Imagine being Kay and having to watch GUIs get increasingly dumbed down, people using Object Oriented Programming to refer to things nothing like what you created, people not using computers to the full potential you thought you had enabled decades ago. "Guys! You're doing it wrong!"

But this means there's still a lot of room for "innovation" to build on top of his "inventions" (distinction he made in a talk that[1] was posted here yesterday: invention being creating new things, innovation being the task of bringing them to market). Or if that's not your deal, he laid out the kind of environment that's required to create new inventions. You could try to work in such an environment or create one.

It's probably too late to have the same "early life" that he did, but you've learned to read, if you're here you've probably learned to code, and chances are you've still got at least a couple "lives"[2] left in you.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7538063

[2] http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2722

I think John von Neumann's early (and later) life is even more incredible.