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Comment by alangibson | Hacker News Reader

This is almost exactly my life, shifted by a decade.

The problem is that by 35 you can't get by on novelty anymore because you've seen some version of everything there is to see.

The worst thing you can do is pine for the good old days. They aren't coming back. And they weren't that good anyway. Your best times are ahead if you can successfully adjust.

What worked for me was putting down roots. I resisted it mightily at first because I wanted to stay mentally 25 forever. Now I see that getting married and having a couple of kids was the right thing to do. It forced me to become more flexible, more deliberate, more focused and have more stamina to do hard things

I'm a loner by nature, so I can't imagine where I'd be if I hadn't settled down. I just know it wouldn't be as good.

Once you've got those roots down, life will lead you to what you should do next. Maybe being a full time parent, maybe learning to sail, maybe more successful entrepreneurship. Who knows...

EDIT: I don't mean to imply that everyone needs a family. What's important is to start living for others to some degree. Hedonism has famously bad diminishing returns.

Some people choose to do lots of volunteering or switch careers to social work. There's lots of options.

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>problem is that by 35 you can't get by on novelty anymore because you've seen some version of everything there is to see

I'm 68 and this is self-limiting B.S.

In the last few years I have seen many things I never saw before, and never imagined.

Ironically, when I was about 30, I was in a similar position and complained to my dad that there was nothing new under the sun, everything is just a rehash of what has come before.

He laughed at me, and threw me out of the house.

You don’t feel the amount of new things you see slows down considerably as you grow older?

It’s not that you can’t find novel things any more if you go looking for them, but most everyday things hold no more (or less) excitement.

I notice this especially much with my 3 year old son, for whom everything is fascinating. He’ll find out that sticking a bowl upside down in the water and turning it face up will make a lot of bubbles and he’s tremendously excited. I’m excited to see him being excited (which is novel’ish), but the fact that bubbles appear is incredibly mundane now.

> You don’t feel the amount of new things you see slows down considerably as you grow older?

Only if you stop exploring. When you think there's nothing new left to learn, nothing novel to experience, well, you stop looking. Start looking again.

> I notice this especially much with my 3 year old son, for whom everything is fascinating.

Spending time with kids is the best way there is to rediscover your sense of wonder.

Just one example: All my life I have been curious about human pre-history and ancient history. Never learned much about it along the way.

Now that I have time, I find an incredible wealth of knowledge and insight about early human history has been developed. I feel like a dim area of my understanding is being illuminated, like exploring a dark attic with a bright flashlight, it is very satisfying, and particularly when pieces fall into place and I have an "aha! so that is what that was all about" moment, it is exciting as well.

I'd add that it's about detail - if you thin slice reality for efficiency, reality becomes more simplistic. But you can also discover infinitely more detail. walking into a library reveals that there is an infinite amount of things to know, and there are all kinds of differences between two similar glasses of wine etc. Perhaps its more about the spare energy of the individual available for learning and discovery

Exactly. The way I think about it is that anything is interesting if studied in enough detail.

A single square inch of lawn could provide material for multiple PhDs.

Indeed. Just studying your last sentence could provide inspiration of finding funny alternative sayings to 'get off my lawn'.

Added as Learc's Lamentation to https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

I'm into my sixth decade, and I will agree with you that it's about detail. I find more and more rabbit holes to go down that are just fascinating. I make ice cream, but how can I make really good ice cream? What are the pros and cons of regular switches vs. leaf switches for the retro arcade controller I want to build? Why does putting a bunch of wood mulch around my fruit trees do so much to improve the soil ecology? The list goes on. I am never bored.

I think many people take the availability of information we have at our fingertips today for granted. It wasn't always this way. Dig into it, learn something, rinse and repeat.

You don’t feel the amount of new things you see slows down considerably as you grow older?

Not OP but I don’t feel this way at all.

My oldest son is starting college next year. That alone has been a learning experience! I coach his robotics team, that has been tremendously new experiences.

I’ve gotten three cloud certifications in the past year. I have a huge list of things I want to learn about - assembly language on Linux, FPGAs and about 20 other things.

I could spend 10,000 lifetimes and not scratch the surface of what this world has to offer.

I don't see how this is an adequate counterexample to OP's experience. The novel things you mention have happened to you take are rarer occurrences than a 3 year old experiencing basic physics.

