When do you lose your enthusiasm?

Some people, like my grandmother, will never be scared of new things. She has a hyper-complex setup that copies files through about eighteen computers to backup her laptop on an external HDD every night.

Why doesn’t she connect the HDD to the laptop? I don’t know, but the point is she’s not scared of things that, thirty years ago, belonged in The Illusionist.

Fred Wilson talked about this earlier today: the fear of change. Right now I’m in the young-twenties sweet spot, working for the Blog Business Summit, which is possibly the newest, most nebulous, and coolest place to be. If they came up with self-zipping zippers tomorrow, I’d go out and buy a bazillion of them so I’d never be embarrassed coming out of the bathroom again. See? No fear.

I hope I’m able to keep that enthusiasm going forever. I worry that in about twenty years I’ll realize that being crotchety is so much easier, because it allows me to be lazy and morally superior at the same time. But that dramatically reduces my cool factor. And when I’m 800 years old, I want to be cool.