Very relatable, at 39. I was one of those with a very precocious career path; chief sysadmin of an ISP at 19, senior software engineer making as much as my dad (a full professor) at 21. It seemed like I practically doubled my income with every job-hop, of which there were half a dozen or so within 3.5 years, between the ages of 18 and 22 (in the 2000s, long before that was cool, or even particularly acceptable).

While this is not the stuff of world-class legend, in terms of the range of sensations of overall grandiosity, pomp and circumstance I had felt in my own life prior to that point, this was all, at the time, very electric; my "meteorically ascendant" tech career was intoxicating.

Two realisations, only with the benefit of hindsight, were humbling:

1) At 30+, I was taken more seriously, but at the cost of shedding the social capital of a wunderkind. By this point, nobody was really shocked that I had deep domain expertise in some area, nor marketable skills. It was just table stakes now, and has been ever since. This means that peers who had also advanced in their career were now catching up, and the cachet of being that far ahead of the pack was long gone.

In purely relative terms, this can feel like stagnation or even backsliding, if your ego is calibrated to the presumption of always running circles around your peers. Tragic, I know, but I built a big part of my ego-protection forcefield around the idea that I was gainfully doing recondite things nobody understands while everyone else is flipping burgers and getting plastered--revenge of the nerds and all that. Everyone needs a healthy ego, but when the snooty argument underpinning yours evaporates, it can force a tumultuous confrontation with the fact that you're not, actually, all that special.

2) With how much I got patted on the head and told I was so, so brilliant in my late teens and early 20s, it was easy to overdraw this praise and improperly extrapolate it to other areas of life, and to believe oneself to be precociously brilliant in everything else, too. I bought a condo at age 21 (which ultimately contributed to financial ruin later in life, as it never came close to recovering its bubble-era valuation) because I was a savvy investor and a clever Economic Man, and I was absolutely sure I knew where I wanted to live and what I wanted from my life (and from my partner of the time), because I knew everything.

Nope, outside of my "wunderkind" sphere, I was mostly just an early-20s dumbass like the others--though I would have been aghast at the suggestion. I made some terrible financial and life decisions from time to time, as you might expect from someone whose prefrontal cortex hadn't fully baked. The difference is that most early-20s dumbasses are somehow means-limited from digging themselves too deep a hole, whereas I was a very well-paid kidult, and did not face this constraint. Some of the consequences linger to this day.

This never seemed a problem at the time; I was young, and in some stratum of my unconscious, sure I had time to clean up my act, get straight with Jesus, etc. But one day, you wake up, and the accumulated weight finally tips over some limit and crashes down on you like a ton of bricks, suddenly and all at once.

Among other brilliant decisions, a month after I turned 22, I was fired from my last job and became self-employed, at the bottom of the recession, and took on my ex-employer as my first customer (and 17 years later, they remain). I thought I was a pretty big deal, having graduated beyond mere, pedestrian employment. Hell, even the guys who just fired me wanted to do business. It would take years to realise that, while I had opened up a lot of flexibility and opportunities for myself in some areas, I had fatefully painted myself into a grim corner in others, and on balance, it's all a bit of a wash at best.

Notwithstanding all this, the bit about the shrinking margin for error resonates strongly. I've got myself killed eight times and I'm all out of lives. I've got a partner, a child, and serious economic burdens which cannot be waved away or whimsically discarded, while I've simultaneously got less energy, unavoidably less flexibility as one gets more set in his ways with age, and am just objectively more tired and can't pull heroics like I used to.

To those who balk at the cocktail of gloom of gloom in the article, I don't read it that way. The maturity and wisdom of getting older is, in my experience, to a very large extent understanding limits, that not everything is possible, that not all problems have solutions, and there's no time to do all the things. This may curtail the energy of youthful naiveté that occasionally gets things done that were hitherto deemed impossible and fantastical, but 19 times out of 20, the acute awareness of trade-offs leads to more realistic and achievable goals. There's something to be said for achievable goals.