Despite the pleas in responses to continue to explore and experience new things, it seems to me that the experience of being surprised at new things becomes rarer as one ages, with exploration yielding diminishing returns with respect solely to that experience.

I think maybe it’s easier to get stuck in a rut, go on autopilot, rely on what you know and then end up feeling like there’s no novelty in the world any more as you get older and comfortable.

Maybe you can fall so deeply into it that you can’t even tell you’re in a rut any more and just think that that’s how the world is, which is a puzzling perspective to those outside of the rut because the complexity and novelty of the world really is literally everywhere.

Not that endless novelty seeking is the be all end all, but it’s there if you want it.

For me I have found that traveling helps break that "tunnel vision" which I occasionally find myself stuck in. And it's very hard to realize you're stuck in it until you break out of it. Traveling helps me realize that there's an entire world out there where people are not just living, but thriving. That always helps stir up my curiosity to dig deeper into things.

The novel things you mention have happened to you take are rarer occurrences than a 3 year old experiencing basic physics.

I can use the same example though! Seeing each of my children born left an immense imprint on me. Seeing them experience basic physics for the first time was as novel of an experience for me as experiencing it myself many years earlier.

There are infinite novel experiences awaiting you if you want to seek them.

> You don’t feel the amount of new things you see slows down considerably as you grow older?

At 44 I have the opposite problem. The more I learn, the more I realize I don't know. When I was younger I had the ego of a young person and thought I was always on the cusp of knowing it all. As I got older I realized I was simply unaware. It's a bit cliché, but I started approaching everything, even things I 'knew' with a beginners mindset.

One of activities that really helped trigger this shift was finding something brand new to me at ~40 that I also became passionate about. In my case it was jiu-jitsu, but it can be anything where you're drinking from the firehose again. That mindset spread through everything else in my life.

> The more I learn, the more I realize I don't know. When I was younger I had the ego of a young person and thought I was always on the cusp of knowing it all. As I got older I realized I was simply unaware.

This rings truer to me than anything else posted here. I feel exactly the same way right now, (in my late thirties) as if I suddenly realize I spent my life going deep rather than broad and that there’s a whole world of opportunities out there to be a beginner again, with the same enthusiasm as a much younger person (but now with resources!). The struggle of trying new things has completely changed my outlook.

My advice: try things you thought looked interesting but never thought you’d be good at.

It's easy to see familiar patterns even in "new" things, though: especially those things that typically bind social networks (primarily shared recreational experiences). There are only so many story tropes to fill books and movies with, shared exercise experiences all blend, card games, board games, etc.--you name it, and odds are that the chance one has "seen it before" increases with age.

So while something can be new, as one ages even "new" things have elements that are immediately obviously the same as one's past experiences. The older one is, the more of these elements there are. There's a diminishing return, so to speak, in experiencing new things.

Exactly this. Many others are confusing novelty with pursuing specific knowledge or activities.

If you can build a life around mastering Jiu-Jitsu or learning machining techniques, more power to you.

I think that you are describing the coming of Wisdom... Seeing how things in many different domains fit the same patterns. This does not have to be a negative thing. If you see something new that fits a known pattern, then look closer and see how it's different or how it modifies the pattern to fit it's unique state.

An ego of a person on the cusp of knowing it all, what a perfect description. I spent a lot of time living like this. I'm going to borrow your page on beginners mindset, living that way brings so much new life to each day.

I guess I realize that, and then when I consider how much time I spent getting where I am at one topic, it never really seems like it’ll be possible doing it for another.

Same age, similar insights and personal development path (except in my case it's woodworking rather than jiu-jitsu). If I could have one personal "do over", it's wishing that I could have spent my 20s and early 30s a lot more humble. I was really unaware how much I didn't know.

54, this is my life.

There is so much out there to know and experience and it makes me sad to realise that there is no way that I'm going to be able to do everything.

I've a history of every couple of years diving deep into an interest. Woodwork was a thing for a few years, then wood turning. Gardening has come and gone a few times.

We spend a lot of time travelling and seeing new areas, slowly in a caravan, we never get to see it all.

Recently I've started running a Dungeons and Dragons game for a couple of my kids and their friends, there can be a lot more depth to that than you may think.

