I’m 37 and I feel the same. Learning a brand new subject is difficult for me, mostly because I just feel too tired to push myself to do it.

On the other hand, my brain feels like it has marinated in 37 years of general experience, such that I can take on projects of significant complexity and not think too hard about it.

I also think a part of this is having enough experience to notice the cyclical nature of things also. Yes, that brand new thing is cool, and in my 20s I mighta jumped to learn it. But now, I see it's just a re-imagination of something from 10 years ago, that I learned back then, so it doesn't excite me in the same way. I might look at it to understand the parts that are different/re-imagined, but often not going to deep dive into items that fit that description.

And yes, not everything is just repeated, but it was an aspect I hadn't seen anyone else talk about.

I'm 39, and a fairly decent pianist. I learned a bit of guitar when I was younger, but just recently started learning guitar/uke more seriously.

I'm keenly aware of the skills that I spent hours and hours practicing that are now second nature to me on keyboards (such as scales, chords, names of notes) that I need to learn for guitar. Intellectually I understand how things work on guitars, but in order to get decent, I need to start putting in the time to practice playing scales, learning the fretboard, and even just teaching my fingers how to move in certain ways.

And it's not any harder to do this stuff than when I was a kid - in fact, in some ways it's easier. But it takes time and dedication. I have to keep reminding myself that I am actually making a ton of progress. But the tiredness / busyness can make it difficult to put in the time.

Tell me about it!

When I was younger I'd tunnel vision on things and get insanely good really quickly. The price was that everything else in my life was totally neglected. But I could totally afford to spend 6 hours after school, and entire weekends, on whatever I was into.

I just picked up guitar last year as an adult. I'm consistently practicing, but man progress feels slow! It feels weird not being able to tunnel-vision on a hobby

That’s what hurts the most about aging, to me. The loss of obsession. Obsession is the sole reason I’ve ever been good at anything, and I’m scared that I’ve entered into a permanent stage of my life where I’ll no longer feel overcome by curiosity or passion.

That's actually not been a problem for me. I don't know whether I have a touch of ADHD or I'm a bit on the autism spectrum, but being able to seriously focus on things hasn't really been an issue for me. The real issue are distractions - including my wife who I love hanging out with. She's been traveling a lot, so I've had more time to spend hours practicing my guitar scales and fingerings, and watching a TON of youtube guitar videos.

Why the delayed interest in guitar?

Just never clicked with me when I was younger. My younger brother was super into guitar so that was kind of "his thing" and I had other interests. I spent a lot of time playing keys in my late 20s / early 30s, including being in 2 different bands, one which played several shows every weekend.

...but a piano or keyboard is not very portable, and not everything is a good fit for keys. I especially love the portability of the tenor uke.

How much sleep are you getting?

I had a similar problem. Getting 8 hours of sleep every night, no exceptions, helped immensely.

It’s really hard. I even have a self-imposed rule that I always send my kids to sleep away camp in the summer. It’s necessary to escape the grind and take care of myself for a few weeks.

But if you look at medical research, it’s absolutely insane how sleep is related to everything.

I tried sleeping a solid 8 hours. Didn’t work. Weirdly enough, if I only get 4 hours of sleep, I’m wired for the entire day and I feel great. But it’s not sustainable.

Maybe look into polyphasic sleep. Instead of sleeping continuous 8 hours you can have main sleep chunk with short naps sprinkled throughout the day.

I think if you're in this position (which I am at 41), you've mostly used your prime brain time well. Turning high-effort, high-value brain pathways and operations into basically no-ops is the point.

> mostly because I just feel too tired to push myself to do it

As a 34 year old this scares me the most. I don’t want real life to accumulate and accrue around me so I don’t have the energy for curiosity and intellectual pursuits. But the harder I fight, the more cruft there is to think about.

It's like the old parable in 7 Habits, "I don't have time to sharpen the ax, I'm too busy chopping". You have to get strategic about it, you can't just plow through like you did when life was simpler.

Cut things that aren't such a high priority out completely. Reconsider division of labor in your household. Outsource. Batch process. Block time out on your calendar to do things you want to do, on a repeated schedule so you don't have to find time again. Put them in the form of classes, if social pressure helps. Yeah it's a job but if it gets your life back, isn't it worth it?

