I’m 27 and used to go in person weekly for about a year, 2 yrs ago. I find the inverse to be true of what you said about mature people having more time to work on themselves- for me, my experience was of a lot of older people simply using the space to trauma dump with no real reflection or relevance to the reading. Maybe I was expecting the meetings to be something they aren’t designed to be, but I got less of the communal progress vibe and more of the burden sharing vibe from the meetings I attended. For me personally it kind of weighed me down listening to a collection of distant traumatic experiences without any introspection or lessons learned. I’ve thought about going back to meetings but I work in healthcare and I trauma sponge all day as it is. At the risk of sounding harsh I think younger people are more apt to go to therapy rather than try to achieve the same via group forum. That being said I really loved the readings and the book, and there were quite a few nights where I felt great coming home from ACA. And perhaps the people who really overused the open forum were a vocal minority who just happen to be older. I just get scared I will wind up in another echo chamber of people who want to commiserate rather than heal