Edit: I’m 30
I've met people in their 60s who distro-hopped over a dozen+ linux distributions just to see what they're like, as I did in my teens, and also priced out a 3d printer from numerous options until settling on one that they bought and used to tinker and make many useful things for their home (something I only wish I could have done in my teens but 3d printers weren't available then.)
But they like you, are the minority, not the majority. Most people slow down and at some point stop learning new things and cruise on what they know until they die or hit a wall of obsolescence and then die.
'Many people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75' is a very real, very sad thing.
Kudos to you for continuing to learn new things, it's truly inspirational.
Those are the things you can't even learn effectively until you get quite a bit older.
As you get older, you learn metapatterns about the world. You see the things you thought were unique new wisdom, were actually just a fashion. So you get more selective about where you apply the limited resources you've got.
If you've seen the hype cycle play out in your life once, you're going to be slower to invest in the next wave. That's natural. I've seen the idea of making things portable by implementing things in a Virtual Machine play out more than once in my life... the UCSD Pascal P Machine, then Java, and Flash, and now WASM.
However, I've also learned why each failed, so I still have a strong interest in WASM, despite it seeming to be the latest in a pattern. It's because of the unique nature of its security guarantees that I hold out hope for it. Like I said, you get more selective, not just stubborn.
I'm 58, and grumpy as heck about some things, and experimenting in direct manipulation of Abstract Syntax Trees for fun as a diversion for now. Once I get my new glasses, and can get about the world again, it's back to learning C and working on MSTOICAL a typed forth variant.
Some people just seem to lose interest in new things as they get older, sometimes as young as 40, I have seen. Once you lose interest in new things it's very hard to learn new things.
For some people it seems there is a certain comfort and security in only doing things you know, for others it is the opposite - same same is boring and new things are interesting.
I see collegues, some more than a decade younger than me, setting in their ways, and the biggest predictor I notice is music tastes. Once they start closing off and lacking interest in any new music, that's the beginning of the stopping of growing (and starting of dying) in general. Make a point to listen to new music.
Also, children keep you young, if you have them take some time to listen to their music and talk to them about the trends in their world and keep familiar with their jargon. That will also stop you getting old before your time.
But I have always felt the day you stop growing at all must the day you start shrinking.
The Japanese have a saying about it, "reason for getting out of bed in the morning", maybe for some people that reason is to complete their routine, for others to discover something new.
As I've gotten older I've only had more and more things competing for my time. I have a family, a home, hobbies, etc. I just can't devote hours and hours of uninterrupted time. With experience there's a lot of "ain't gunna need it" and if I do I'll learn it then. I've got plenty of stuff that I sank tons of time into in my younger years that only faded into memories and didn't turn out to be very useful.
As far as tech goes you'll see enough stuff come and go that sinking that much time into it will feel like a waste. Remember SOAP, SOA, XML, XSLT, EJB, CORBA, MapReduce, Mesos, Java Applets, etc? A lot of what you're doing now is going on that list.
But I would say, it is that sense of wonder and imagination that you lose when you are older, you've seen stuff, even interesting stuff becomes 'oh just another interesting thing, much like this other thing i saw before'.
What you need to do is optimise things for novelty, interest, excitement and challenge rather than for outcome. As you get older, you likely have things you want, these will become goals, but these will be based on what you already know and your supposed path to them will also be best on your current knowledge. The problem is, that won't even get you to anywhere interesting, it might not even get you to that 'goal' because the world is way more complex than you think and you begin to think you know as you get set in your ways.
When you did interesting things, when you learned the most, it was when you didn't know any better, you didn't know what you were doing, you need to get rid of that idea that you know, you need to accept you don't get out of your comfort zone and do things, try things, optimise for that novelty rather than an outcome and you might find something interesting and that is where you will learn the most.
If you really want to learn, change your goal from achieving things and outcomes, to seeking out novelty, things that interesting/excite you and anything that is a little bit challenging for you. It will put you back in that space again, or at least as much as you can be.
I found this talk interesting on this subject: It talks about lessons learned from AI and machine learning that show this to be a valid path. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI&t=1s
Now another person only has 4 hours a week.
Who is going to be fitter? Who is going to find it easier to, for example, take up a new sport, like rowing for example.
Now replace fitness with learning.
And note that 18-21 year olds at university are learning 40+ hours a week.
And typically by 30 you are working and applying 40+ hours a week, but hard studying much fewer hours. (Unless actively studying, say for a leet code type interview or something).
On a positive note, they do give you other perspectives. So it’s not all bad.
The biological decay is obvious - for now - but the mental factor is way underrated. Mature people often don't have the time or the mental space to dive into something and "forget the world" like youngsters have. Almost without exception mature people prioritize their family or at least they are accountable for it. They may find time after retirement but then the biological decay will be more advanced.
During college (Architecture, a field dependent on creativity) I remember hard-working colleagues in their 40s and 50s, people with jobs, sometimes family and they couldn't pass the same bar as the youngsters. While youngsters could spend days debating some theory and shaking it till the foundations, older people barely had the time and mental space to execute. I heard literally teachers saying that they had to lower the bar for them or they would be there indefinitely without major improvements.
