[huhkerrf]

I found the article anodyne enough, so this is not a knock on it, but something I've noticed as I've gotten older that I find a bit amusing and curious.

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.

[conductr]

As a older than this person, I feel like it’s around the time most people have that first large step of retrospectiveness where they see their current self has deviated from their self they thought they were previously. They realize they have autonomy to craft themselves. They realize there are more important aspects to life than their grades/sports/hobby or whatever things they built their identity around for the first 20-25 years. Anyways once you realize it, it’s an interesting topic to write about as you’ve become a completely different person from the one you were maybe 5-10 years prior. Because you’re likely transitioning into adulthood (maturity wise). As this continues in your later thirties and forties, it’s just status quo adulting and not as interesting to write about.

[jamestimmins]

I always half-joke that I gave up on my hopes of being a child prodigy when I turned 30.

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.

[tempodox]

> realizing that there was no future "grown up" version of me

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.

[jamestimmins]

That's very exciting to hear! I'd be delighted to be wrong about that.

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.

[nasmorn]

Wrong. I never ran more than 5 times a year until I was 30 and now I have run ultra marathons. It is my spiritual calling and I didn’t know about it until 34. Now I am 44 and probably in the best shape of my life.

[conductr]

I hated manual labor as a kid/young adult, associated it with chores and whatnot, now in my 40s I build homes as a hobby/side gig. I like to be as hands on as possible with it and do about 70% of the work myself on every house. I work a knowledge worker job during the day and need something physical to feel like I’ve accomplished any real which helps my overall fulfillment. Most people think it’s strange, but I do most of the house work between 10pm-3pm. After my job and family duties are complete for the day, I’m somewhat nocturnal and it’s not as hot at night (Texas). I’m usually fine with just the 6 or so hours of sleep but it’s kind of like I have a whole second life at night lol

[Hunpeter]

A somewhat more depressing take: "There comes a time in everyone's life when you look into the mirror and realize that what you see is all that you'll ever be. And you accept that fact - or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking into mirrors." (Babylon 5, quoted from memory, so probably not 100% correct)

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?

[prerok]

I think you are always in this phase of being able to be anything you want. Even as you are growing up, there are usually more choices than you can see. What experience and age gives you is a broader understanding that that really is the case and then, speaking from personal experience, you start feeling foolish for not realizing this before.

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.

[FearNotDaniel]

"It is the most shattering experience of a young man's life when one morning he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself: 'I shall never play the Dane.'"

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/mar/29/richard-grif...

[noisem4ker]

That first "or" coordinate was really uncalled for.

[vinyl7]

Its true though, unless you can find your purpose in life. Gotta be more to life than transient hits of dopamine

[ponector]

>>so predictably I started woodworking

Making your own doors now!

[Brendinooo]

This is good, and I'll add that for the kind of person who grew up sitting in front of a computer and is now working full-time sitting in front of a computer, this is most likely to manifest in recognizing problems with physical health and taking steps to fix it, steps that are tangible and highly achievable for someone in their 20s and 30s.

EDIT: Oh, and farmers do not have this particular problem, lol

[netbioserror]

Precisely this. For all the (woefully young) science about brain development and maturity, it doesn't seem to stop for quite a while, and my late 20's and early 30's have been the most interesting time of reflection and self-appraisement I've had.

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.

[bryanlarsen]

> I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this.

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.

[spookie]

This is true, it's normal with the age.

[Aurornis]

> What is it that makes people in tech in their late 20s and 30s write about life lessons like an old sage?

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.

[dansmith1919]

> 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.

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.

[sharadov]

I am in my late 40s. I went through my own journey. This is not the first generation to do this. The difference being, they did it in private.

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.

[freetime2]

My experience is that most people in tech don't write about life lessons. But the ones who do frequently appear on HN because the audience on HN likes this sort of article.

[michaelcampbell]

I think their point is not that people in their mid 20's are WRITING LIFE LESSONS, but more that PEOPLE IN THEIR MID 20'S are writing life lessons.

[achenet]

In this particular case, the guy seems to be in his late 30s or 40s (he says "until my late twenties, I could count the number of times I had been to the gym on on hand", and later "fast forward almost to a decade").

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.

