Thanks for writing and sharing that! I think I generally come to a similar conclusion. One additional thought on my mind is that the consequence for failure for a kid can be low to nil. But as an adult I’m more risk averse: I don’t want to fail to ship a project and possibly be fired, so I lean towards approaches whose process and outcome I can already envision.

I also have so few free hours that my main concern is, “am I about to waste the 8 hours of hobby time I have this week?” I have this problem in video games too: I don’t want to build a character that might suck. I can’t afford to play this game twice, unlike when I was younger.

I think there’s definitely some level of truth to this fearlessness the “ignorant” have. I mentor a high school robotics team and they prototype things so fast. I think that’s also because the stakes are so low: it’s only thousands of dollars. Nobody is being fired. The competition is for fun.

So in a way, maybe it’s just a rose tinted look at younger people. Maybe they’re more fearless than us not because we lost that trait, but because we gained many more constraints.