I've got to agree with you that you start to see a lot more things that you are familiar with. This is not really surprising if you are staying in the same environment.

Cycles of initiatives at work seem to come back every 5 or 6 years and they always ignore the same problems... sigh. There is truth in the idea that history repeats and the more things change the more they stay the same.

My suggestion for dealing with the feeling that nothing is new is much the same as everybody. If your world is getting boring and feels like everything is just on repeat, just change your world. Even if that means you are stepping into the unknown or you are taking risks, you are still going to change your experience.

> At 44 I have the opposite problem. The more I learn, the more I realize I don't know.

I'm 47 and in the same place. I have only recently come to grips with the fact that I am a good programmer and I do know what I'm talking about, but there's also so much that I still don't know. I keep learning, but you've got to pick your focus, because you can't possibly learn everything.

> You don’t feel the amount of new things you see slows down considerably as you grow older?

I don't feel that at all.

I've always felt there was a lot to know. I don't think I ever felt the "ego on the cusp of knowing everything" when I was younger, because I knew I hadn't studied most fields and that there was much more I didn't know about. But I did feel like I was getting that way within a few narrow technical fields.

But as I get older the awareness that there's so much still to see, learn and do in just about every area, including those where I'd become something of an expert, just grows and grows, and it is depressing.

As time passes I feel more and more the limited bandwidth of my capabilities, and that nothing I can do begins to scratch the surface of what there is. Some people seem to find a joy in learning. I enjoy it, indeed I can't help it, but I feel so small and my future life feels so short, it gets me down.

Most things I take an interest in, it feels like it will take 300 years to get to grips with them. If anything, I feel an almighty rush to see what tiny part of what there is I can see, be around, and even better, understand and work with, while it's still possible.

So much to see, so little time.

I'm 64 and retired last year. I spent 4 decades programming, and everything changes all the time, and I always learned new things. I am still learning new things, and still writing code to support my generative art. Admittedly I was finally burned out of the grind of working as a programmer, but it took a whole lifetime. But to truly approach new things you have to be willing to let go of the old, even programming if necessary, but without forgetting what you learned. A lifetime is a long time; you really don't need to just do one thing the whole time.

A quote from a novel has always been an inspiration since I read it in high school - "An artist must leave a body of work" from The Agony And The Ecstasy, about Michelangelo. If your programming no longer excites you, learn something new in programming, or even learn something that isn't programming and do that. It's not easy, and might cost you money, but wasting your life doing something you no longer care about is not worth it.

Of course some people can deal with a terrible job, and just spend the non-working time doing what they love, and that's OK if you can deal with it. I could never do that; I didn't turn to art until the last few years.

> If your programming no longer excites you, learn something new in programming, or even learn something that isn't programming and do that.

This is the key right here. If what you used to do is no longer exciting you, it is time to try something else. This often means getting out of your comfort zone, and there is no guarantee that the new thing you try will excite you. But if that happens, at least you tried. Every discovery of something that doesn't interest you is a step closer to something that does.

I'm just over 50 and I'm finding it harder to stay in programming.

Most companies want to push me upward into management (which I don't want to do) - and I feel like I'm aging out of eligibility for most development jobs.

How did you manage to stick with it? I still love it.

56 and still technical here.

Learn, learn, learn. Find the new hotness (at least one that has staying power).

For me, kubernetes is the latest 'big hill'. It seems to have legs for years ahead, and plenty of technical details that prevent anyone from completely mastering it.

> Learn, learn, learn. Find the new hotness

58 in a few weeks, and seriously considering going the other way: To jump off the treadmill of new fads and concentrate on / return to basics.

"Big Data!" "Data Lake!" Data Vault!" "Apache Spark!" "Kafka!" "Cloud this!" "Cloud that!" "Cloud the other!""Snowflake!" "R!" "Python!" "Pandas!" "This new ETL tool!" "That new ETL process!" "This other new ETL tool!" "That other new ETL process!"...

Sigh.

SQL and bash ain't going anywhere, and they're all you really need for ETL.

I'm thinking of really learning the old cool in stead.

Yes, that's a valid path, too.

When I was just starting out (circa 1990) a good friend of mine had a pal that was making his living servicing punch card machines.

They were completely unsupported by IBM at the time, this guy had been an IBM tech and saw the opening. He embraced the old tech, knowing there were people still using it and willing to pay for some form of support.

