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Remember: Kurt Vonnegut Was 47

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/p/remember-kurt-vonnegut-was-47
53•herbertl•1h ago

Comments

asimpletune•44m ago
I think Cormac McCarthy also wrote very late in life.
mattmaroon•24m ago
He started writing young, but he was nearly 60 when he hit his first big breakthrough.
sho_hn•35m ago
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.

magicnubs•30m ago
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.
isleyaardvark•11m ago
I don't think child prodigies as commonly known exist in computer programming. A child can learn concertos or even write concertos, but not the comparable version of a concerto in code.
chaiDrinker•14m ago
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.

morkalork•31m ago
Richard Adams was 52 when he wrote Watership Down and surely there's more examples
dexwiz•31m ago
Kurt Vonnegut was also a Nepo baby. His paternal family built much of turn of the century Indianapolis and his mother was from one of the richest families in the state.
jacquesm•25m ago
All the more impressive that he turned out the way he did.

"Vonnegut definitely had survived a lot. His once wealthy family was impoverished by the Great Depression, causing grim strains in his parents' marriage. His mother committed suicide. His beloved sister died of breast cancer, a day after her husband was killed in a train accident. But the defining horror of Vonnegut's life was his wartime experience and surviving the Dresden bombing, only to be sent into the ruins as prison labour in order to collect and burn the corpses."

From: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/03/kurt-vonnegut-...

Not exactly a life made in a bed of roses, to put it mildly. I realize he's not perfect, but then again, neither am I and probably neither are you, shooting your arrows from behind comfy anonymity.

SpicyUme•15m ago
I enjoyed reading the Brothers Vonnegut about Kurt and his brother and the time they both spent working for GE in 40s. His brother worked on cloud seeding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Vonnegut
scrumper•17m ago
Irrelevant even if true, which it isn’t, so you’re both mean-spirited and wrong. Does this kind of comment soothe some wound?

Your characterization doesn’t make any sense anyway. A nepo baby how? He wasn’t in the construction business, working a cushy job in dad’s company. He sold cars and did PR work while trying to write. His family’s past seems to have conferred him no advantage whatsoever.

ruricolist•29m ago
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.
edbaskerville•26m ago
Craig Newmark was...checking Wikipedia...42, 45 at incorporation of craigslist.
Fwirt•21m ago
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.

stevenfoster•19m ago
Teresa of Avila was 62 when she wrote the Interior Castle. Easily one of the most impactful books on my own life.
saithound•16m ago
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.

reactordev•13m ago
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.

pinkmuffinere•2m ago
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?
fortyseven•1m ago
Identity theft!!

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