Also I have two children, so I have to be very selective on how I spend my time.
So it goes.
More recently, conversational techniques for problem solving have been really interesting. Google "The SOON Funnel" if you're curious.
So no, I wouldn’t say I’ve found learning more difficult. I just recognize there are different things to learn.
My suggestion would be to reassess what you think “learning” means, because you’re probably already doing a better job of it than you’re giving yourself credit for.
It sounds like you want to learn explicit material like a student might. That’s fine, but at some point I would imagine your head will get a bit overcrowded with disjoint, received details. If you’ve emphasized that sort of learning in the past, you might just be sort of topped up and need to change gears to a more sophisticated kind of learning.
I'm way more motivated to learn now. I only really watch Netflix etc on Friday and Saturday nights. Other evenings I try to get an hour to myself to do self learning. (Difficult with a child,!)
My main problem is I prefer learning programming related things not directly related to my programming job. Currently doing a course on network programming in c (I don't have a com sci degree).
What I really want is to learn maths to the point we're I can do a bit of calculus.
Just listened to John carmack on lex Fridman podcast. Very inspiring. He's switched in to AI research , never seems to stop teaching himself. (Though he has the advantage of being genius).
I'm 50, and finding it easier than ever to learn. (Mostly.) For most new topics, and in particular new tech skills, there is some similarity to something I've learned before. I just need to adapt my perspective and learn some new details.
Sometimes I end up wanting to learn something truly new that does not match any prior knowledge. That can be hard. And I can sometimes feel like I don't want to bother. But such a scenario is the exception.
As far as aging goes, its impacts are more diverse than I thought, according to a really interesting book called "The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain: The Surprising Talents of the Middle-Aged Mind." Aging brains really haven't been studied until recently, and newer research (cited in the book) suggests that in some ways the brain improves at certain kinds of thinking during aging. (A rough model is that you spend your youth acquiring a raw mass of experience, and as you age it gets consolidated into actionable chunks.) So while you may have trouble recalling specific facts, aging brains also out-perform when it comes to synthesizing existing information and extrapolating solutions.
That's just one example from the book. Basically, aging brains are a lot more interesting than we give them credit for.
Almost 1.5 years after quitting my mind feels just like it did when I was 20. Only difference is now just a different personality from being older I'd say. I'll be soon beginning a new job though so wish me luck!
I believe exercising, eating well, good sleep, keeping stress low will make wonders with wanting to learn new things.
These days I'd fail miserably at that but now I can read something and figure out how to apply that knowledge to something pretty easily. Which I think is the better option.
Try changing how you try learning new things, if you used to read things try videos or working through examples.
"He [Fellini] lived inside things with indomitable curiosity and perpetual openness, surrendering himself to what Dostoevsky calls "the river of life," in the serene understanding that it always takes you somewhere."
I think the easiest way to learn new things are two simple steps:
1. Always be reading. 2. Teach yourself how to learn
There’s many great books on the latter topic. Once you get the basics and understand the different modes of your brain and the importance of rest, anything is possible.
Why do you want to force yourself? Do you have something to prove? Just enjoy life.
But then you get to a place where you've done some of that keeping up, and most of the time, it's not going to consume you for the rest of your life. A new thing eventually becomes old, and while learning another new thing can set up a career, you hesitate a little more to bother when you already have things you want to go deeper on. Which means the kind of learning you do is different, less focused on the grind of established courses and more in the space of independent study, integrating a bunch of disparate things into a whole. It shows up in people's brains, too: the current thought is that "crystallized" intelligence peaks much later in life. Young people are fast, old people are wise.
I realize now that something I really didn't understand, even as I started my 30's, was how to study things really well. I could be a fan about them, and learn interesting facts, and follow steps, but the really essential thing was to not gloss over it, and to turn the learning into a workout, a thing that engages you while simultaneously being relatively simple and monotonous, just copying things, memorizing things, repeating processes to master them. And part of your repulsion may well be the same kind of feeling that many get at the idea of "working out" - your brain knows that's what needs to be done, your emotions say, why do that, it's so much effort. As a baby it's no issue, you'll do anything if pointed the right direction, and just expend all the energy you have on hand and then sleep it off. But somewhere along the way you both gain desire to save energy, and also to protect an identity of being "the kind of person who...", and other various beliefs. You can't just turn on baby mode and follow along with the nursery rhymes or practice tracing the alphabet. No, you have to say to yourself, "I'm going to turn this into reps and do 30 reps today." It takes some creativity even to start down that path because often the material you want to study is all packaged up in a form that doesn't aid your mastery.
But it's hardly as simple as old people suddenly becoming unable to operate a computer. The old can still discuss technical matters, but they aren't self-evidently interesting to know or discuss. Most of them are things to eliminate from life in order to make room for something else.
Lots of people never stop learning until they die. It's just not as easy. Some people do better than others.
30 is not that age.
You ever consider you may be burnt out?