So I don't disagree with that idea, it's definitely workable.

SQL isn't quite comparable today to punchcards in 1990, is it?

Depends on who you would ask.

Anecdata: was asked by a client why the same query was running orders slower on our infrastructure (IaaS on Xeons) than on their test server (a regular desktop with i7). I check the load, IO, yada-yada and I don't see anything what could indicate the slowness. After a bit I check the db size and ... I'm pretty speechless, because it is 77MBs. 77 megabytes and the query runs for tens of seconds. I tell the client to give me the query. They are happily oblige and provide a two FullHD screens of SQL with like... 20? More? 'SELECT *' from the same tables on and on.

After speaking nicely with the client about the origins of this query and checking their dev environment, I learned:

1. this query was autogenerated by Lavarel

2. their dev environment is 100 times smaller than the prod

3. until I forced them to copy prod data to dev they didn't believe the problem was with the query

4. between two programmers and one sysadmin on the client side NOBODY was even close to reasons of slowness.

So... for some people SQL in 2022 is pretty equal to punchcards.

My first dev job about 15 years ago I took over this in-house developed intranet. Some queries took quite long (30 to 60 seconds), and according to "the last guy" there wasn't any way to speed it up. At the time I didn't know anything about SQL (literally never used it before), but I figured there really had to be some way to do this faster. I just read some basic documentation, rewrote a few queries, and now I got the exact same results in 1 to 2 seconds. A few months later after I learned a bit more about SQL and optimized it further (just by adding an index IIRC) and now it was fast enough to appear instantaneous.

I'm still far from an SQL expert, and certainly wasn't 15 years ago, but you can get a lot of win by just spending as little as one or two days learning about SQL. It really surprises me how some people don't.

Then again, for a very long time I thought awk was basically useless to learn, until I did last year after which I kicked myself for not learning it sooner as I had spent a ridiculous amount of time cooking up inferior solutions for ~20 years, and spending just an hour or two learning awk would have been a great ROI *shrug*.

I guess the moral of the story is that you can never be quite sure if something is useful or useless until you actually learn it.

With the rise of ORMS, I'm coming across more and more devs in my work that have no idea how to write performant SQL, and don't ever check to see what gets generated and run "behind the scenes"

Pandas is a pretty fantastic tool for ETL.

Only if you've never used dplyr ;)

Awesome, thank you so much for the suggestion. That is one of the reasons why I am active on here.

I was being a little snarky. Dplyr is phenomenal but it's written in R which many people perceive to be a weird language.

64 and still crafting in C and assembly. Occasionally doing hardware design/specification work. I studiously avoided the management path my forty year career. The constant technology change is what has held my interest. A career in telecom: Metallic access -> DS0/DS1 -> SONET -> 56K/DSL -> MPLS -> ROADM -> OFDMA/LTE -> WiFi/BT/Lora/Zigbee. Never look back. I cannot even imagine the page count of standards documents, requirements, and manufacturers user and programmers guides I have read in the last forty years.

Had to come back and add. I am doing a lot more embedded python utilities in the last three years, but it is all interfacing to C based firmware on raw silicon underneath.

I have found python to be a lot of fun.

spent 4 decades programming, and everything changes all the time

A half-aged kid here. This is the source of my anxiety, that all I’ve done and learned will age, slip through fingers and become forgotten. I wish our craft could stabilize on something, but it just doesn’t.

It does if you specialize in something that barely moves (AS/400, COBOL, others), but the experience of that career is almost the exact opposite of why many people get in to programming (lots of paperwork, consensus-based decisions, lots of waiting around trying to look busy, little new growth or exploration).

However, there is some light at the end of the “everything changes” tunnel: as you learn different frameworks and languages you’re gaining new perspectives on the deeper concepts, and for the most part those deeper concepts don’t change. In OOP the “gang of four” is practically as relevant now as it was then, for example.

Technology is rapidly improving, developers like us have this cycle of never ending learning new tech stack to keep up with the times.

Change is the only constant, I guess. This has always been part of anything computer-related. My dad started his career with punch cards, ended doing Java. You keep learning. But you've got to do that to some extent in every career.

