My father's recent passing made me "the old generation" at my new, younger company. Reflecting on maturation since my 20s, three insights stand out.

First, understand your incentive structures and don't believe everything you think. Like Oppenheimer's guilt over the nuclear bomb, I once agonized over 0day exploits—whether to fix or use them. But history largely routes around individuals; anxiety about impact is often self-flattering ego. The key skill: ask "how might I be the villain?" and practice meta-cognition.

Second, monocausal determinism is an illusion. Computing machines are physical—subject to wear, temperature, bit flips—and the real world is probabilistic and multicausal. The scientific method intentionally biases against false positives, meaning many true things will never be scientifically proven.

Third, the reason-emotion dichotomy is a Western cultural construct, not neuroscience. Emotional valuation is integral to decision-making; your gut has as many neurons as a dog's cortex. Eliminating emotions removes information and worsens decisions. Integration, not suppression, is wisdom.