Ask HN: I'm 27. Why Do I Feel Like I'm Getting Too Old or Running Out of Time? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: I'm 27. Why Do I Feel Like I'm Getting Too Old or Running Out of Time?

68 pointstraviswingo54 comments

Perhaps it's the remarkably young tech scene, or maybe the funding bubble, but I'm 27 years old and feel like I'm too old, and that I'm running out of time to succeed.

Wtf is going on here? I can't be the only one.

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You're not getting old. You're getting older. Welcome to humanity. :)

I am 43 now. The last 10 years of my life have been equal parts challenging and amazing. I have a little girl who is about to turn 5. My teenager is about to turn 18. I've made more "progress" and done more growing and experienced more in the last 10 years, than in all the years before.

Whether or not you have kids, I would do your best to learn how to enjoy each day. But learn. Whatever you do... keep learning.

Contrary to popular thought, you don't have to be young for great things to happen. They happen all around you, all the time.

Also, there's an author by the name of James Altucher and he's written some things about just being a little bit better, a little more improved than the day before. His stuff is good. I'd recommend it. Also, Deep Work by Cal Newport.

Thank you for letting me share my thoughts. I'd be happy to talk more if you ever want to.

> a little bit better, a little more improved than the day before.

How you do this?

In my case, I often apply my effort to learning one more thing about Ruby/Chef. Something I didn't know yesterday. I try to apply what I've learned, so that the knowledge sticks, and I'm cementing the concepts in my mind.

Tldr; Try to create balanced life. Balance is the key. & Meditate.

- Make peace with everything that is happening around you. Be happy.

- Building meaningful relationships will help you to be happy. When I say relationships, it must be done without any self interest. You should never expect anything to get from it but to just give with generosity. It works. Trust me.

- Most importantly delegate your work. Do not try to do everything on your own. Consider example of your body, if one organ starts on its own, then whole body is unstable. Same is with the community. If you play your part very well & you'll get to have more fun.

- Do not think in terms of milestones. Think in terms of journey. Marathon mindset. If you think if you hit the milestone you will be successful & content then you are doomed. You're already successful. Be content with what you have. But keep up the hard work.

I would suggest to you to read James Allen's work.

Start with this -> http://james-allen.in1woord.nl/daily.php If you read it in the morning & practice on daily basis. You will start to see the results.

Thanks for reading.

You're paying way too much attention to the press and PR about the tech scene.

"According to research by Vivek Wadhwa, an academic and tech entrepreneur, and the Kauffman Foundation, the average age of successful start-up founders in these and other high-growth industries was 40. And high-growth start-ups are almost twice as likely to be launched by people over 55 as by people 20 to 34."

Do the things now that you won't be able to do once you've got a family (assuming you haven't started one already.) Take a few risks, learn more than a few things, and stretch yourself in ways that aren't comfortable. You've got plenty of time—what you lack right now is perspective. Work on that.

[1] http://business.time.com/2013/03/14/ask-the-expert-the-best-...

There are great stories about later in life success stories too. Just yesterday I was reading about Tom Clancey. In his mid 30s he was an insurance salesman. His first book published when he was 37. Not that I want to be an author, but that's a great story. Another one I think of is that John Boehner was a plastics salesman at age 41. Not that he's a role model at all, but clearly he had talents and abilities that were not being fully exploited as late as his early forties. Life is long, and while people like us may have missed the whole "teenage Internet entrepreneur/genius" train, there are lots of exit ramps to fortune and glory throughout your 30s and 40s.

Also worth noting: not every success story looks like 100M exits and millions of users. My market has about 4000 customers tops (or about 50 enterprise-level clients) and were a front-runner in the industry. It's never going to garner much in the way of investment but we feel pretty successful even so.

You hear alot of noise about young people who manage to achieve great success because that is the exception, not the rule. For most people, success happens as a result of what you do in the next 10-15 years and very little of what you did before matters.

However, I am starting to realize that the options I had before are simply no longer available as I get older. I'm never going to be a doctor or pilot or in the military, for example, as I chose to go into software instead. While I could have simply decided 10 years ago to drop everything and do something different, there's no time to do that now and expect to have the same level of success that I would have had if I kept going with what I'm doing now.

