At first, you are voluntarily exploiting the good opportunity because… well, because the rewards are good. You get lots of money and/or respect. And you can keep getting it, if you continue this line of work.
Then the hedonistic treadmill makes you less happy again, but the work continues consuming your time.
Even worse, the situation may be unsustainable, because your existing skills may become obsolete, and you have no time to get new ones.
One option is to wait until the bitter end, or rather until the moment the skill is still profitable but only a little, so the opportunity cost of learning a new skill is now sufficiently low. How exactly this works out depends on the shape of the skill profitability curve. (I heard that people coding in Cobol still make lots of money, despite the shrinking market for their skill, because the supply of their skill shrinks even faster.)
Second option is to predict this moment, and decide to jump ship in advance. You give up the tail of the old curve, but you get to ride the peak of the new one. There is a certain risk involved: you know how good you are at the old skill, but you can only guess how good you will be at the new one.
Third option is to resist the pressure and decide that no matter what happens, you will keep spending e.g. 10% of your time learning and practicing new things (specifically: new things unrelated to your currently most profitable skill; as opposed to deepening the skill or learning adjacent skills). Note: I didn’t put this option last to suggest that it is the best one. It really depends. In case of the Cobol developer who is five years away from retirement, spending 10% of time learning unrelated technologies is probably a waste of time. Also, it depends on what is intrinsically interesting for you: maybe you still enjoy the old skill only not as much as before, or maybe it turned into a chore and you hate it but you need the money.
In some sense, this is a paradox of (Pareto-) optimal behavior. If you frame it as “this is the best you could do” it sounds great, but if you frame it as “any change will only make things worse” it sounds ominous. Yet it is the same thing.
Am I being exploited by other pressures, or am I the one exploiting a single (good) opportunity to the cost of my slack?
At first, you are voluntarily exploiting the good opportunity because… well, because the rewards are good. You get lots of money and/or respect. And you can keep getting it, if you continue this line of work.
Then the hedonistic treadmill makes you less happy again, but the work continues consuming your time.
Even worse, the situation may be unsustainable, because your existing skills may become obsolete, and you have no time to get new ones.
One option is to wait until the bitter end, or rather until the moment the skill is still profitable but only a little, so the opportunity cost of learning a new skill is now sufficiently low. How exactly this works out depends on the shape of the skill profitability curve. (I heard that people coding in Cobol still make lots of money, despite the shrinking market for their skill, because the supply of their skill shrinks even faster.)
Second option is to predict this moment, and decide to jump ship in advance. You give up the tail of the old curve, but you get to ride the peak of the new one. There is a certain risk involved: you know how good you are at the old skill, but you can only guess how good you will be at the new one.
Third option is to resist the pressure and decide that no matter what happens, you will keep spending e.g. 10% of your time learning and practicing new things (specifically: new things unrelated to your currently most profitable skill; as opposed to deepening the skill or learning adjacent skills). Note: I didn’t put this option last to suggest that it is the best one. It really depends. In case of the Cobol developer who is five years away from retirement, spending 10% of time learning unrelated technologies is probably a waste of time. Also, it depends on what is intrinsically interesting for you: maybe you still enjoy the old skill only not as much as before, or maybe it turned into a chore and you hate it but you need the money.
In some sense, this is a paradox of (Pareto-) optimal behavior. If you frame it as “this is the best you could do” it sounds great, but if you frame it as “any change will only make things worse” it sounds ominous. Yet it is the same thing.
I read it as the latter.