[carlosjobim]

Why not? Experience and maturity is not very dependent on age. Getting those depends on doing it, not just waiting on time passing by. I'm much older than the article author, but it would be foolish of me to think that I couldn't learn things from 20 year olds – including important and profound teachings and advice.

[the_af]

I would say experience is correlated with age. You need to live to gain experience. Someone in their 20s simply hasn't lived long enough to be giving life lessons.

(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).

[carlosjobim]

You need to do things to gain experience. Doing time is not enough. A 20 year old can in many cases have done and experienced much more already in life than some 40 year olds. The large majority of today's mass population have identical lives that are staked out for them from the cradle to the grave, and it is true that most only gain experience by accidents which accumulate over the years. But many people live real lives already from a young age, and have the experience which that gives.

[the_af]

The implication goes the other way: someone who has done a lot of things and learned many lessons has lived a longer time. Not that people who have lived longer necessarily drew valuable lessons.

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.

[hadlock]

There's not a lot of 20 year olds who have made a single mistake that rolled back multiple years of work, almost instantly. When that happens to you for the first time, it is very humbling; and may take months or years to understand and learn from what happened. We all have things to learn from others, but proportionally there are very few self help authors under the age of 40.

[michaelcampbell]

> Experience and maturity is not very dependent on age.

Mostly only in edge cases.

[AlecSchueler]

People in their 40s are too busy juggling family life with senior positions at work to write about anything that isn't strictly necessary

[renewiltord]

It is true. Self-help content is HN’s favourite. Though I think moaning is close behind.

[cl3misch]

Maybe the old farmers and rednecks don't have blogs which you can read online. They might well tell their friends and family!

[sharadov]

But wait, how will they get their dopamine kicks in the form of likes.

[wwweston]

Being very online, probably.

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.

[wbrd]

Do you regularly read the writings of farmers and roughnecks? I didn't get into tech until I was 40 but I definitely was going through some of the same personal growth as the writer when I was about 30 and if I had a blog I probably would have written about it.

[huhkerrf]

> Do you regularly read the writings of farmers and roughnecks?

If you count Facebook posts from high school friends, yeah. I grew up in a very rural environment.

[Yreval]

They may be far from having learned all their lessons in life--and hopefully are open to the wisdom of those with many more years in similar shoes--but that doesn't mean that can't have learned valuable lessons in ten, fifteen years of adult life. I know I have plenty of wisdom now that I wish I could have passed to a five-years younger version of myself. I don't think writing, sharing, or publicizing that sort of retrospective is necessarily presumptuous. Sometimes young tech personalities are pompous, but there are also plenty of my own peers (and juniors!) that I'm happy to take lessons from.

[close04]

You learn extremely valuable lessons even during your traineeship. But it takes many more years to realize if that lesson is truly unique and worth sharing, and if it won’t be turned on its head as you learn more later in life.

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?

[altcognito]

I'm decently older than this and I'm all for it.

Age is just one modest, fallible signal for wisdom, to say nothing of occupation. Farmers and roughnecks definitely spout plenty of "life lessons".

[noduerme]

An unkind answer is these are the sort of navel-gazing observations had by most teenagers, and people in tech are just late bloomers.

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.

[viridian]

You should choose to practice kindness and charity if you can at all help it. Accusing a whole class of people of arrested development is incredibly derogatory. There are healthier ways to frame criticism.

[noduerme]

Yeah, I guess it's not really fair to single out the tech worker class. Pretty much everyone in America under the age of 35 now suffers from some form of arrested development.

[alexchantavy]

Kind of like if /r/im14andthisisdeep met LinkedIn B2B SaaS prose :)

(side note in all seriousness I did enjoy the article)

[HankStallone]

I was listening to a book-review podcast that was talking about one of Ernest Cline's books. They were on a section where the 17-year-old protagonist is remarking on how his personality probably reflects his dad's interest in something or other, and one of the hosts laughed and said no 17-year-old does that kind of self-analysis. I immediately said, "Au contraire, maybe you didn't, but plenty of them do." I certainly did.

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.

[the_gipsy]

Tech people are good at writing, maybe not like an actual writer or journalist, but we definitely write more than farmers. Tech also evolves very fast, so we probably perceive time differently, and think we "have seen a lot" in less time.

