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Comment by dpiers | Hacker News Reader

I'm 23.

I don't like people my age, including myself. We are inexperienced and foolish, and think much too highly of ourselves. The only cure for our folly is experience, which I believe does not temper ambition, but instead directs it towards wiser pursuits.

I know I will soon reflect on the things I create now and realize how flawed they were, but I've decided not to let it stop me. I know I will make mistakes, I know I will chase the wind, and I know that five years from now all of my running may leave me tired and broke, but what choice do I have?

The best things I create in my life will likely come ~15 years from now, but in the meanwhile I am left to do what I can with the resources I have, which are currently youth and ambition.

I will be a better entrepreneur when I am older, for now I will be the best I can be today.

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I'm 39, almost 40. I feel the same way.

The moral of this, IMO, is that the answer to the question "Am I there yet?" is always "no" in life. No matter how old you are, you always have more to learn, and you can always look forward and say "in 15 years I'll look back and think I was pretty silly now".

This is not to discredit the value of experience. I feel like I make better decisions about certain things now, than I did, say, 20 years ago. But by the same token, don't discredit the energy and ambition of youth.

In the end though, at any given time all you can be, is who you are. Make the most of it and just accept that you'll make some mistakes. Always keep learning and trying to grow and eventually you'll realize that the more "wise" you become, the more you just realize how much you don't know.

I think that both ambition of youth and experience based wisdom are incredibly valuable in most areas. I think one of the major mistakes that people make is trying to focus on why one is better then the other rather then seeing what each of them has to bring to the table. I personally would love to work in an environment where both are present and valued.

You're right.

Experience is only a treatment, not a cure, for folly. People will always be imperfect, regardless of how much they improve, and will always make mistakes. We just get better at avoiding the easy ones.

Just don't hate yourself for it. I was the opposite way: I didn't realize how ridiculous I was early in my 20's until I hit my 30's, and the fact that you already know it does put you ahead of the game (i.e. your peers).

Keep going cautiously, but always keep going. You have a great attitude.

I'm 27 and so much this. If I could find a 45 year-old wise person who can redirect me to work on something awesome in his area of expertise, that'd be awesome.

Perhaps a new site to connect would-be 45 yr old entrepreneurs with 20-something hot shot programmers?

Time passes faster the older you get. It's something you ought to be noticing by 27, but sometimes it takes people a little longer.

Your 30s are going to go by in a flash, and when you are 45, you are going to chuckle at what people in their 20's think old is.

I disagree. If you keep a journal, life goes by just as fast at 30 as at 19. The key is definitely novel experiences. There's some research to back this up: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2228221/Scien...

Do not cite the daily mail. Or read it. Go and find some real research papers.

I always figured it was because you experience time relative to how long you have already lived. One year seems like forever when you are 5, because it's 20% of your life. One year at 50 is only 2% of your life, so it seems shorter.

I'm 22 and I've noticed this trend when I was 10. It depresses me quite a bit actually, and I constantly check up on the latest research involving this phenomenon to see if there's a way to make time "seem" to go slower at least.

I asked my grandparents the other day if this acceleration of time kind of levels off once you reach old age, and they said nope, years go by in what months used to be.

One way to slow down the perception of time is to embrace the schlep. http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html

Working on things that are tedious or generally unfun, can make the clock tick by slower.

Workouts slow the clock down for me.

However, instead of trying to slow down the perception of time, think about it trying to leverage it:

If you know that the days, weeks, years, etc., are only going to pass faster, it becomes easier to visualize the end results of cumulative effects.

Always wanted to learn a new language? Spend 30 mins a day on it. When those 2 years have flown by, if you were disciplined, you will reap the rewards.

Same for working out. If you have always wanted to be more fit, or stronger, or whatever, nothing can be as intimidating or embarrassing as struggling to lift the bench press bar before putting the weights on.

And at the end of the workout, especially in weight lifting, you can feel like it will never get better or take forever to get results.

But if you bank on the ever increasing speed of perceived time passing, add a dash of discipline, and before you know it, you will have achieved your goal.

