At 22, you bristle at the thought of someone in their 30's or 40's year old calling you a child, and why does the entire car rental industry agree with these tired old farts? It's not fair.

By 30, you start to allow that they might have a point, but you abstain from saying anything because you remember how it feels. You smirk (privately) at Sarah in Labyrinth instead of identifying with her. "It's not fair. It's not fair." Brat. By 35 you've lost track of how many times you've resisted the urge condescend, and you start to lose the war by degrees.

    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

I am coming to appreciate Jim Highsmith's position (we aren't solving problems, we are resolving paradoxes, but refuse to see).

It's not that they're wrong, or they're right. It's that everybody is wrong (and always will be). That excitement at finding a new strategy (which the old cynics point out is merely new to you) is the hope of escape. It's also the hope of changing the narrative so that everybody is on an even footing. You aren't competing with people who have 10 years experience in this (the only people who do are 50 and a mix of short memories and ageism prevents them from taking over).

If 'progress' looks like taking our foot out of one bucket and putting it into another over and over, we're just going to spiral toward the future forever, which is going to be boring and slow. Probably we need more specializations based on problem domains instead of techniques. My exceedingly vague understanding of the history of medicine is that they didn't make much progress either until they did that, and that a lot of people died until they started getting serious about issues. We are 75 years old as an industry. It's time to talk about kicking out the snake oil and cure-all vendors.