What is it that makes people in tech in their late 20s and 30s write about life lessons like an old sage? I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this.
EDIT: Oh, and farmers do not have this particular problem, lol
It's becoming clear to me that what we call a "mid-life crisis" is probably just Jung's self-actualization, where a person becomes aware they've been wearing a mask to some degree until then. It seems most people find a way to drop it, stop doing what they don't want, and start doing what they do want. Hence the development of grumpiness, divorces, moving far afield, buying sports cars, becoming ascetics, whatever it is that reflects a truer identity than their young selves that satisfied expectations and chased approval.
I've found that the people I know who naturally reject molds and masks while young and pursue what they want early on don't seem to go through this.
That was a major milestone not just for realizing that there was no future "grown up" version of me, but also seeing how much time had passed and how little was left. So I accepted that who I am is who I'm going to be, for the most part, and I might as well make the best of it. That opened up a lot of doors for personal interest that I hadn't even noticed previously.
So predictably I started woodworking.
Should you get older (which is probable), you’ll be amazed at how wrong that is. Development doesn’t stop at 30, it just gets a little slower.
Edit: Although, just to clarify, I didn't really mean that I think I won't change as I get older. Moreso that if growing a mustache or getting involved in international diplomacy was going to be in my future, I'd likely have some indication of that by now.
As I'm nearing 30, still in the "I can be anything I want" phase, I wonder when this time will arrive. And whether it is true for everyone - maybe some people possess the ability to reinvent themselves no matter their age. But can you even do that without giving up some contentment?
That said, changing things is never without some loss of contentment. Even if status quo is abysmal, we humans seem to prefer it over changing it. It is worth exploring, though, even if it is uncomfortable.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/mar/29/richard-grif...
Making your own doors now!
Hang out in a bar with 32 year old farmers or roughnecks as a teenager and you'll hear lots of similar shallow anodyne life wisdom.
Some of my friends tried going down the influencer path. Some on LinkedIn, one as an Substacker, others on Instagram.
Seeing their influencer content in contrast to their personal lives made it abundantly clear that they were using their influencer side as an outlet for their thoughts. As ideas or epiphanies came to them, they would jump to their influencer accounts and preach their realizations as if it was knowledge they had held for decades.
The optimistic angle is that they were using the outlet as a place for sharpening their thoughts. Thinking in public and putting your thoughts into words forces you to sharpen your ideas and make them more coherent.
The part that never sat well with me was how they were trying to preach it to others and present themselves as the wise, experienced guru sharing this advice to others when really they were just barely figuring it out.
The content can be helpful for others to sharpen their own thoughts or catch up on basic realizations about life, but for others it feels weird to see so much fanfare around basic social and workplace understandings.
Honestly, you probably have to bring it like this if you want to generate a following. I guess people like it when someone just hands them a truth in a confident enough way.
Not post every thought and idea as if they've figured out the meaning of life.
And I disagree, you don't need to share your thoughts for validation. Rather, you need to live them. Most roads taken will appear as mistakes, but they have their own teaching moments.
There is nothing better than lived experience.
But even if he was in his mid 20's... I understand being cautious about taking life lessons from young people, because they've had less chance to learn and correct the false things they might have learned, but the lesson he is sharing here - that your identity determines your actions which in turn will determine large parts of your life outcomes is one that even someone young can understand, and it is a useful one - I'd argue that no matter your age, if you've got a self-image that is blocking you from 'living your best life'/'doing what you want to do'/'being happy', knowing that you can change it, and this will get you closer to your goals, is useful.
(Give or take some extraordinary exceptions of people who accumulate a lot of hard-earned experience very early in their lives; but the general rule applies).
It's less likely that a 20 year old has done as many things, faced as many challenges, and drawn as many lessons, as someone who doubles them in age. They simply haven't lived long enough to be able to tell if their lessons validate or generalize well.
Even the perspective of someone who has most of their life ahead vs someone who has a few decades more is wildly different. Someone with most of their lives ahead can course-correct more easily. Someone who hasn't had their mid-life crisis yet, etc, etc -- you get the idea.
How can you get enough experience without living long enough to accrue said experience? How can your perspective on things change if not enough time passed for perspective changes?
To get back to your initial claim:
> Experience and maturity is not very dependent on age.
This is what I disagree with. Experience and maturity are very dependent on age. While some people have a lot of experience and maturity early on, this is rare.
Also, some people don't get wiser with age, but that's a different proposition. I'm not claiming old people are necessarily wise.
I don't know what else to tell you, other than "read what I wrote".
Your last question has already been answered (by both myself and others). I won't repeat myself.
Mostly only in edge cases.
Also, it’s writing code for a social product.
Also, Wendell Berry isn’t exactly just a farmer but grew up one and kept as much as he could while becoming a fine writer who talks about life lessons. More people should read him.
If you count Facebook posts from high school friends, yeah. I grew up in a very rural environment.
I learned very different versions of the same lesson given 20 more years of experience. Sometimes just having my confidence in “old” life lessons shaken was a huge deal, it takes a lot to shake what I thought is bedrock.
If you watch 20 minutes from a 2h movie can you really tell something about the whole movie or just about its beginning?
Age is just one modest, fallible signal for wisdom, to say nothing of occupation. Farmers and roughnecks definitely spout plenty of "life lessons".
But an even less kind answer would be that self-help is big business, and to run the scam you have to build an audience.
(side note in all seriousness I did enjoy the article)
There may be something about the kind of mind that's drawn to tech that correlates with navel-gazing. We like to know how things work, and that doesn't necessarily only apply to computers and gadgets.
Of course, that only explains why we think about it; not why so many of us write about it like we think other people need to hear it. That probably comes down to being smarter than average and thinking you've got everything figured out by the age of 15, also a common trait of tech people. Fortunately some of us manage to outgrow it and be embarrassed by what know-it-alls we were.
I like some tech writing, but the number of tech authors who I return to for the long view, reflective of industry understanding and life lessons learned, like I might do with writing about any other topic, is extremely small.
Example of such lessons: recently, a well known dating coach who gives lessons that costs around 8000 euros per hour about how a man can become a high value man and attract high value women, called Sadia Khan, proved she is in the position to give lessons about how a woman can be of high value: private calls of her were released recently and it is shown she is a side chick of a married man.
Oh, they do it. They just do it in their preferred medium, which is usually in person on the job, not the internet.
That’s the charitable read anyway.
They have blogs and the means to distribute the links to their blogs via sites like this.
Spend some time at your local pub and you'll hear people of all backgrounds over you their sagacity.
Someone in their early 30s could’ve been a developer for half the existence of the browser platform.
Looking at wikipedia, he started it in 1962 (at age 24), and it is still incomplete in 2025 (he is 87)
By the time you're old, it might be too late to start your "wise" framework.
/s this is totally a riff on how fast frontend and data science tooling changes
Not for nothing, but you might if you spent time on the FarmersAndRoughnecksNews forum instead of here
Do you read the blogs of 32 year old farmers or roughnecks?
Take it from me, an old sage who has seen some things, people writting life lessons like they are old sages have absolutely no idea. They might strike the correct time twice a day like the broken clock they are, but there are an awful lot of hours in the day that they are wrong.
...if that makes any sense, I'm sure someone else put it more eloquently than that.