1. I only ever heard of this as a dilemma and not a paradox
2. There is this recruiting problem where you have to decide which secretary to hire before having seen all of them. The optimal solution is to see the first 37% (1/e) and then hire the first that is better than the previously seen best.
Putting that into lifespan of ~75 ys and assuming we don't really start sampling until we are 15, we end up with an optimal stopping (= exploitation) age of 32.07.
Surprisingly close to the 30 mentioned.