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This piece seriously misrepresents Vonnegut's career just to make a dubious point.
Sure, Slaughterhouse Five was Vonnegut's big financial breakthrough, but by that time he was a very well-known writer with several classics, including Player Piano and Harrison Bergeron, and a Guggenheim Fellow, and made a decent living from writing full time. Not glamorous for sure, but in line with most very good writerd.
Far from demonstrating the author's thesis that "failure can ripen into art", his story is the story of a man that had no notable failures in writingy, who consistently produced great work, and continued to do so until he made it big.
He got the guggenheim fellowship in 1967 when he was 45, only a couple years after he had considered giving up.
I don't see how what you're saying is at odds with the author. At no point did they say Vonnegut was a failure before Slaughthouse Five. Only that he, like many others, didn't produce their opus until later in life. This isn't just limited to writing. There are examples in all fields if you look, both creative and commercial. This idea is definitely at odds with a lot of current SV rhetoric.
Well just a few years before the breakthrough, he was broke and considering giving up so not entirely misleading IMO.
I think you need some luck to have picked something early in life to be passionate about that will allow you too be great at something later on.
If you were unfortunate enough to be passionate about something physical like a sport or game, not much to look forward to
Also Kurt himself wrote he had always been trying to write about Dresden but failed to do, obviously until said novel. So this article is very spot on on that matter as well — maturity can achieve something that precociousness can’t. So your accusation is kinda missing the point.
As they say, youth is wasted on the young. Reaching my 40s, I feel I am, almost, at the end of the tutorial of life. Sure, if you dedicate yourself to something as soon as your brain is reaching maturity in early adulthood, you might be a master by the time you reach middle age.
But the common trajectory is that youth is not usually spent advancing the arts and sciences, but to learn the circus of society, its rules, its demands, to the point that we have the very real concept of midlife crisis when these individuals, after learning what the hell society wants from them, ask, “is that all? I got my degree, my job, my career, now what?”
Only after answering this question, in your late 30s or 40s, the road to self-realisation opens. I think rather the fact that we don’t see many Vonneguts is that the vast majority of people never make this step, and just continue to dance the monotonous rhythm of work and family, learned in their 20s, to their grave, without ever developing their full potential.
A lot of Carl Jung’s career as a therapist was dedicated to the topic of self-actualisation for middle-aged adults.
I'll mention the recent Second Act as an excellent survey of the phenomenon of the late bloomer: https://www.henry-oliver.co.uk/home.
A book surveying late bloomers does sound interesting.
However, this is packaged as a self help book, which probably sells more but doesn't interest me at all.
Richard Adams was 52 when he wrote Watership Down and surely there's more examples
JRR Tolkien was 38 when he started writing The Hobbit, which wouldn't get finished and published until he was in his mid 40s.
He wrote his science fiction novel "Cat's Cradle" before Slaughterhouse-Five, and I consider this novel to be his best. It is essentially an intelligent parody of the madness of scientists who are eager to make a breakthrough discovery but also completely blind to ethics, and who can even endanger the whole planet. This is a very relevant issue to this day.
There is an untold plethora of fabulous artists and creators whom go forth in obscurity because fame is akin to winning the lottery and only a sliver of a hair of an ant's elbow ever finds success. The stories we hear are typical of the famous (biased) survivors, but never those stuck hacking away through the brambles of anonymity.
I think the people who need to hear this message are not in their late 40s, but are in their 20s thinking that they have to do it now or they never will. I see a lot of ageism on X from people who are clearly young and inexperienced, but when you actually get into the real world and how things are done you see the vast majority of real success happens later in life once you've been around a couple times.
Experience, on the whole, really does get you further than cleverness, but good luck telling that to the inexperienced.
Something we definitely lose when we age is lack of judgement, and with it the ability to play and experiment. I miss that naïveté and over confidence from my twenties knowing I was allowed to screw up.
Teresa of Avila was 62 when she wrote the Interior Castle. Easily one of the most impactful books on my own life.
> Some traumas resist immediate rendering.
Maybe I'm too early to speak on this, since I haven't reached 47 yet ;) but so far, from having been around for a while and having seen people struggle through life, I'd say: All traumas resist immediate rendering.
Trauma overwhelms you and causes behaviors that are hard to break until you understand them. And getting to that understanding is difficult, because the behavior is mostly there to obscure that which is overwhelming, because, well, if it wasn't then the trauma would overwhelm you.
How many people I've seen who get stuck in cycles that never seem to break. But then again, most of these lives are far from over, so it's premature to add "most never will".
Good piece. There's still time.
I know there is ageism in tech and that people think they need to do x(thing) by y(age) but as a 51 year old: let your values drive you and don’t spend all your money. My 40s on have been the best in terms of freedom, learning and execution. Yes, I felt all the same pressures in my 20s and 30s so my words mean little, but I am far happier and more fulfilled the last 11 years of my values and the things that bring me joy driving me. And I’ve never been more productive- frankly, at 30, full of piss and vinegar, I didn’t know shit. And I had already started and exited an ISP and a software consultancy.
In general, young naive entrepreneurs are easier to exploit due to desperation in a sucker VC deal, and tax or school credits often subsidize youth labor costs in many places.
No tech bro or VC wants experienced people around telling younger versions of themselves what to avoid. =3
So it goes.
Craig Newmark was...checking Wikipedia...42, 45 at incorporation of craigslist.
I love seeing a Vonnegut writeup on HN. He’s my favorite author and his work had a major influence on me in my 20s. I guess we’ll see what I do when I’m old, whenever that is.
