I remind my kids on a regular basis we are multiple people in the same person. Who I was at 20 is a different person than 30, and 40, and 50 and so on. Yet each of these personalities shaped by experience are physically the same person. My name hasn't changed; my identity is static. However, during each of these phases the human brain goes through a transformation and generates another person. Sometimes the shift is muted; sometimes it can be dramatic. It also affects how we perform mentally, interact with others and our outlook on life going forward.

Education, for example, has been a long adventure for me. When I was young, I hated it. The idea of sitting in school learning boring stuff that didn't seem to readily apply to anything I was doing or wanted to do was a waste in my book. I had to do it to get a job once I grew up, but that was about the extent of the visible value. However, once I hit my 30s, and skill-retraining really began to become a need, education suddenly had a very real value. I saw it as a gateway to opening new career doors and opportunities. And then I started to love education for what it was, just the idea of learning something new and feeling alive again being challenged. 

Unfortunately, my brain in my mid-50s has changed again. Thankfully, it happened right at the tail end of my last education venture, allowing me to finish my computer science degree in programming. That said, I'm not in the mindset anymore to masochistically suffer through self-induced labs, endless lectures, memory tests via quizzes or the stress of big, semester-end projects. I'm accepting I'm done with formalized learning per se. Now my big thing is physically building things. I have to exploding urge to tinker with tools, take things apart, and build new things. PCs make that easy for me, but I keep graduating to the next level of electronics. Now I'm playing with building networks, and I'm fancying the idea of basic robotics while also getting into serious home repair as well (i.e. electrical, plumbing, interior renovation). I was always good with tools, being able to handle engine rebuilds, but now I want to venture into other stuff too. Yet I'm still the same person per se.

Fortunately, my brain this time gave me a bit of a warning. I could tell over 2025 my motivation to get things done with online learning and classes was waning hard. I didn't have the heart to keep going much longer, and I was recognizing it for what it was. Sure, maybe I needed a break having been on a long burn earning skills and degrees; but, I also knew I was pretty much done learning what I wanted to learn.

Writing took a similar hit too; I've been on a bit of a soft hiatus from hard writing since mid-2024. Prior to that I put out an average 10,000 documents a year on the side beyond my regular day job with writing per year. It was also a dramatic downshift. AI was to blame for much of that, wiping out the freelance writing industry as I knew it, but I was also tired of the grind. Now, I write when something hits me like a bit of a muse, like the topic for this article that sparked with my morning coffee. 

We can fight what we become over time, or accept it and make the most of a new situation. I'm resigned to the second category. I've had my years of stress. I realistically have 30 or 40 years of life left, and I don't want to waste them on endless slogs anymore. A few decades doesn't seem like such a long time anymore, and I'm still likely to change into a few more versions of myself over that time too. So, up with the tool box and to bed with the academia. Life moves on.