If anything, things are stabilizing now more than ever before. Java and Javascript are almost 30 years old, and still as relevant as ever. Computers have been "fast enough" for most purposes and aren't obsolete the moment you've bought them, like they were in the early 1990s. The x86 architecture is surprisingly still with us. And despite all the new languages and frameworks, there's still tons of stuff being done in all of the old ones. They don't get obsolete as fast as they used to.

You can never do everything. Pick what you love, and focus on that.

[ A quote from a novel has always been an inspiration since I read it in high school - "An artist must leave a body of work" from The Agony And The Ecstasy, about Michelangelo. If your programming no longer excites you, learn something new in programming, or even learn something that isn't programming and do that. It's not easy, and might cost you money, but wasting your life doing something you no longer care about is not worth it.

-What about economics, a management role or something else? my advice: Have the habbit to improve your habbits (including your thinking) the medicine = reading btw

]

I agree, a curious mind never runs out of interesting things to see or do. How do we help the original poster becoming more curious and motivated?

When you're burned out, it's hard to simply be curious. And burnout is demotivating.

I believe 35 is a tough age. You've effectively achieved Journeyman level. No, seriously, you're past the Apprentice level, and you've completed all the 300-400 level life courses. You're ready to become a Master. Unfortunately, you need to go on a journey to discover your masterwork. That may take a while. For me it took another 10 years. But trust me, you will find it, if you're willing to take a step sideways in your career a few times to try and find the problem that you seek. When you find the problem, you will recognize it for what it is: Your Masterwork ... something only you can solve. Solving it may pay off financially, with fame, or just emotionally, but either way it will pay off spiritually. You will know who you are.

Wow brilliant comment. This masterwork concept - I love it. Something only you can solve. Wow. Solving this type of problem it brings a wealth greater than any type of FAANG paycheck, win or lose.

I'm a month from 71 and I still get excited by stuff. Things I half expected aren't going to happen in my lifetime (fusion for example after working on JET years back) which is disappointing. And flying cars - thankfully seeing how ground based cars are handled. OTOH I came across the Internet in the early 70s and it's been amazing to watch it change. I still work in cyber security and that keeps giving challenges which I enjoy.

I've been married and been not married and had long term relationships. Built a couple of houses, moved from the UK to Australia, then across country. So much new to see there's never time to get bored. A decade ago I started to feel burn-out so I did an MSc (Mobile Biometric Authentication), worked at an ISP and learned about voice.

My current side project is a mix of NLP and semantic graphs, and I read a lot. The biggest change over the years is probably that I listen to less music now. I never really got into podcasts or audio books, but I still have 70s, 80s and 90s mixes on the server, but they're played less. Probably because I know the content too well.

I used to like music. Now I think it muddles the brain. I am 80. Brains are marvelous things but the thing I don't think can handle multiple inputs over a significant period of time. I prefer quiet when I am engaged with any project or activity except those involving the opposite sex.

Yep, concur with this - having children and a family gave me a sense of fulfillment and purpose that has never really diminished. Won’t say every day is amazing or life is any less difficult. However, there is definitely something to be said for living your life for others instead of your own enjoyment.

I felt exactly the same as OP described. Once I became a dad (not that long ago), I felt that a missing piece of a puzzle finally fell in its place.

This thread suggests that becoming a dad is not unlikely to throw you into a 2-year deep depression: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30240609

"Even with this realization, there were lots of times where I sat on the couch the first year and just felt like I was drowning and life was over. That happened in the second year as well, but less after the child was 18 months. And by ~2.5, it's a lot better!"

That's hardly a good outcome for anyone, let alone someone who misses the joy of life they had in their 20s.

I wouldn’t call 2.5 years the “outcome”. You have kids with a much deeper horizon in mind.

The big difference is that settling down gives you things to care about deeply. Your family, the community your kids will grow up in, the experiences and skills you want your kids to grow up with.

Absent that, my life was one long drawn-out example of “fear of missing out” and I flitted from thing to thing, place to place.

Just make sure you marry above your station, emotionally.

> Just make sure you marry above your station, emotionally.

This is one of the most pithy bits of marital advice I’ve ever read, but easier said than done! Emotional maturity seems to exhibit a very pronounced Dunning-Kruger effect. Also, people continue to mature emotionally in adulthood and this can occur at very different rates.

Just as a vivid example, recovery from addiction/alcoholism can often create rapid changes in emotional maturity.

i second the recovery from addiction as a catalyst for growth in emotional maturity.