I'm 42, I'm finishing my game development degree, doing my ham radio license, and I was never so sharp as now in my life. Maybe as younger hacker, I could learn harder, but i used to have much less focus and waste much more time than now. Now I know myself, I know how I learn and what I want to learn. What works for me: I study always from 7 until 8:30. To be able to do that. I wake up 5:30, do my sports and then start to study. I'm blessed to have a wife and kids that just support me to be "weird" and hungry for learning and knowledge. I dropped as well my workload to be able to spend as much time as I can learning.

The sports bit might be the key. I think I need to start exercising daily - currently I only do once per week.

I do it every day. Even if you are feeling not so up to do sports, grab your phone, tune your favorite podcast and walk at least 30 minutes, following it by a stretch session. Something like that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_xrDAtykMI would be enough.

At 33 I’m feeling something similar. I wouldn’t say that new subjects are hard, necessarily, but they do take a type and quantity of mental energy that’s not always available, making for a sense of tiredness in these situations.

I could be wrong but I feel like this would improve a lot if I didn’t have to work a job for a while. The bulk of each day’s mental energy goes into writing code, which doesn’t leave much for other things.

If you've never done it, I strongly suggest finding a way to take at least two months with absolutely no agenda at some point.

Same age, same boat but I wonder about two independent factors: how my cumulative health decisions have depleted my energy reserves, and if being lower on the Dunning-Kruger curve had some distinct advantages earlier in life (i.e. I expect things to be harder now which adds an additional mental obstacle and fatigue). I also gave a shit about far less thus further freeing mental capital.

Then again, outside of sports, nothing in my youth was taxing (particularly not school). The only real mental investment I had to make was verbal sparing with friends, and video games.

It was easier to do math in my head but I had been doing it regularly for years (full stack web apps call for very little), and it was much easier to keep momentum on something like Tolstoy (could also be health related though).

What about you? Any specific things you think you could incontrovertibly do better in your youth that aren't likely confounded by other variables?

> how my cumulative health decisions have depleted my energy reserves

I wonder about this too. Goodness knows that sleeping for ~4 hours or pulling all-nighters, eating the cheapest things on the shelf, and not getting in much physical activity late in high school and through college weren't sound decisions and are likely to haunt me for the rest of my days.

> if being lower on the Dunning-Kruger curve had some distinct advantages earlier in life (i.e. I expect things to be harder now which adds an additional mental obstacle and fatigue)

This isn't that much of a problem for me. In fact when it turns out that things put up less resistance than expected it's kind of refreshing and helps pull me along. The trick is getting to that point in the first place.

> What about you? Any specific things you think you could incontrovertibly do better in your youth that aren't likely confounded by other variables?

Hard to answer, really. Maybe sitting down and getting lost in the process of doing something creative… it came extremely naturally to me in my teens and early 20s but there are so background processes associated with being a responsible somewhat functioning adult running in my head now that it's considerably more difficult. Probably fixed by removing the need for those background processes to run, but that's not exactly practical.

Dunning-Kruger (as you are using it) is a myth, though.

Are you referring to people often misapplying the concept, or its replicability issues (which I had admittedly come across before but don't hold in active memory)?

I'm confident I nailed the former (I thought I was better at things than I was in reality when I was younger, and am now more likely better than I think I am in those same domains today).

If you referring to the latter, it's tricky for me. It's like the famous two humped camel in programming aptitude. It seems to be useful in describing experiential observations but didn't (doesn't?) replicate. I've stopped using it at this point because I don't want to mislead people.

DK also has the appearance of explanatory power at a minimum, and utility in communicating the simple form of the concept. I don't like the replicability issue but wonder how bad the down side is if all I'm really saying is we aren't often humble enough about new things, and aren't confident enough about things we've dedicated time to?

Welp, that justification for promoting something potentially falsifiable surely isn't going to come back to bite me and expose my hypocrisy elsewhere...

That rings true for me as well. I think it's -because- there are areas that have had so much experience and focus and come so easily, that everything else feels hard by comparison. While I can identify with feeling too tired, I don't know if that's really different than when I was younger, it's just when I was younger I had nothing easier to fall back on to feel valuable.

There are concepts called crystallized intelligence (stuff you learned) and fluid intelligence ("working memory", ability to work with x number of data points). The latter is what drops with age.

The idea isn't that you aren't effective when you are old, just that you are slower.

Some studies showed a slower rate of decline in execs and people doing interesting/creative work, which implies that the "not doing anything new" is at least partially at fault.

There are three phases of learning: computational, associative, and automatic. When you are older you may be able to transition into the associative stage more quickly when you attempt to learn something.