[xoac]

Most tech people are only good at trite linkedin type writing and larping as pg.

[kjellsbells]

Humbly disagree. The majority of tech writing sucks.Or perhaps I should say that it never has a chance to be better because the medium of choice, the blog, is clunky at best and little more than diary entries for the most part (which perhaps makes it harsh to judge them, but then, don't put your diary online). The worst of them are look-at-me/SEO/LinkedIn audition spam. The best are entries that are useful in the moment and then quickly forgotten.

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.

[the_gipsy]

Apparently we also can read, but are also not good at "getting" it.

[astura]

"Good at generating vacuous platitudes that sound profound to dumb people" is not the same thing as "good at writing."

[sharadov]

Really, probably the most uncreative writing comes from tech writers.

[ashwinsundar]

I have never read whatever farmers write, but I am almost certain it is miles better than the average tech writing drivel

[grigri907]

I recommend starting with Wendell Berry

[begueradj]

True. But it's the same trend in every other field: new born babies lecture soon to die people about life.

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.

[stronglikedan]

> farmers or roughnecks doing this

Oh, they do it. They just do it in their preferred medium, which is usually in person on the job, not the internet.

[ratelimitsteve]

across the rim of a pint glass, ime

[turnsout]

Software people reply heavily on systems, patterns and frameworks in planning their work. It leads them to think that all of life is like a coding challenge that just needs the right framework, and as soon as they think they’ve discovered something, they want to share it in the spirit of open source.

That’s the charitable read anyway.

[__alexander]

There was an article or comment a couple of years back discussing how people are now writing grandiose blog posts like they are describing how and why they broke up Pink Floyd. I wish I could find the original source because I still think about it.

[AlecSchueler]

> 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.

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.

[spacebanana7]

Netscape was only released 30 years ago.

Someone in their early 30s could’ve been a developer for half the existence of the browser platform.

[the_real_cher]

The quintessential American author Oprah Winfrey didn't write her first book untill she was 42.

[m463]

I can't help but think of Don Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming.

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.

[tomrod]

The tools have a short lifecycle. So if you've used the tool for a week, that's equivalent relevant lifecycle experience to a farmer using a tractor for 50 years.

/s this is totally a riff on how fast frontend and data science tooling changes

[satisfice]

I attempted to write a life’s lessons kind of book when I was 17. It took 26 years to finish it. Turns out, it takes a long time to test ideas. I kept asking myself “but how do I know this works.”

[zzzeek]

exactly. there's just an attitude of hubris in a lot of tech nerds that remains unmoved even when they've "swapped out a whole new operating system" for themselves

[renewiltord]

I suppose it’s true. You don’t notice them doing it. The problem here is that you’ve concluded that the detection instrument functions. That’s bad engineering. Check your equipment.

[Bilal_io]

I think it has to with the audience, or a platform. A young farmer would probably pretend to know a lot and even talk to impress if you put an audience in front of them.

[ludston]

Sharing ideas leads to feedback. People in their late 20s and early 30s are only just feeling like they are cementing their identities, so they seek validation.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

I think it's a social media thing that's not limited to tech. There are tons of tiktok videos where some 18 year old explains the world with passion.

[ratelimitsteve]

>I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this.

Not for nothing, but you might if you spent time on the FarmersAndRoughnecksNews forum instead of here

[pavel_lishin]

> I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this.

Do you read the blogs of 32 year old farmers or roughnecks?

[isaacremuant]

Blog posts are branding. A version of them is self help style but there's all kinds. It just sells well.

[neutronicus]

In tech there's more to be gained building a personal brand online than in petroleum

[spookie]

They feel the need to prove themselves to others. Not a jab or anything, it is normal.

[clickety_clack]

Maybe you’re just exposed to tech blogs and not the farmer/roughneck equivalent?

[blitzar]

> write about life lessons like an old sage

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.

[nachox999]

old farmers do the same, they just don't blog

[firecall]

Arrogance.

[Cthulhu_]

I draw analogies with junior / medior / senior developers; juniors don't know anything and they know it, mediors know something but think they know everything and want the world to know, seniors know something but know they know nothing.

...if that makes any sense, I'm sure someone else put it more eloquently than that.

[joncrocks]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence

[ludston]

Dunning-Kruger?