This sounds like incredible advice, if you can it would be wonderful to learn more of your thinking about marrying above your station, emotionally?

It’s sort of a know-it-when-you-see-it thing.

On an early date with my now wife she spent an entire subway ride to Queens telling me about Montessori education methods and how it made her the person she is. I recounted that when I was in first grade I was punished for interrupting the class by having a cardboard box put over by desk, so nobody could see me, and that that made me the person I am.

So two passing tests in one convo: she was impressively interested in things that matter (I was already infatuated with her) and she was not put off by my bullshit.

you do know it when you see it, but boy does it almost always look like this....

You won’t know, they age like a fine wine - haven’t you heard? You will see very different facets of their personality- before you’re married, after you’re married, after you’ve had kids, after she stops being able to have kids, after the kids have gone off to college.. they are all the same person underneath it all, but you won’t know, you can’t.

> The problem is that by 35 you can't get by on novelty anymore because you've seen some version of everything there is to see.

This could not possibly be true. You have only just begun. The mere thimble full fo knowledge and experience that you have accumulated thus far is nothing compared to what lies ahead. But only you can make it happen. Make a decision. Take an action. The comments here are loaded with wonderful and practical advice. Louis Pasteur: "Chance favors the prepared mind".

Also consider this (this is a quote that I cannot give attribution for): "In youth we struggle with illusion of certainty. As we grow older we struggle with the certainty of illusion." We create the worlds that we live in. It is easier to follow a path that mimics and conforms to the structure of your environment. It is much more difficult to break away and define and follow your own journey. The feedback is not avaialble so you have to rely on your own internal compass. The choice is yours.

> This could not possibly be true.

The novelty you experience when doing something new must decrease over time. To say otherwise is to say the world is infinite, which it definitely is not.

At some point the buzz one gets from the novelty of new experiences is not enough to make a satisfying life. That's when it's time to look for source of meaning for your life.

It's different for everyone. For me and the OP it happened rather quickly.

> Make a decision. Take an action

Thanks coach

The world is effectively infinite relative to your ability to experience it.

The worlds is big enough to keep finding new things! Not to mention all the new things that are constantly being invented! Recently I have been playing Flight Simulator in VR… just remembering how was to play Flight Simulator 95 back on the days to how it is now my mind is blown! Or better… with a bunch of friend we started enhancing our DnD sessions with very cool AR glasses that we got as backer of a very nice kickstart! The world is full of wonders! To find something new and amazing you have just to look for it!

> we started enhancing our DnD sessions with very cool AR glasses that we got as backer of a very nice kickstart!

Sounds really cool, what product is it?

https://www.tiltfive.com/

“Thanks coach”

The ego in this response and complete ignoring of the advice given to you is off putting.

And I’m quite younger than you ;)

> The novelty you experience when doing something new must decrease over time.

It goes up and down at different stages in your life.

When you're a child, everything is new, so nothing is. Everything that exists in your childhood is Normal. It might be completely new to your parents, but you've never known otherwise.

As you grow up, you get used to this normality, and new things are novel, but not that novel yet, because they're still close to what you know as Normal from your childhood.

As you get older, new stuff gets increasingly removed from your Normal, and you're amazed by it. At some point, you get used to that feeling of amazement. You get used to getting new stuff all the time. And sometimes it doesn't impact you as much because you're already completely invested in all the old stuff. Although still there sometimes is new stuff that you can't avoid, and it uproots everything. (Think internet banking for old people who have banked on paper for all their lives.)

And then you start to realize that all the Normal stuff from your childhood was probably also completely novel at the time.

If you’re out of novelty in the world by 35 I think that’s more on you than the world. There’s really so much out there - complexity in every direction and at every focal length. If you want to center your life around novelty-seeking you can do it until well past the point where your body will fail you. Travel and education are good ways to find new horizons, but they are everywhere around you all the time. Seriously.

> If you’re out of novelty in the world by 35 I think that’s more on you than the world

It's a good thing I didn't say that then. I said you experience diminishing returns due to having already experienced similar (but not the same!) things. The more you experience, the more you recognize what you've already experienced in new experiences. This seems like a totally unavoidable consequence of living for anyone that doesn't have a long term memory disorder or an interdimensional portal gun.

