My brother is a commercial pilot. Just left republic for a new job at Atlas where he'll be flying cargo 747's across the globe and he's only 29.
If you want to seriously get started in aviation, you needed to start about 15 years ago. He has his pilot license before his drivers license. He spent days and days on flight sim with live ATC plugin, simulating flights, learning to talk to ATC, etc. Then he got his bachelors in aviation, started doing private lessons for people, got into commercial...
But if you just want to fly planes for the fun of it, its pretty easy to start, just takes a lot of money.