Hmm, interesting. I'm 39 and used to have amazing flow sessions in late 20s and early 30s but not seeing them much anymore. I can't tell if it's because of stresses of life or simply because I don't have enough time (with 3 young kids) to allow myself to fall into a state of flow. I really hope it's not stresses or my brain changing because I really valued those periods of focus.
Have you tried going back to the theory of Flow, and the conditions for it to happen, and compare&contrast your current situation with earlier ones?
I suppose that the differences might be subtle. For one example, for the condition that you have a sense of doing a good job, your metric for good job might have changed: it might no longer be simply make an algorithm to do X, but include larger context, including the reason X is being done.
BTW, keeping in mind that techbro ageism is a thing, especially in YC-type circles (that's how YC started), I suppose that HN comments by over-30 people can be fodder for confirmation bias by 20yos.
I don't think it's time, it's priorities; your work is, naturally, a lower priority (both in terms of your focus and your actual time) than your kids, spouse (if any) and yourself. Whereas in the Before Times, it was just you and your keyboard.
Having family as priority compared to work is more than fine, it makes you (potentially, not necessarily) a good human being, a good parent or husband. This world needs that 10'000x more than another code ninja optimizing some corporation by nanofraction of a percentile.
The opposite is extremely valid too (to not leave any room for misunderstanding - folks prioritizing work over their kids are shitbags, no exception, and every single one I've met in their later years deeply regret that... apart from outright sociopaths and similar careless crowd).
Focus on career if thats your calling and spent whole live in it if you want, but then please don't have kids. Every kid with missing/bad father figure I've ever met later in their lives was a mess in one of myriad ways, endlessly compensating for this and never actually coming over it, permanently. If you know what to look for, you can start seeing it around you quite easily. It breaks my heart a little every time I see it. These folks often repeat same mistakes of their parents too.
One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that my difficultly in getting into a flow state is more often than not because of a subconscious hang-up about the approach that I haven’t articulated yet.
I’ve learned to recognize and lean into this, and actively look for what’s bothering me about a design. Usually while doing other things.
Sometimes I have to detangle a bunch of loosely related spaghetti code in my head for long enough to fully grok it and relate it to the business context. And then bring it all back together as one cohesive unit of work. In the end the code is easier to understand and maintain than if I layered on more spaghetti code and called it a day. I've done that too and months later not understood my own code.
Late 30's no kids, no stresses beyond the threat layoffs and still being single.
I recently tried playing some video games adjacent to ones I've loved before, and I found it really hard to get into them. The games are Red Dead Redemption and SimCity 4, so the graphics and gameplay mechanics are ok. It's just been hard to really get into them.
The same for me. I still sometimes find games that I can really get into, but it's much harder than it was 10-20 years ago. I think part of that is because I've played so many games that many new games just feel like the same old again and again. The other reason is, of course, that the general inability to concentrate hard on stuff makes it so much more difficult to immerse myself into the game world.
Some exceptions in the past few years have been Zelda: breath of the wild and GTA V (yes, I know both of them are a bit older, but I only played them relatively recently).
Same here. There is one game though that for some reason I've replayed over and over through the years.
I played the original way back of course. Probably once. Settlers 2.
I had to look it up but apparently the "Settlers 2: 10th anniversary edition" came out in 2006. I don't even remember the original graphics and I'm so used to the 10th anniversary edition look. But once every year or two I delete my profile and play the campaign again over a week or two. It's the only game I've come back to again and again so often. Even with kids in the mix.
Try Cities Skylines. The newer SimCity games really botched it and Cities Skylines came along and ate their lunch. It's a fantastic game with a vibrant modding scene
I find that my taste for games and tv reflects what is missing in my life. If your life is relatively peaceful, maybe you would enjoy more action-oriented games like FPS?
No kids here, but similar in that I remember sessions of long focus, and being able to do them repeatedly, for multiple days in a row. I typically can't do that as much now. Perhaps more to the point, I can't do them on demand. I do still have periods of 'focused flow', and they're great, but they just 'happen'. But... I never could just turn them on/off in the past either - they just happened far more frequently.
I predict you'll have more, just not as frequently as you used to. :)
FWIW, many of the things I used to have to spend long periods of focus on are now simple/common libraries that just didn't exist 30 years ago. Or, if they existed, there wasn't any convenient way of discovering them. So I find my productivity is still comparatively high, even with fewer number of flow states.
When I code, there's always so much stuff I don't know that I have to look up or so many big design/refactoring questions that I'm discovering in real time and have to grapple with. It's as flowy as your car getting stuck in the mud every 2 miles and having to get out and push. It's as productive as having a bipartisan Congressional hearing on the best posture to use every time you have to push it out of the mud. Incrementalism and time management are my friends cuz it's exhausting to do that for too long without breaks!
Nevertheless, programming remains my favorite professional and hobbyist activity.
