The pace of change is faster than the average person can keep up with each change, but because more and more new technologies and niches are being created, there are more and more opportunities to be competent in a certain niche.

It's also so much about your mindset. Seeing the difference in positive and negative mindset between you and the comment root is eye opening. When you think everything is "useless historical trivia" and is "depressing", of course anything you try to learn will be useless, tiring and depressing.

One of the things I'm trying to really improve in my own personal life is my mindset. I have/had a mindset similar to yours (I'm much younger too) and I've noticed how draining it is to my overall mental health. I'm trying to be more optimistic and positive about things. Life is too short to be depressed and upset about something you spend 1/3 of your waking hours doing.

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.

I'd say the answer is to move up the career ladder. Let the new people learn the new framework, your value add is you know the types of mistakes people make when working in a new framework (programmer mistakes and manager/planing mistakes), and with your support the younger team members will be 10x as productive. Your steady hand gets the project delivered on time/budget despite the massive underestimation of technology risk.

And you can do this w/o moving into management.

The question is what do you want to do? What's important to you? All knowledge will be obsolete or obvious. The question is what do you want out of life?

I'm blessed to be doing fun stuff with amazing people. Definitely grateful for this amazing life even though it's short. We're all going to be dead much longer than we're going to be alive. Think about what is important to you and go after it.

Is that so bad? I expect the more important thing are the results that the learning allowed you to render. If the knowledge has a half-life but you contributed to or built something meaningful that endures, isn't that what matters? The knowledge and skills are like the scaffolding that allow you to arrive at a certain height or build something of value. And at the end they can be taken away and you're left with the fruits.

Unless, of course, your intention is to have knowledge that you can pass on to future generations via writing/training.

Me too friend... It's also quite exhausting to see things change so much when the overall results and methods are mostly just ways of doing the same things that were done before (Since Ajax) and they're also becoming more complex than the methods used before to implement with no major added value and just an alternate set of unresolved issues to work around.

For new gigs, frequently get vague job descriptions which at the end of the day mean that I'm pretty much boing everything by myself and reporting to 3-4 useless managers that know buzz words, but don't know tech at all.

I've pretty much had enough, if we weren't stuck in a pandemic currently I'd be on a beach somewhere exotic, but at least I moved out of the expensive & stressful city work hustle.

I’m a mechanical engineer by training and my “knowledge” is as concrete as it could get besides something like physics or pure mathematics. In theory I can design and create wonderful things in the physical world instead of random API’s on a server somewhere. Does it matter? Not one bit!

Useless historical trivia like why we used x tech stack or why that engine sounds a little funny at 3250rpm are what provided value at the time, but times change and that’s okay.

I suspect no matter what career we pursued there would always be some part of it that seem frivolous to us.

I hold great hope that one day I'll be able to spend 5-10 hours a week learning.