> I'm never going to be a doctor or pilot or in the military [...]

A friend of mine, bus driver at 30, decided to become a pilot.

10 years later he's a captain at a major commercial airline.

Sample size of one, but never underestimate some good old determination :)

Agree, someone close decided to fly planes after retiring (60). And Some famous painters started in their 30s/40s.

A big misconception that I had in my 20s, and I'm sure others have had, was my belief that life isn't as good when you're older. You probably look at 40 or 50 as being old, but when you get to that age, you still feel young inside and besides the little aches and pains, you feel pretty much the same. I'm pretty sure your 40-year old or 50-year old self will appreciate the work you do now and for the next 15 years towards big goals, because you still have a lot of time to enjoy them.

You're not. Similar age bracket, similar feeling. I've gotten to the point where I honestly feel _bad_ about doing "leisure", even activities I used to enjoy, because I feel like I'm "Wasting time". It's become a bit of a problem, because while I feel like "I can do this as long as it takes" Part of me worries eventually this mythical burnout thing will kick in with no warning and render me unable to even keep a basic income. Or maybe it already has kicked in, and this fear/stress is what it is? Hell if I know, and that's half my reason for posting, to let you know you're not alone in feeling worried about this shit and unsure as to the answers.

The only logical hypotheses introspection has given is that it's reasonable to recognize that compounding value is probably the #1 reliable way to greater wealth/freedom later, so by not generating that initial compounding value early the time is "doubly lost". That combined with newly minted billionaires significantly younger than me off of photo apps makes me feel like I missed the train somewhere as I crank away in a corner on some insane analytics SaaS. The only pragmatic response I've found to that is to just keep cranking, and if this doesn't work change my approach, but that doesn't really help with the mental conflict of if I should enjoy the time I have now but shared with work, or 100% myself now for the purpose of "buying" myself more 100% free time later on.

I realize I gave more of a braindump than anything else, but I hope it gives you a window into the thought process of someone else in a similar sort of mental tumbleweed.

That doesn't sound like a pragmatic response at all.

"Keep doing what you're doing unless it doesn't work in which case do something else"

That sounds like woody allen.

The vast majority of savings is simply unspent income. Income accumulates at a more or less fixed rate, and the extra income you get for extra experience grows much faster than the extra income you get from interest on the unspent portion of that.

If you want to have more money, MAKE more money.

There is a maximum amount of money you can make with your skills, If wealth is truly your goal you should figure out what that is, and do whatever is required to get it.

Working too hard is counter-productive... work too many hours and you'll burn out.

And what is the point of working hard if you don't enjoy it? If you consume yourself with work you don't enjoy do you actually think you'll be able to find things to do in the hypothetical future when you've retired?

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-s... puts it: "do what you love because you love doing it. If that means long hours, fantastic. If that means leaving the office by 6pm every day for your underwater basket-weaving class, also fantastic."

If you really want to not work, buying freedom is much easier by reducing your expenses. Betting on getting rich is a bet, not a plan.

In practice there are many paths to freedom, not just getting enough money to not have to work: https://codewithoutrules.com/2016/09/16/sane-workweek/

Yeah this is exactly what I was referring to. I literally feel guilty for doing leisure activities and absolutely feel like Im wasting time. It's led me to build some really cool things and given me the reputation for outputting a lot of quality in a short period of time, but nothing else, really.

I'm in a similar boat, except I have 10 years on top of yours. It's actually been a lot of fun, the learning and building, but I've been driven by the same fear.

First off, this is hard and very few (any?) have this figured out. It took me going through a major depression episode and other, significant, life changes to start to work on this.

