For those who DID think "I wonder what my 'when I was a kid' will be about when I'm old" what kind of things did you guess it'd be and what did it actually end up being?

I'm only in my 30s but I was thinking recently "when I'm retired I feel like I'm going to be telling stories about how back in my day we had this thing called the filesystem and you'd just browse it directly..."

Always assumed I would, but I thought it was that the youngsters would be running circles around me (in this domain) the way I ran circles around the olds when I was a kid.

What happened is that as an Xennial (young genX / old millennial) I know way more about computers than either generation to the side of me. This includes younger devs. I knew way more than them when I was their age. As a teen I was hacking C to get my 386 with Slackware Linux that I installed from floppies online by modding SLIRP to run on the sun3 I had dial up access to so I could pipe serial SLIP through it. Learned all about everything happening under the hood on a network.

I don’t feel self congratulatory about this. I feel depressed. If the kids were all smarter than me it would give me more hope for the future.

Man, just this week I had a moment like this that killed me. I had just woken my tweenager up for school and realized I’d turned into the kind of asshole who comes into your room in a good mood at 6 am. Stood in the shower and came to terms with that, but it took a while.