The loneliness as all of your loved ones die and your friends disappear.
As a kid I wanted to live forever. As an adult I understand how that would be endless torchure.
I lay here in an empty bed. This time last year I had a wife, 3 cats and a dog. Its been a brutal year to say the least.
I’ve lost my dad, my brother, and most recently lost a good friend. I’m only 31, so I know what you mean. These have all been extremely painful and difficult to live through, but fuck, I can’t imagine losing my life partner.
I’m really sorry for your loss. Life really does take some of us for a ride. Hope you manage to find some peace and happiness eventually.
Being excluded from culture when you feel like the same person you always were. At some point in your life, every TV commercial, every new service, every trending product will be aimed right at you. And then you’ll age out of the marketer’s target bracket, and suddenly the party is over and you might as well be dead.
It doesn’t sound like a big deal because all that stuff is bullshit anyway, except our entire human culture has been replaced with a synthetic one, and everyone embedded in it takes the cue and treats you the same.
On the bright side, the grocery store music has started playing bangers these days.
I’m old enough to be experiencing this, but I actually like it like this. I had zero desire to own a Labubu when they came out recognizing it as just that generation’s flash-in-the-pan fad like beanie babies was for my generation.
So many online services are sold for things I do not care about so I have zero to manage on those.
I’m not seduced to buy the “latest slightly incremental increase in performance” item for 99% of products out there because I have something that does the job for me already.
Some of today’s pop music styles I don’t like, but there’s thousands of hours of music I do like (including a chunk of new stuff) so I’m not put out.
Its actually kind of great to be immune to so much of the advertising thats out there today because you simply don’t want what they’re selling because they’re targeting the younger generation.
People who push 100 must feel like they’re living on a totally different planet than the one they were born on.
I’m not even close to that old and I have trouble understanding GenZ conversation in public sometimes.
It’s already weird for me to think about what home interiors and cars used to look like when I was a kid. Those are totally different now.
Pain.
You no longer don’t feel pain. You just manage it.
How old? I am rapidly nearing 60 and have considerably less pain than when younger because the migraines have nearly vanished and I do yoga instead of running. No chronic pain yet.
Perhaps having negative expectations helped as well, I was sure by now I’d have osteoporosis from early eating disorder, pain in joints from years of ballet, none of these shoes have dropped yet. I do feel weaker than my 40s which were my peak but not weaker than my 30s. And so, so much less pain with fewer migraines.
Yeah.
It seems like an obvious answer, but pain is it. It’s not like I didn’t know old people experienced body pain when I was younger, it just isn’t something you really have to think more deeply about. Once you actually get to the point where you’ve got one or more chronic injuries and you stop remembering what it’s like to have a “normal” day, then you realize how little you had to take it into account when you were younger and how little you understood what it was really like.
And beyond the physical pain, it’s just a huge bummer. You constantly have to manage medications, you have to constantly be careful not to do something to make it worse, you have to cancel weekend plans if things go south or stop doing certain things altogether.
Being in constant pain literally changes your personality. You get angrier. More depressed. You lash out at those closest to you.
That was what I was going to comment. If you don’t stay JUST AS ACTIVE as you did when you were younger, you just ache. Getting up wrong is a thing. Sitting wrong is a thing. Existing can cause pain.
It’s weird and miserable. Luckily there’s distractions enough.
YUP! Oh, you want to do an activity, any activity, you enjoy? Look forward to two-to-six weeks of a random body part being in pain from it.
I’m jumping on this to say that there’s a good amount of this pain that you can preemptively avoid by taking care of yourself while you’re younger.
Not everything. As you get older your body is stepping closer to the end of its lifespan. But if you don’t manage your fat/muscles/tendons/etc, you shouldn’t be as surprised when you suddenly find yourselves with bad knees that hurt if you ever try to get active again (that’s me!).
If you’re young: plan.
If you’re old: don’t give up. Just try your best to get as much quality of life back as you can, so the last few years of your life aren’t spent in a hospital or assistive living facility/nursing home/etc.
Unfortunately the nature of my employment did not allow me that opportunity.
Be wary of burnout. That shit takes years to recover from.
Can confirm. Do not recommend.
I’m thinking of moving from my higher paying career field to one that will pay me a nearly break even salary (for this living area) because my heart just isn’t in this anymore. Talking days of staring at the screen and not doing anything. Feels bad yo.
I’m thinking of moving from my higher paying career field to one that will pay me a nearly break even salary (for this living area) because my heart just isn’t in this anymore.
How close are you to retirement? If you increased savings from [high paying career], how much longer would you have to work at it before you could stop working altogether?
Not close to retirement. Can’t save because of family debt that I didn’t accrue. If I was solo I would lean fire my way into a nice small house somewhere to chill but that ain’t happening.
Money ain’t worth it. Find something that makes you happy!
