> The pace of change is faster than the average person can keep up with and still be competent.
I'm only 35, but until now I feel the opposite is true.
I've started to learn C, HTML, CSS, Javascript when I was a teenager more than 20 years ago. The knowledge and skills I learned then are still as relevant today as they were then.
Sure, there's flexbox now instead of tables, but the basic idea of HTML vs CSS vs Javascript is still the same, I can still make a basic website for a project in a few hours. Vertically centering something on the screen is still harder than it should be.
C now lets me declare variables anywhere, and there's a nicer syntax for initialising structs, but pointers work the same as they did 20 years ago. Knowing C is still as useful today as it was then.
My main focus for some years has been Mac desktop development. While a lot of new things was introduced in the last decade, it has all been mostly incremental changes, and even if you skipped a few years of progress catching up isn't that hard.
It helps to be aware of some general trends. I've read about async/await years ago when it was introduced in C# I think? and now it's coming in Swift. Sure, it's a slightly different way of thinking about concurrency, but one or two new concepts every 5 years should be doable.
Also, you don't need to learn everything. For example, the whole Reactive / Flux technologies with event sources and subscribers sounded really interesting, but I never really was able to get into them (you can probably tell by the fact that this paragraph makes no sense), and I'm doing just fine.