About a year ago I've started to change some key habits and that has helped to alleviate this feeling. To start with:

* Reduced the amount of tech news / startup news I consume significantly. I cut down the number of blogs from ~ 300 to ~ 10. * I have a hobby (woodworking in my case). I tried a bunch of hobbies over the years and it took a while to find something that I'm sticking with, but just keep experimenting * Meditation and non-tech and non-business reading has helped. Instead of reading 10 business/startup/tech books for every 1 fiction/biography/history/fun-topic, I reversed that relationship. * Vacations. Not some huge travel-the-world stuff, but a weekend getaway with friends / significant other is amazing. Could just be to look at vintage stores, art galleries, sit on your butt by the pool, etc. Don't have goals, get lost and don't watch the clock

Lastly, the most important piece. Spend the time and the energy you're investing right now in projects and "growing" on figuring out what you want out of life. This is not some existential thing nor is it some grand plan. Starting a company is a goal and good one. Traveling 3 months out of a year is a goal too. Don't get hung up on it, it'll change and evolve over the years. Just start somewhere, you can "pivot" as you move forward.

Here's the most important piece though - how do you measure yourself? Forget realistic/unrealistic or external/internal - doesn't matter. Identify what are the metrics that you use to gauge your progress and what it means for you to have had a successful week (day - too short & month/year - too long).

Then, ask yourself: why that?

The answers to the questions above will help show you a path from feeling like you're spinning in one spot and what to do next.

Reach out if you want to talk about any of it.

Guilty? "Guilty" comes from breaking a legal or moral standard. So, what legal or moral standard do you think you are breaking when you do leisure activities?

Legal? None.

Moral? Not really that either.

It sounds (putting words in your mouth here a bit) like you've taken someone's "should" and internalized it to the point where you've given it pseudo-moral force in your thinking. If so, stop it! You don't have to live up to that person's standard of how they think you ought to live your life. Trying to do so makes you miserable. (I think you aren't really satisfied with where it leaves you, based on you saying "... but nothing else, really.")

However, that person is often a parent. It's not as easy as saying "stop doing that" when you've had it drilled into your head for 27 years. It takes a lot of effort, figuring out why you want what you want, and whether you really want it or just have been told that you ought to, and, essentially, deprogramming yourself.

One other thing - whether you want to travel or not, reading Vagabonding is helpful for the mindset. Some of Tim Ferriss' writing on this is helpful too.

The idea of financial freedom is not a one-size fits all. It really depends on what you value and how you want to live.

However, that's another existential question without an easy answer, just lots of work on self-awareness.

Just want to say I can relate to your train of thought.

But don't go 100% on one thing at any aspect in life. Things change, if you go 80% on something the 20% left is investment in something else.

As you say yourself you need compounding value.

I'm 57. I've been programming since I was 19 and I'm successful.

Never made pots of money, but it's kept me in comfort. Success for me is having a lovely wife, great kids, roof over our heads, food in our tums, enjoying time together, doing some of those bucket list things, and laughing every single day.

I still love programming and solving problems for people. You won't have heard of anything I've written, but much of it is still in use and (I like to think), makes people's lives a bit easier and hopefully helps them have the same kind of success I enjoy.

We can't all be millionaires, but maybe we can all improve humanity a bit by the things we create.

Yup! The key is to define what success is for you.

As developers we're always sharing and reading stories of young millionaires who did something that "We could do in an afternoon" and think we're failing if we just get a decent job that keeps us in comfort.

I felt a lot like OP as I was moving into my 30's. Then I realized that traveling and photography make me much happier than stressing out over being the best programmer or trying to make millions on some novel new idea.

I'm 26 and feel the same sometimes. Then I look around me and realize that I know just one person that managed to build a successfull company before 30. All other successful founders I know started their company in there mid to late 30s.

My father started a successfull company when he was almost 60.

You need to realize that the young founders seem to be quite successfull for high risk ventures but the big mass of successfull startups is built in the not so visible B2B market, where your value significantly increases with work and industry experience. The B2B market is also much easier to bootstrap since you're much more likely to know your potential customers before you built a product.

This monster is 79: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth

Perspective.

I'm 33 tomorrow and I haven't accomplished a damn thing yet. Furthermore, it sounds like you're way ahead of me. I make hardly any money and have no prospects for anything better. Actually my situation feels quite desperate at the moment.

What keeps me going is the thought that people in 3rd world countries have it worse, so maybe I shouldn't complain too much.

Buy a sports car, have a fling, get married, become a monk, walk Camino de Santiago, etc. are some of the usual vaguely sabbatical-like experiences people use to assuage their internal perspectives in times of existential "forks" in the road. Obviously, stay away from harder drugs, hookers, shopping, food and so on.