Even getting diminishing returns on all the variety and everything in the world in your 30s to me seems crazy, but to each his or her own. I am in my 40s and don’t feel like my world is trending towards indistinguishable gray mush at all.

You don’t have to take my word for it though, there are lots of older people who still find and get by on novelty in the world, are inspired by it, and don’t feel that everything is a rehash. There are some even replying in this thread, and more you can meet in your own neighbourhood I’m sure. Let them be an inspiration that it doesn’t have to end up that way.

> I'm a loner by nature, so I can't imagine where I'd be if I hadn't settled down. I just know it wouldn't be as good.

I'm the same way, and spent many years of my twenties living a very lonely existence. Getting a family was the best decision I ever made. I'm absolutely certain I'd be in a miserable place otherwise.

There's no question that family is what is missing from your life. A grown man needs a family to take care of. And yes, it's a direct contradiction to what has been discussed on this very forum re:divorce. And no, I cannot suggest any magic solution to the question of finding a sane woman who you'd be madly in love with.

The good new is that 35 is far from the end for a man. I'd say you have five to ten years while you are still at the peak. Make sure to look for a woman a few years younger though.

I started surfing with 40. And then I found out plenty of people do it, now I am starting with rock climbing.

Plenty of things to see and do after 35. New friends, new activities, new music to listen, new places to go. Don't self limit yourself.

Well said. I have been thinking like you and OP: never wanted to settled down , didn't want to be tied down to anything.

Now, I have married, and planning to get a child. I kind of gave up and let wherever life/fate lead me to.

However, I still feel lost. Just too busy with worries to think about it every hour like before. I feel terrible because I feel like I have surrendered life.

At least I don't have time to think about it as much; whether it is an improvement or not, I don't know.

You don't need to _have_ a family. But it helps to find one.

Can you add a bit more about how this works?

(wishy-washy, unverifiable emotional pseudo-psychology follows)

What I mean is -- you do not need to have a partner and your own kids. There are all sorts of families (macro and micro) out there that can benefit from us.

On the micro side: you can allow yourself to be included in your best friend's family, you can allow friends to become close enough that you know they'd be there if you were sick and vice versa. You can think about lonely older people who you feel kinship for and be brave enough to offer them support. You can sometimes convert former romantic relationships into trusted friendships, and you can widen your romantic ideals to include joining a single-parent family that already exists.

One step up: you can treat your wider friendship circle like a family, believe in them like you would your family.

On the macro side of things: you can join a community and allow yourself to be absorbed into it as someone of significance; you can help people find their people. Introduce people to other people; be the reason other people have people.

All of these things require a kind of bravery that deserts most of us at some time, and obviously a kind of comfort with other people that not all of us find easy at all, but really any step you make to try to build a "family" is better than no step.

When you're young you don't need it and you forget to look for it, because new experiences outweigh family ties. When you're old you need it and it is harder to find.

When you're 35... this is the time to enjoy the thrill of being brave and seeking real connections with a mature mind, and allow yourself to think of it as building family and significance into your life.

I managed some of this -- a real social life, real connections -- for a long time from the age of 33[0], and then the pandemic has undone a lot of that; people have scattered. And if all of the above sounds preachy and patronising it is because it's really all I think about again -- how do I get that back, at the age I am now?

[0] "Lord, to be 33 forever"

This is a beautiful answer, thank you. It puts into words so much of what I’ve had at the back of my mind for awhile now.

Thank you. It sort of spilled out a bit, and I think it's more a message to myself than I realised; it is time to pay more attention to this again.

35 is an interesting age, because it can cut both ways in terms of the OP's concern. Your approach is common, but I think it's not the only way.

Many people commit to being settled etc as you imply. But you don't have to! The "settled" / company-man group skews older, but it's more about attitude and priorities.

Keep a positive attitude, keep working out, don't let the way you dress etc slip, be a "bro" not a "bob" at work, go out and do fun things, and keep raging on the weekends. Don't steer conversations towards work and your kids. Get excited about things. Don't complain. Keep up personal projects and hobbies. Keep learning new skills and challenging yourself. Talk to the newer/younger people at work etc as peers, and not in a condescending/know-it-all way.

Assuming that's what you want!

Best part? When you have raised the your own children, grand and great-grand-children start trickling in! YAY!

I second this one

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