isn't even wrong; it didn't start out from anywhere I recognize.

If you're living in the middle of a sea of what you recognize as cultural signifiers, and it slowly dawns on you that those cultural signifiers swarm and bubble around a particular age cohort, I guess the experience of drifting out of that age cohort can be disorientating.

But I don't even agree with what this chap seems to recognize as culture - it's mostly froth, mostly commercial pablum - and it never gripped me much. But I can only guess at this, because he isn't precise enough to define his terms.

The search for meaning in my life came to me in my late teens, and was over by the time I was 25. The meaning I found was not derived from the attention or efforts of other people. I don't expect a decline in marketing of cultural objects towards me, because I've never been much of a target for cultural object marketing that was targeted to the 15-40 age cohort.

I don't watch much TV, I don't watch many movies, I don't go to music events, I don't visit the gym, and I generally feel quite comfortable in life. I don't feel pressure to try and appear young. I've never got much dating advice because I never spent much time dating. The world this chap seems to have been living in (as near as I can tell) is almost unrecognizable to me.

As near as I can tell, the chap has just discovered existential angst. Welcome to late adolesence, is all I can say.

This might be a bit more compelling if you were > 40. Most 40 year olds who are engaged with others en masse probably recognize what this guy is trying to say.

To change this logic, I think we need to change mass culture. Simply being more mature in the way you talk about, is nice, but it also means you can't participate on an even playing ground (again, en masse)

I'm over 40 and I didn't understand this post. Maybe someone else can summarize it.

I think the only dirty secret when it comes to passing 40 as a software developer is that you become more and more in the minority and notice that there is a greater percentage of older people looking for work. So- it's a little scary.

As an over-40 developer, I haven't really experienced that latter. However, I have experienced the feeling that I've passed my due-date, culturally, in more-or-less the way the article describes. People look to me to provide answers, now, even when I don't know them off the top of my head, and accept my answers as correct even when I preface them with conditionals and hedging. I know exactly the feeling that I am now responsible for creating culture for those under 30.

younger developers are asking you questions? Don't they know everything?

People have been looking to me to provide professional answers almost since I started my career - I've historically been the best, or one of the best, developers everywhere I worked.

Younger people I've known are typically headstrong in the ignorant way of youth - they can't help it, they don't know what they don't know. I haven't seen young people pay particular attention to what older people say.

But young people aren't usually very interesting, so not being culturally relevant to them doesn't really affect me in any way.

If you the article is about existential angst (something like "the difficulty in searching for meaning"), I'm not sure it "clicked" for you; it's essentially the opposite of mere existential angst - it's about realizing something crucial about cultural meaning.

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