The end of my childhood

One of my most striking memories from my last two years was speaking at hackathons, visiting hacker houses, and doing Zuzalu
 in Montenegro, and seeing people a full decade younger than myself taking on leading roles, as organizers or as developers, in all kinds of projects: crypto auditing, Ethereum layer 2 scaling, synthetic biology and more. One of the memes of the core organizing team at Zuzalu was the 21-year-old Nicole Sun
, and a year earlier she had invited me to visit a hacker house in South Korea: a ~30-person gathering where, for the first time that I can recall, I was by a significant margin the oldest person in the room.
When I was as old as those hacker house residents are now, I remember lots of people lavishing me with praise for being one of these fancy young wunderkinds transforming the world like Zuckerberg and so on. I winced at this somewhat, both because I did not enjoy that kind of attention and because I did not understand why people had to translate "wonder kid" into German when it works perfectly fine in English. But watching all of these people go further than I did, younger than I did, made me clearly realize that if that was ever my role, it is no longer. I am now in some different kind of role, and it is time for the next generation to take up the mantle that used to be mine.