Yes. You are too old. In fact, it makes me feel I'm too old since I felt what you felt twice over already. First time in the first dot com boom, again in web 2.0, and now again at third wave internet.

Two things.

Mark time with longer references. School is a good one since it's 4 years and you likely repeated the cycle twice. Freshmen, sophomore, junior, senior. Freshmen, sophomore, junior, senior.

However short that felt for you, that's how fast the next 4 will hit you.

Now the second thing and the real reason you feel the way you feel.

Youth is forever refreshing. Someone will always replace you. And you just got done being replaced. You aged out of that 22-26 bracket. Welcome freshmen to the 26-30 league.

Better grow the fuck up and stop feeling sorry for yourself, kid. You've only got 4 years before you start feeling the next growing pains, the one about success. And how success is always intangible, how everyone else is better off than you.

That one was a doozie.

Maybe i didn't convey the original message correctly, but I don't feel sorry for myself. I feel pressed for time, and that I'm aging out of opportunities even when I'm young. It's more of a psychological illusion than a reality, and it looks like many people share the same stress over it.

You don't run out of time, you run time.

Who exactly are you trying to impress? You may be think I'm being presumptuous, but because there's no objective success you must be trying to impress someone. Once you figure that out and acknowledge that you'll be closer to figuring out what you really want to do.

Success can be measured by how satisfied you're with your quality of life. There is no one to impress.

I disagree. No one lives life in a vacuum.

I can see it both ways, because you can also choose who you spend your time with, and different groups confer respect to different things.

You are getting old, you body changes itself.

Do you run daily, swim, eat healthy food, do yoga, do gym, do you change your position during work, do you go and speak fun stuff with friends, listen audio books of philosophers and autobiographies, check health with various doctors?

Or you sit all day long, drink coffee, smoke tobacco, much of sugar, cheeps, other drugs you sit on, no physical training, read only news or only books from you pro sphere, TV/serials before sleep?

Body age changes hormones change brain. Drugs and exercise and food do change hormones do change brain. Endogene drugs are better than exogene, I believe. Age changes what is good drugs good food good exercise good read good movie is for you.

You are comparing yourself to others. That's what's happening. You aren't the only one.

Totally feel you. I'm 29 and have this sense of urgency, that i am running out of time. My main problem is financial freedom. Is not about the money, it's about the freedom to do whatever i want, whenever i want. Is not that i want to buy a Ferrari tomorrow, i think it's more related to ability to travel to places and enjoy every moment of my life instead of sitting in an office.

When i look around, i realize that i am actually doing pretty great compared to the friends around me. I have had the privilege to study or work in each continent of this planet, Antartica excluded. I travelled and experienced lots of different places during my twenties, which are arguably the best time do have these experiences. On top of that I bootstrapped two different companies which are running and profitable (one in South Africa and one in Hong Kong), but not yet enough to pay for my living expenses. Both amazing experiences, but probably also adding to the psycological pressure of "not being there yet".

And YET, i am somehow still deeply unsatisfied. I feel that i am not free and still unsure of what my life will look like in the future. Still bound to a salary.

Over the last year i made some small and big changes to my lifestyle to keep things in check: - stopped the digital nomad life and got a easy, well paid job in berlin. That gave me the financial security and peace of mind back. - completely scrapped tens of tiny dead-ended side projects, which were only adding clutters to my mind and taking away preciuos time. - slowly accepted that things happen when they are ready to be. I'm dumping this "launch fast, fail fast" mindset. Most of the time a project takes lots of years to become successful. - Code less and talk more to people. - forced a bit myself to enjoy the small moments in life, like having a beer with my old time non-business-savvy friends. - stopped drastically reading noise-making magazines like Techcrunch. You just read about the million dollar exits, but not about the majority failed stories. - stopped reading business books and switched over to novel (sci-fi in particular).

Overall, my well being has improved a lot since one year ago. However, I believe once you experience this lifestyle, it's hard to go back and settle for the old one.

