Comment by tartoran | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tartoran | Hacker News Reader

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It’s good that they still can and act on it. Maybe it’s brain chemistry but so many have it and waste it. While others try really hard and can’t stop the decay. A lot of older folks who retire don’t know what to do with all the free time and end up not so well especially ones whose only social life was at work. Also having a sense of purpose can be the spark to the motivation flame.

I on the other hand, at 40 with family&child, I don’t have the same patience for just anything that comes my way. Only if something sparks my interest I manage a way to make some progress. Last year I begun a slow journey into lisp/scheme and found the same flame i had when i was a junior. With other mundane things I’ll most likely get a shallow depth of knowledge to the level needed to get my work done and if needed i do some deep dives. I used to go in depth at first but lately i found that the return on investment wasn’t too appealing.

I hope to still have the acument to learn later on in life when I have more time and fewer responsibilities

If you focus on return on investment, you won’t get anywhere. Your child can remind you how to learn something just because it’s there, without concern for return on investment. The trick is allowing yourself to invest time in things that feel like play without interrupting yourself with thoughts of “but how will I use this?”

My opinion at a similar life stage, anyway.

Im constantly learning something new that has zero returns on investment but the difference is that these things are for my own pleasure. I learn music theory without a particular goal. I paint without a particular goal. I play guitar and keyboard without any goal, I don’t see myself as ever becoming a professional musician. But I do enjoy the journey. What i was refering to is learning shiny tech that lasts for 2 cycles of 2 years then goes dusty. Most times it is convoluted and quirky, unintuitive, filled with jargon and the knowledge doesn’t translate well in other areas. For example I put a month or two of effort to learn Angular 6 or 7 and then did a 4 month project with it. It was fun and enjoyed it but my company decided not to go with Angular anymore. In this sense I don’t regret it but the investment wasn’t really worth it and i’d rather spent the time deepening some other skillset that I could put to use. In my company everybody jumped on the blazor bandwagon. I don’t have a good feeling about it and have 0 motivation to learn it.

The knowledge you got from the javascript flavored web components and indexDB and service workers you might have used with Angular will come in handy optimizing wasm/blazor when you realize -- wasm is still a WIP and javascript and DOM libraries are still needed.

Also, I'm sure Micrsoft will support more than just C# for blazor (you interested in OCaml or F#?)

You are so correct! Knowledge that I have acquired just for the love of it has given me the greatest value in my career.

Learning used to be one of my passions. But with two small kids and a full time job, I have to redirect my energetic waking hours on few focused tasks. Constant interruptions rest of the day means I lose the motivation to do any tasks that need long attention spans.

Pick up cooking - a lot of deep science if you feel like it, instant feedback, ability to always literally conduct experiments and get something tasty as end result.

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