Your body has a slow self destruct mechanism embedded in it and it starts ticking in middle age. Your body doesn’t get broken down because it’s old, it’s broken down because it’s programmed to do so.
goddamn telomeres at it again (or not)
Most people in their 40s are concerned about their plans for retirement are on track when they should be worried about their telomerase.
I’m 60. At age 45 I decided to make staying healthy a priority and started learning to take better care of myself. I’ve avoided the aches and pains others report for the most part.
Most everything else said here tracks for me, though.
When things seem less than ideal, I remind myself that there’s only one alternative to growing old, and I go out for a walk.
What steps did you take? I got a gym membership and go 4-5 days a week and cook at home now instead of fast food/take out.
I’ll tell you the worst thing. Far worse than anyone else here can mention.
Time is constantly accelerating. When you are 5, the concept of a year is nearly an eternity. But your perception of time changes the older you get. Every year is shorter and shorter. Like you are on a constantly accelerating ship headed to the end of existence.
Keep doing new and novel things. It helps!
Humans adapt. We have abysmal bandwidth, so we have adapted. If anything is normal you don’t notice. You reserve bandwidth for the unexpected. You already know how to react and what to do/feel regarding daily life.
Break rhythm
Absolutely, you stop measuring the passage of time in days and years and start measuring it in experiences. When you’re young and everything is new it’s absolutely full. The 10th or hundredth time you’ve done something you handle it more easily but it also starts to seem like one ‘thing’.
Routine is the quickest way to looking back on life and feeling like it was the blink of an eye.
People can’t afford experiences anymore
Most of my best experiences didn’t cost anything except some time.
Those are the best, time well spent.
Many can’t afford time either
Yeah, the nervous system works by detecting deltas. Gradual changes can sneak up on you.
Use it or lose it is true of the mind and the body. And it’s better to burn out than to fade away (and no, I don’t mean taking Kurt’s way out).
I feel this way precisely because I keep doing new and novel things: there are so much to learn, think, and try out, I feel I am constantly in a rush.
When I was younger, I either have well-defined tasks or I would hit technical blocks forcing me to stop for a long time. Now, I get to work on all the hard problems to my heart’s desire, and is also more skilled, thus hits way less blocks. I am in a constant race against my own ideas and desires to try new things…
It is cool and fulfilling, but also terribly exhausting most of the time :(
I don’t think that’s true. Time is relative so it’s only accelerating if you’re in a comfy routine with fewer distinct points of reference. There’s an easy fix for that.
From my perspective, I believe it is true. I’m only late 30s, and I’ve been filling my time with more “firsts” than ever before, but I can’t remember the last time I ever thought “damn, time is really dragging on today”.
I’ve got a relatively new career; I’ve been trying my hand at politics (was just 150 votes from winning an election this year!); I’ve been getting involved with volunteer work; I’ve gotten involved in activism, going to protests, anti-racism rallies, removing stickers, posters and flags placed to cause division and hate; I’ve been bonding with the most beautiful parrot my fiancée and I rescued; I’m teaching my son to drive; - the list goes on. My schedule is pretty relaxed, but whenever I look at the time of day I think “hell, how did that all go so quick?”.
I’ve been making a few mistakes just this week because my brain has refused to update the fact that we’re 5 days into July already and we’re no longer in mid June.
I dunno. Maybe it’s time perception, maybe I have early onset Alzheimer’s, or maybe I have early onset Alzheimer’s.
Your life sounds amazing. Glad you’re doing things you love <3
30s? You are still a baby. There is a long way to go my friend. There are literally no limitations on what you can do right now.
I’ve hit a point where I can do a lot of the things I passed on previously because I was always busy or didn’t feel like I had the money. It doesn’t slow anything down. I can’t actually remember all the things I’ve done. I don’t regret doing all these things because I get reminded about them over time, but it’s still just a fuller life, not a slower life. Things I “recently” put on hold have been waiting for years. Projects that were deemed critical at the time have gone unfinished, mostly proving nothing was critical.
And that’s not to say to have a full life, you have you be bouncing off the walls from airports to other continents to concerts to festivals to soup walks to ski resorts to motorcycle rides to beaches to parties to home improvement projects to artistic endeavors. That’s just my flavor, slotting things into the schedule as they fit.
I thought about this recently. When you’re 5, a year is 20% of your life. When you’re 50, it’s 2% of your life. Not surprising it goes quicker.
This is true. I barely notice summers anymore. They used to stretch out and now feel compressed into 6 week stretch when other people aren’t available.
One of my kids freaked out the other day when he realized it was July and we still hadnt gone to the pool! My wife and I had barely noticed, our weekends have been busy, but the summer is already 1/3 gone!
We went Saturday
Time is literally accelerating according to scientific studies as well.
We’re always moving through time capped at C minus velocity through space, so the only way that could accelerate is if we’re slowing down moving through space?
Source: AzerNews https://share.google/OHbtuFQKe5MMVaUcC
Your body ages faster than your brain. Your brain says “go ahead, jump!” Your body says, “aw fuck!”
