I'm a fair bit closer to the right hand side of the age curve than the left. My advice: Look at the brevity of Alan Kay's responses. When I was young I would have soared past them looking for the point. Now I see that one sentence and I weep. Why didn't anyone say that 20 years ago?

Maybe they did. I was too busy being frustrated with the churn of software development. All my time and energy was focused on new technologies that came out all the time. My young plastic brain spent it's flexibility absorbing the latest framework, etc.

Now that I have lost the motivation, ability and time to keep up with things like the younger folk, I can finally listen to the older folk (hopefully while there are still folk older than me to listen to).

These days I'm trying just to write code. All those young people have soared past the wisdom of their elders looking for the point. It's still there. Don't look at the new frameworks, look at what people were doing 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago. How does it inform what you are doing?

I hope that helps! It's a struggle for me too.