Gaztop, I can so relate to your story. I'm 53 and finally decided a couple years ago to grow up and ditch the drink and smoke too. Not into social medial much myself either. I'd always played around with flight sims over the years, but never got serious.
My first fascination was with Sublogic in 1984. Ran it on a Commadore 64 in college. Frame rate probably in the single digits with 8 bit color and forever to load what you had to use your imagination to call - scenery - from a 1541 floppy drive. Anyway... now I'm looking, like you, to get back into it - to learn. You're absolutely right - there's a lot to it, and never too old. Get good at it, do it right and it'll be the thing to keep you young!
The realism that can be achieved with today's hardware and software - incredible! Now to decide which sim to invest time and (likely) money into. I still have "boxed" DVD versions of FSX and XP9 and after trying both, decided to download XP11. Haven't installed add-ons for either yet, but am really enjoying just flying basic traffic patterns in the Cessna in XP at different airports. I need to look at FSX again and then decide which sim it's gonna be.
Anyway - again, never too young! Keep on flying and keep 'er out of the trees!
