You feel obsolete as younger talent rises

Come, let us take the long view, as one who has watched much rise and pass. You staked your identity on being current, which nothing can remain — everything current becomes past in its time, the plain nature of things, so if you built your self on being at the front of a moving field you built on a wave, and waves pass; the young rise as you once rose and will themselves be passed, and to grieve this is to be astonished that a river flows. What is passing is your currency, not your worth — the particular tools you mastered are ageing, true, but do not confuse them with what that mastery built in you: judgment, pattern-sense, the understanding of how things and people actually work, which the newest tool does not confer and the young have not yet earned; your currency dates, your wisdom compounds, and the two are easy to fuse. And trade the front of the wave for the depth beneath it — let the young have the front, which was always theirs, and take the deeper water where experience compounds instead of dating, the judgment that guides, the perspective that steadies, the mentoring of those who rise; one can be made obsolete only by insisting on competing where the young will always win. What has your experience taught you that no new tool confers?