For the future, I will try to be more patient and wait for things to fall in place. But overall life is not a destination but a journey. As long as you enjoy the entire trip, it's all good!

This really hits the nail on the head. My main driving force behind all of this is financial freedom - not in the sense of, as you put it, "buying a Ferrari tomorrow," but just being able to do what I want, when I want, without having to cater to other peoples needs to afford it. I find the idea that people work so fucking hard just to be able to afford to work really fucked up. At the same time, I have more than many people I know, and I earn much more than many people I no. However, I still don't have the freedom to just relax. We live in a backwards society where we live to work, work to live. No one is able to just live, unless you're content with living outdoors off the land (I'm not).

I'm 18 and I feel the same thing, to the point that I was thinking about quitting high school to start my own career life or build a startup. I'm always thinking about making good money and starting my life(rent/buy a house, travel, work, etc...), I'm so much in a hurry on myself, because I think this is the age of taking risks, I'm still living with my parents, almost have no responsibilities, so I can take whatever risks, I'm making my own project now(just a project for fun currently, but looking to make money out of it)

I think you first have to define what success is for you. I have a good job, good wife, live in a good city.

I always do a little bit of study in new tech / use them in side projects / when I see fit in work.

On that note, I don't feel like I am missing anything to achieve "success", I am 28.

I'm 43. I haven't accomplished much yet, don't have enough money to get by, but I don't want to lose my sleep over it. I never lose hope and stop being optimistic.

Looks like you're suffering from burnout. When you are not your normal self, you can't think properly. See if it's just wealth, success you're after and see if these are the culprits. Like moraya-re said, balance is the key.

Take a break. Empty your mind. Talk to people around you. Spend time in nature. If you can, exercise, run. It's important that you have healthy sleep habits. Stay clean.

Maintain your physical and mental health, or you won't be able to achieve what you want in life.

> running out of time to succeed.

There's a great quote by Charlie Munger - "If you want to get rich, you'll need a few decent ideas where you really know what you're doing. Then you've got to have the courage to stick with them and take the ups and downs. Not very complicated, and it's very old-fashioned."

Incidentally, great perspective on life & work from a successful Old Guy in this book > http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25530069-charlie-munger

I like to think back to this post when I feel similar to the OP:

http://neopythonic.blogspot.com/2016/04/kings-day-speech.htm...

"Success" on whose terms? What do you want in life? And is it your idea, or some other person's ideal that you're projecting on yourself?

Well, maybe your intuition is right and you are indeed running out of time. According to Oxfams reports, beginning of 2016 62 people owned as much as the bottom 50%, and beginning of 2017 it was only 8 people owning the same. So if you extrapolate this a bit, with this rate of wealth accumulation, in 10 years time a single guy will own the whole planet and we will all be the peasants working for him. So get your shit together and be that single guy...

Because you are running out of time. Save thyself. You're surely still young enough to whoop some ass. Emotionally feeling like you have no time means that you care about too many things that don't actually matter, or you need to delegate. Being in a rush makes you less effective.

If you want to feel like there's all the time in the world, leave your cellular at home, and visit the DMV, grab a number and watch time extend into the infinite.

Your not. I'm 42, I still love to code and am in the very early stages of planning a startup or something like it and am just excited about it as when I did a startup when I was 29.

Keep learning. Find a couple things you can become an expert in, and get out of you don't enjoy it.

I'm 26 and I feel the same way. Probably because I just found out the 2 founders of Stripe are my age.

I'm 36 and feel absolutely no sympathy for you.

Too old for what? You never run out of time if you have a good solution for a real need.

Perhaps you could provide some specifics to receive pertinent advice.

Good luck!

You are running out of time.

I'll be 34 this year and life is great.

Set a big Mission for yourself, have great experiences and human connections.

Everyone is running out of time. Hurry up.

I am 29 and I had a BIG crisis when I turned 27. Things are settling down in my head now.

For me it was 26. Einstein was 26 when he published his paper on relativity. Not that I was a physicist, or a genius, but the fact that a single person could have that much impact on the course of humanity at that age really messed with me.

Is it possible to still have a big impact after 26?

Yeah, I've had this feeling every year starting at age 10.

Not joking.

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