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Comment by zulux | Hacker News Reader

Sort of confirm: I'm older, and my mind is fine, I just don't care as much anymore. I'm comfortably numb as the song goes.

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What do you think caused you to stop caring as much? I’ve been becoming more aware of my finitude recently for a variety of reasons relating to middle-age and having kids. A side effect of that is definitely caring less about lots of things in order to focus on others. But I have an internal battle going on with the part of me that says I should still be ambitious and make a dent in the world.

For me at least you hit exactly on it - shifting priorities. I never imagined how quickly life flies by, and it only seems to move even faster as we grow more grey, so my interest has become more on my children and basically turning them into 'little mes', but ideally even better. Then they can have their go at the same game with some better guidance.

Everything we personally do will mostly be forgotten in short order in basically all cases. Even the exceptions do little more than stretch out the timeline by a bit. Jeff Bezos of tomorrow will be the John Astor of today; many, if not most, young developers have never even heard of John Carmack. The only real legacy we can ever truly have is our children, because they will be the humanity of tomorrow.

I can't pinpoint it, but I'm increasingly aware that I only have limited time and I'm starting to think that sitting by a stream watching the birds is more important than working to make my company 2% bigger.

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