It's hard to say. I'd say any natural interest I had in science was ignored or actively suppressed by my family. I think it's no accident that I did not embrace computers until after I was a financially independent adult.
If my family had encouraged me and others like me earlier, the numbers of us surely would've been larger.
Yes. My obsession with computers, which did not start until after I met some super geeks after college, has COST me tens of thousands of dollars, more if you count rent for my lab and patents.
It has cost me thousands of hours of time when I could've been reading literature, networking, cooking, going to med school, or a hundred other things.
It has been worth every fucking penny and minute and the best joy and highlights of my life have been when I learned about a new idea or created a new algorithm.
We exist. There just aren't that many of us and we don't glamour blog.
What separates the young from the old? Knowledge, wisdom, of how the sausage is made. I suggest that you look around for some legit hackers in their late 60s and older, and get to know them.
Older OLD hackers I know are super optimistic, like to make things, and are always learning.
Optimism from this point on is your challenge. I challenge you to be optimistic and do something with your experience, even if it's a hobby on the weekends and evenings.
Even if you DO accomplish something amazing, you then have to figure out how to share it with people who can find it, promote it, or buy it. It's likely they will not understand the amazing thing you have done, and you'll be stuck for a week, a month, or a year.
If you accomplish some great work of genius, but no one can understand it, what then?
I would then engage her in a data science topic and ignore the guy.