By the time you hit 40, you've accumulated ~20 years of adult-life habits. For a lot of people, that lifestyle is very sedentary, missing most dietary recommendations (insufficient fiber intake, oversufficient saturated fat intake), poor sleep, frequent emotional stress etc.
As a young adult, you've spent most of your life being very active, sleeping ~10 hours a night (as a child), having plenty of downtime and playtime etc. It's why you can party hard, study hard and sleep a little; you're starting fresh.
The good news is that some of these habits are massive levers; biological age can drift decades (worst-to-best).
Do you have any good readings to recommend on this topic?
The NHANES study[1] is another one that showed huge jumps in slowed aging with proportionally (to calories) increased fiber consumption.
There's a lot of these. I recommend Dr Michael Greger for a lot of them summarized. He's very biased towards whole food plant based diet (a type of vegan diet), but he references and cites every statement he makes and is generally a very good communicator.
There is a YouTube channel called Viva Longevity! that invites research authors and generally presents longevity/health information in a way that is very thorough and sincere.
0. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... 1. https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/10/4/400
A large contributor towards leaning towards plants (or awareness thereof) was probably Michael Pollan with his "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." tagline:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Defense_of_Food
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Pollan#In_Defense_of_F...
The other thing you gain is time contraction - a year now feels like a month when I was younger, so it's easier to plan long term and follow through on projects.
But I too am very interested in the perspective from closer to 80! I suspect, if I'm lucky enough to make it there, I'll consider present me the same kind of fool as I now consider younger me.
I guess so, particularly the "getting started" problem - I don't even like to think about setting up a project or dev environment.
That's a strong burnout indicator/symptom (or maybe you just don't enjoy it anymore), not necessarily something age related.
In fact plenty of people seem to fill their days with more work as they get older, where their younger selves would have chosen to do as little as possible.
Where he could once hold an entire system and its details in his head (almost an essential skill in the 80s/90s), he could only instead focus on smaller pieces at a time. Any new tooling or approaches that came along, he was fascinated to hear about them, but no longer felt able to pick them up. He could still solve algorithmic problems and debug "in the small", but it was like he had to do math on a Post-it note where once he had a huge sheet of paper.