I've always had a sneaking suspicion that the best folks I've worked with just ("just") had the breadth to immediately drop into an associative mode, and as I've gotten older and realized that I so very rarely actually encounter anything remotely new that I'm doing it now, too. Having grown into being on the other side of the table, recognizing that "yes I understand, yes this is the first time I've seen this, it's fine, go on" capability in myself is neat. (I try to be as delicate with it as my own mentors were.)

Yes agreed on peak emotional intelligence coming later (at least in my case).

I'm 51 and have never been happier nor more balanced in my life. I can't run as fast nor program as long into the night as I could a decade ago (or maybe I can but I know better now) but as far as my approach towards people and life in general I'm feel much advanced over my neurotic 900 mile an hour have to show everyone how smart I am younger years.

Of the "I wish I knew then what I know now" aspect, the emotional intelligence would be the one area I'd choose. The absolutely stupid and meaningless things that would set me off back then just make me embarrased/ashamed of that behavior now. I'm practically zen-like now compared to then, and I have a much better quality of life for it now. I would stew on things and not let things that bothered me go then, where now I actually laugh at things instead.

Yes, I observed that also. They are are faster physically and mentally (such as operating or discovering how things/software works) and a lot more logical (but not in depth). Simple recent example, doing trail making test (for fun) they were twice as fast while I was average.

http://apps.usd.edu/coglab/schieber/psyc423/pdf/IowaTrailMak...

This is why I wish system would allow for more young politicians and leaders, lower voting age of 16, and maximum voting age of average lifetime expectancy - 16.

My own political stances from back when I was 16 make me think that this may not be a great idea. I was logical, but also young and inexperienced, knew no other perspectives than my own and had yet to develop some more empathy. I was even completely unaware of some significant facts about myself, which also influenced my opinions. Also, I like to believe that I'm way less prone to manipulation and peer pressure now than I was back then. My mind may have been sharper, but that's not all that matters.

If started at 16 young people would be much better voters at 18 than current 18 year old voters are and so on. There are examples of uninformed voters at all age groups (voting across party lines is one example). Young people should have a chance to participate in our democracy and should be able to vote, if not in general, at least in municipal elections.

How so? How is being able to vote or not influencing people being informed or not? (which, by the way, is absolutely not what I was talking about in my previous comment)

Having voted before does not make you a better voter in the future. I don't think the fact that I had to wait with my first vote for almost full voting cycle longer because there were elections right before my 18th birthday that I couldn't take part in had influenced my political stances in any way.

I’m OK with this as long as we make 16 the age of adulthood. Otherwise it’s a bit hypocritical to say that a 16 year old is mature enough to vote but not mature enough to have a beer.

I think it makes sense for age of adulthood to be a graduated system for different perks at different ages.

If we ever make “K-16l” schooling free I suspect it will come about in tandem with increasing the perceived age of adulthood.

Meanwhile I do believe that 14-18 year olds should be provided far, far more agency than they currently are.

That is an interesting idea, but hard to implement in practice, to only allow mature enough people to vote. Being mature means different things to different people, but I suspect that even we we agreed on a definition we would find that a lot of adults would not qualify.

You could argue that an adult shouldn't be represented by someone they didn't have the ability to vote for or against. But in that case you would probably need to lower the voting age even more.

"and maximum voting age of average lifetime expectancy - 16"

- And maximum age of US public officials (especially presidents) set to a similar limit.

Should 16 year olds also be required to serve on juries?

Jury is selected and approved by layers and judge. Judge and lawyers are in much better position to select someone competent than age, especially at low and high extremes. Just like there are few 18 yo juror's there would be likely very few 16 yo ones.

Speaking of age, there's an interesting research that found: "that conviction rates increase by about 1 percentage point for each year increase in the average age of the jury pool"

The role played by judges and lawyers in selecting jurors varies a lot by jurisdiction and type of proceeding.

If 16 year olds are allowed to vote, they will wind up on juries.

Assuming jurors are selected randomly from the electorate, with exclusions only in very unusual instances, would you support 16 year olds being part of juries?

This is crystallized vs fluid intelligence in IQ terms. Your fluid intelligence (short term memory/spatial vizualiation/problem solving) starts going down around 25 and you crystallized intelligence (long term memory) starts going down around 60: https://oxfordre.com/economics/doc/10.1093/acrefore/97801906...

This kinda sounds like there's a marginal cost thing going on: you've made some kinds of problems much cheaper to solve, via experience. The things that those mental models don't apply to are then harder in comparison, even if they aren't actually harder in absolute terms than they would have been earlier on.