Really the advantage is two fold, during the workout time slows to a crawl, so you have achieved goal one, slowing down time perception.

And the rest of your life blazes by, so in seemingly little time, you will have worked out every day for 2 years and trust me, you will see results you wouldn't believe.

When you're young, every day is a new experience. Your brain timestamps these experiences and you can see a lot of activity in a given period of time. As you get older, you end up doing a lot of routine things and there are relatively fewer new experiences. As you look over a given period of time, you see a lot less activity. This is what I've come to believe is the basis for the universal phenomenon of the perception of accelerated time.

The solution is to break your routine. For me, the subjectively slowest passing of time is when I'm doing a lot of new stuff and haven't formed a routine around it. But if you're working a 9 to 5 kind of job you end up doing the same shit every day and every week and every month. Pretty soon you take notice and discover that another year has gone by. So do your best to avoid routine. Or if that's not practical (hey, we all need to make a living) then fill your non-work hours with new experiences and new learnings. Now that's some advice I need to take myself...

Keep a journal. Does't have to be anything deep, just a list of any out of the ordinary activities you did on a given day. Things like movies you saw, dates you went on, conversations you had with friends etc.

I started doing this a few years ago and it's really great at the end of the to look back year and see all the cool things I did.

There are a few apps for this. I use Everday.me a bit and have been meaning to try Overdrive.

There's also a company called OhLife that sends you a daily email to reply to. I think they're YC.

It's weird, I'm 25 turning 26 in a month. On one hand, I feel quite old, meaning that I'm struggling in terms of trying to learn new things, like learning a new musical instrument, language and sport, things that should be done at an early age. I def. can feel the concept of going past my prime, and now doing things awkwardly and always will have an "accent" with the new things I take on now.

On the other hand, stupid things matter less to me now. Like the fear of missing out (FOMO) and trying to look cool, so all of the hip social badges like trying all of the yuppie-crap to present an image that I'm an renaissance man matter less to me. The more mature things like being responsible, on-time and saving money matters more to me. But I feel so inept in these things, so I feel both like I have peaked and very immature at the same time. But hey, Dota hasn't changed so to make myself feel better about myself, I just pub-stomp n00bs ftw!

There was an interesting article/discussion on the subject a few months ago - "Why time appears to speed up with age" - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4402763

I was always told that when you turn 30 your birthdays start coming twice a year... interesting you made this comment.

Prove your hot shot abilities through OSS and countless companies will line up to put you in that kind of environment.

Sugar Daddy Programmers?

/joke

I wouldn't be so sure, it's far more common to peak creatively when you're younger.

I think the correlation is that creativity matters less in entrepreneurship than execution.

I'm 23.

I don't like people my age, including myself.

I'm 29. It doesn't change. I've no problem with the average 29-year-old (or the average 23-year-old) but the types of people who do well, young, in VC-istan are pretty irritating.

The types who do well at older ages aren't much better.

For people, I prefer Wall Street. No, I'm not kidding. The work isn't as interesting, but the people are more decent.

Have been reading your comments for a while now, I honestly thought you were in your 40s.

Ha! Is that a good thing, or bad?

This is not the first time I've gotten that.

It's a good thing.

Agree, Michael seems to have a wide experience of working with programmers. I am 31 but I feel he knows more than me about programmers and companies.

Good thing! You sound much more experienced for someone your age. But then I am only 26 myself!

Having also read your comments for a while, I keep seeing your use of the term VC-istan. I can guess what you might wish to convey with that, but perhaps you could explain in your own words what you mean by that? (My apologies if I missed a previous explanation.)

He's referring to the fact that Silicon Valley these days operates as a company town of the VC's and BigCo's of tech. You can see it when people from the Bay Area who don't work in anything connected to the tech sector talk about their area: "You can only live here if you belong to the Tech Master Race", and so on.

Not liking yourself is a serious hindrance to a happy life. Learn to accept yourself with compassion, flaws and all, or you'll pay the price later!

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