I'm 40, started working as a programmer only about 10 years ago, so I definitely have more lost opportunities that you. But I don't care. I manage to make a good living, enjoy what I do and get the appreciation of my clients for the work I do, and that's what I wanted when I went my own way. I can understand though, and I think part of the problem is actually HN. When I started reading it I was suddenly informed of many new (to me, at least) programming languages and other technologies. I felt behind and thought I needed to learn, or at least understand, them all, but I didn't have the time -- I had much work to do during the day, and then no will power to learn anything new in the evenings after I had finished working for the day. So then I felt guilty about it -- how do other people manage to both work and learn all those things at once? I don't know. I just stopped feeling bad about it since (as stated above) I make a good living, enjoy myself doing this and get appreciated for my work, and that's what important to me.

There are two things that I do that might help you though:

1. I only read NH when I'm not working (i.e. mornings or evenings). That means I can focus on my work rather than get involved with something else.

2. When I read about a new exciting technology, unless it's relevant to what I am working on at the moment, I bookmark the page, in case it becomes relevant in the future. In the process I realised a lot of it is trends. People on HN get excited about something and a year later they're excited about something new, and then the old gets criticised. So basically, I saved myself a few hours learning something that wasn't so important to know after all.

Edit: formatting