[orbitur]

> The take-away invariably being that people who are older and have more things to do have fallen out with technology, whereas the young are still with it, whatever it is.

But it's still true, in general.

Sure, I work with plenty of early 20s people who have (frustratingly) no interest in their domain outside of what is necessary to get them through the work day. These young people exist.

But there are also the young people who are actually interested, and, in general, they have a comparatively infinite amount of free time to dig into languages and libraries.

If you have a spouse/partner, some of the time you used to spend working on your interests is now spent nurturing your relationship (and if you don't do that, I guess you'll have more free time for yourself again later on). If you have a child, then you must take another chunk of time spent on personal interests, or work. For most people it ends up being their own interests, since they still have bills to pay.

[personZ]

But it's still true, in general.

At best what you could say is true is that people with no relationships and no "extra-curriculars/external interests" have more free time.

This crosses all ages. There are young people with filled social and activity calendars (I've worked with young people who seemingly had filled social calendars at work). There are older people who have all the time in the world.

I remember reading once that the best employees are the unhappiest (in life). These were the people with endless time because they had no activities, no family or social relationships, etc. They'd happily burn the candle 120 hours a week because they had nothing else to do. Not sure how beneficial that is to knowledge work.