Unfortunately, this doesn't fully transfer over for math. The Fields Medal has an age limit on it for example, based on an ancient premise that old mathematicians can't make new incredible discoveries.
It's ridiculous though, I've seen some older mathematicians do some incredible work by themselves. Rare in my experience, but it happens.
> The Fields Medal has an age limit on it for example, based on an ancient premise that old mathematicians can't make new incredible discoveries.
No, it's like that because it was established to encourage young promising researchers. It should not have become the "supreme award" of mathematics. Fortunately, now we also have the Abel Prize.
The Fields Medal isn't the only achievement in math.
> based on an ancient premise that old mathematicians can't make new incredible discoveries.
Not true. The Fields Medal is an encouragement to do more work, not a reward for completion.
https://www.ams.org/notices/201501/rnoti-p15.pdf In fact, the strict age limit of forty was only codified at the 1966 Congress, although an informal criterion of youth preceded it. Fields’s remark that is often interpreted as favoring young medalists, that the prize should be “in recognition of work already done” but was “at the same time intended to be an encouragement for further achievement,” is associated with no claim about the age or career status of the recipient. Rather, the stipulation that the award should be given “not alone because of the outstanding character of the achievement but also with a view to encouraging further development along these lines,” was Fields’s suggestion for how “to avoid invidious comparisons” from partisans dissecting candidates’ existing work [18, pp. 173– 174]. What started with a worry about rivalrous national factions became an excuse to narrow the pool of candidates and eventually turned into a restrictive cutoff. It is yet another myth that Fields intended the medal only for the young.
I feel like there is powerful social conditioning in our society which prevents people who didn't succeed early from succeeding later. It's not about their work. At the end of the day, nobody can succeed in society without the stamp of approval from a bunch of elites. Like a big publisher, or a big social media influencer or a big media platform editor. Nowadays, it seems more than ever, that the elites all have to agree.
It creates situations where some young person may not be "allowed to succeed" due to their unconventional approach and this continues until they turn a certain age by which point those in power think "This person cannot be good because they're 45 and I never heard of them." The suppression becomes self-fulfilling because they were unconventional even though their approach later proved optimal and everyone may be doing it now. Not everyone on the frontline gets recognition.
Also, because a lot of successful people achieved success by a certain age, they tend to look for and help people who are like them. Someone who is 45 and not successful has a very different worldview than someone who became successful in their first venture at 18 years old.
Charlie Sheen was successful at age 20 in Platoon and has been a drug addict since.
John B. Goodenough filed his breakthrough lithium-ion battery patent at 58. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry at 97, the oldest Nobel laureate in history.
The lessons here are two-sided: First of all, don't write off experienced tech workers just because they don't have the spark of youth. Second of all, don't write yourself off just because you haven't had your breakthrough yet.
Except to be a president , for that your prime is 90 - 92
I think Cormac McCarthy also wrote very late in life.
He started writing young, but he was nearly 60 when he hit his first big breakthrough.
It may be true that youth confers certain physical and mental benefits, but I feel it's generally under-appreciated what a massive amount of value older people can still easily bring to society around them.
I grew up as a young 20-ish programmer in a FOSS community that had multiple people in their 60s and 70s act e.g. as module maintainers and similar, and you can be productive and matter and contribute to greater things for far longer than most people seem to assume.
The bottom line is perhaps more that "finding ways to apply yourself" and doing the right things is challenging at any age.
Agreed. The child prodigy is overvalued in popular perception. It is a subject of fascination precisely because it is uncommon. Most really great work is done by people with plenty of experience; it's just not that interesting when an experienced person does good work.
I remember an article on Slashdot (IIRC, can't find it now) that examined big discoveries in science and they found there are either child prodigies or old masters that make them. Prodigies make a big splash by their early twenties, and then you get people who don't make big contributions until after middle age.
Some solutions require an entirely new perspective while others require a lifetime's worth of information and experience to be properly collated I guess.
The ham radio community is basically kept alive by senior citizens and the 42 of us under 50.
> It may be true that youth confers certain [...] mental benefits
I think it would be better if HN didn't tell impressionable 20yo techbros things like this.
> massive amount of value older people can still easily bring to society around them.
This is generally recognized in many places, outside of techbro echo chambers.
> in a FOSS community that had multiple people in their 60s and 70s act e.g. as module maintainers and similar,
To your 20yo techbro, this sounds like damning with faint praise.
40 is the new 30s and life really starts after 50. Until then you’re spinning your wheels trying to pay back loans, raise kids, work, save, and not fall victim to vices.
Colonel Sanders started KFC in his 40s and didn’t come up with the signature recipe until he was 50. KFC as we know it didn’t exist until he was 65.
Truth is, most successful business owners start in their mid 40s or around 40.
I’ve seen this (“most successful businesses start in their 40s”) a couple times, but I always wonder if the people who start a successful business succeed in their 40s _because_ they’ve been trying since their 20s, and learned a bunch on the way. And if the secret isn’t some combination of business experience/connections/etc, then what is it about being 40+ that would make one intrinsically better at starting a business?
>40 is the new 30s and life really starts after 50.
If you're poor, yes. I don't mean this in a derogaroty way.
i was asking myself what is the point of succeeding if its so late in life. then i wondered what is the point of succeeding young? having a ten year period of not working when you otherwise would be? but business owners and other rich people work harder than most… so the only way to succeed is to not only succeed but make enough to stop working? i just dont understand what im chasing anymore. the only two clear objectives that i can identify are to avoid discomfort unless its deliberate discomfort and to become rich just to prove to myself that i can
Identity theft!!
The agism on this site is astounding and completely tolerated by the mods whereas stating negative facts about race or sex is disallowed.
Significant double standard.