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Comment by Blackstrat | Hacker News Reader

I’m 67 and don’t have any trouble learning new things. My priorities change. I’m not willing to waste time on certain topics now but will spend hours on others. The claim that “old people” can’t learn effectively is a myth and has been shown as such by numerous studies.

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I think that the truth is somewhere in the middle.

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.

Similarly, I’m much more selective about how I spend my time but learning things doesn’t seem especially harder.

Some things take more decades of prerequisites than others.

Those are the things you can't even learn effectively until you get quite a bit older.

One of the most important things I learned early in life - don't define yourself based on your career. Eventually, the career ends and then you find that you don't know who "you" are. Same with family, children, friends, etc. They are all important as is one's career. But at the end of the day, if you lose sight of "you" or only define yourself in terms of career or those around you, you are going to be a miserable, old retiree. This attitude probably cost me a promotion or two along the way but that was a fair trade off. I never lost sight of "me".

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