The folks with one to three decades more time at bat who are hiring you most likely do find learning and change literally painful. Not because of age, but because of “number of trials” at the change experiment, where often someone gets burned.

Reading, learning, thinking differently, hurts the ego, as it makes clear you were less informed before, and puts you on unknown ground where you don’t know if you’re failing or not. This is hard for a lot of people, ironically especially hard for folks who started out as high performers in spaces with “known knowns” knowledge available (aka, school and textbooks, where learning isn’t an ego problem, it’s expected that you didn’t know).

You haven’t yet developed the instinct to yank your hand off the stove, and you don’t have to stick around long to see if your hand gets burned anyway, so you’re valuable to these folks.