Some Lessons From the First 24 Years of Life | Hacker News Reader

Some Lessons From the First 24 Years of Life

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59 pointsandreipop13 comments

"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." -- Mark Twain

As a 38 y/old: You have no idea how much time you have right now. I thought I was always really busy, but looking back I didn't realize how much time I actually had when I was in my 20's. Try kids, your own house, (older) relatives, everyday stuff, a body that requires more 'maintenance',a full-time job and a startup. OP says "money is fuel", but time is perhaps even more so.

Oddly enough, at 35, I'm very much aware of how much time I have. I have the full-time job, but virtually none of the rest of the time-expenditures that someone my age usually has. It's very much like me at 20.

And yet I'm acutely more aware of my time and how I spend it.

I wonder if this holds up: The older we get, the more aware of time? Or is it: The more responsibilities, the more aware of time?

As a 31-year old, the main thing I've learnt is that at 24, I knew nothing. Nothing at all.

I imagine I will feel the same way about 31-year-old me, who is at last, finally, starting to Get. It.

Conversations with my 69 year old Dad suggest that he too feels as though he is on the cusp of true understanding.

Also, here's a joke for old farts.

    When I was 18, I actually did know everything*

    * for sufficiently small values of 'everything'

... and the fun part will be seeing what changes and what stays the same

I realised earlier this year that bet-the-company decisions on technology and process are, at this very moment, being made by people for whom the Agile Manifesto was signed when they were in primary school.

People for whom MySQL is relational databases.

And so on.

I mean, numerically speaking, I have only been paying attention for a minority of the history of this industry. But if you read stuff from the 90s, it refers to stuff from the 80s and 70s and so on down the line until you get into deep ur-software engineering.

But then the internet came along and nobody has time for books any more. Even blog posts are tl;dr these days, everyone sort of scrapes together their craft from twitter and HN comments.

It's like someone took decades of accumulated wisdom and hit a giant red button somewhere that overwrote that collective knowledge with random 1s and 0s.

Of course ... similar rants were being written in the 80s ...

Its strange that people keep complaining about how things where better in the past than they are now. But the reality seems to be different(Which is that things always seem to be getting better)

I don't feel that it's getting worse. It just annoys me when stuff keeps getting reinvented and nobody takes the time to check what's already been done.

That was my first thought as well when I saw the title of the post. :) (I'm 31 as well as a matter of fact)

Looking back, I feel that I indeed had no idea what I was doing. I still don't but I feel I'm more self-aware of this fact.

Totally agree. Especially if, at 24, you had spent most of your time in school/college, the knowledge you had reached is very, very superficial, because you have actually never lived in the "real" world until then.

I would argue that previous generations knew more than us at the same age, in a way. I'm 33, and by my age, my Dad had been working for 15 years through several companies, had been married for a long time, had got 2 kids, had gone to War, etc... I cannot say that I can ever compare with the knowledge you derive from those experiences.

This reminds me of a line in "Interview with a Vampire", when Louis says something like that to the interviewer "I was about your age at that Time, but I was already a Man".

This is exactly what I thought when reading the article. "Wow, this kid has a lot to learn."

And I would hope I'd say the same about myself in ten years. And ten years after that, etc.

I think one should worry if one ever feels they've learned all they need to know. At the same time some 30 or 40 year olds will say things like "just wait until x happens..." and I always wonder why they stop there and don't get into more detail. I guess at 14 most of us wouldn't have grasped theses "truths" which reveal themselves later. Maybe we can't at 24, 44, etc. I'm really interested in what others feel I will learn not because its true (it may be) but because I like to see if our perspectives differ, and why.

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