You’re tired all the time. You realize there’s degrees of tired and you figure out how to do things at different levels.
I took off work this week and have napped almost every day… Still tired but in a better mood than I’ve been in in months. Sigh
Prioritize your health. Living on energy drinks and pizza’s looks fine in your twenties but then you head towards your fourties and you take meds for things like hypertension and fight a neverending war against your waist size.
Realizing how stupid you were when you were young.
The alternative is not realizing it. Realizing how stupid you used to be is how you grow.
Too bad many people never get to that point and keep the same stupid beliefs they had as children that their dumb parents forced upon them.
And it never ends! When I was 25, I cringed at how I was when I was a teenager, but I was glad that at least I wasn’t like that anymore. Now that I’m in my 30s, I cringe at how I was when I was 25!
Later you’ll cringe at how you were in your thirties, forties and so on.
Exactly! 😫
(hopefully)
I’m in my fifties and still occasionally cringe about things I did last week.
Still making rapid developments I see!
Lol that’s some pretty good self-awareness
For me it is more like, when you interact with young adults - you will able to see the difference between developing and actually developmed brain.
Tho not everyone reaches that point.
And yes. We all been that stupid.I have a principle of not judging my younger self for not knowing better. Hindsight isn’t helpful.
Anyway, there are lots of people who don’t learn from their experiences, so they’re fools when they’re in their 70s just like they were fools in their 20s. The only difference is that they had 50 years of opportunities to learn, but because they were fools, they didn’t. That makes old fools even worse than young ones.
That’s the worst part!? Not having to mourn friends and family while being stuck in this ever-worsening world? Or hoping you have enough retirement saved up and invested in the right, safe things since you become less and less capable every day (to say nothing of being less employable). You have to watch as your body gradually fails and your agency is taken away; you also gradually lose more and more of your senses and personality and less and less people who know and care about you are around, you lose your memories and eventually your own sanity and are left trapped in your own mind, not knowing who you are or what’s happening…
But yeah, I do have that one cringe moment as a teenager.
No one cringes at the thought of pooping their pants when they were 1 year old. It’s normal development at the time and soon you move on.
It’s the same at any age. It really should carry on like this if you continue to learn and grow through your life.
Pooping your pants seems like a numbers game.
Like a shart, you have to roll the dice a lot, but usually win. Eventually, your card gets pulled.
So when it happens to me, I plan on laughing about it and dealing with it. And until then, working on continually improving and balancing my diet, and anal health and happiness.
But it’s very different when you’re a typical healthy adult and someone reminds you: you’re almost at an age where it’s normal to poop your pants. Talk about cringe
Three main things from my personal experience.
-
Sleep is shit. I remember when I was a teen or in my early 20s. I could sleep like a baby for 10 hours straight and wake up like tigger, raring to to, full of vim and vigour. Now I sleep in half hour bites. Each time I wake, I have to change position because some bit or other feels like it’s going to sleep (the irony!) or just hurts. At least once in the night I need to pee. My dreams, at this point, inevitably become some variation of me looking for a toilet and they’re always dirty or broken or something is wrong with them. I wake feeling tired, even if I get 10 hours in bed.
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Chronic arthritis. I’m not that old (late 50s) but my hips are utterly fucked. I can’t walk for more than a couple of miles before the pain starts. I can’t have steroids because (apparently) my hips might just fall apart. I can’t have hip replacement surgery (Fuck! That’s something old people have done!) because the arthritis isn’t currently sufficiently debilitating.
-
People no longer notice you. When I was younger I was a good looking guy. I had girlfriends who made everyone’s head turn. Women fancied me, men were envious of me. Now, I’m just some old guy. It’s pretty fucking rare that anyone gives me a second glance. I’m just some old guy.
I have noticed this as well. I joke with the students that us old guys all look the same so they’ll have trouble telling us apart for awhile. But it’s true.
Until like 5-10 years ago, I’ve been traveling a lot, and in the evening, I’d take the tram or go on foot, sometimes 30-60 minutes, and go to bars, restaurants, no problem. In some city that’s completely unknown to me. After pretty heavy drinking and with just a few hours of sleep, I’d get up in the morning and travel on.
Nowadays, when checking in after, let’s say, a 2 hours journey, all I want to do is watch TV in my suite, end of story.
As to 3.: That can still happen, and it’s quite rewarding when it does. Just a few months ago, I’ve been turning heads again because I started dating a cover model for dentist’s office magazines. All eyes were glued to them wherever we went.
Then one day, you’re sitting all sobered up in some hotel room with what suddenly appears to be the phoniest person on the planet, and you start to realize beauty isn’t all there is.
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That you feel like you woke up in a completely different meat suit, than the one you were used to for 40 odd years. Nothing is the same. Clothes don’t fit the same, you can’t pull off the same styles you once could, you can’t bend or reach the same. Injuries seem to be delivered by someone with a voodoo doll of you and a lifetime of object jealousy. The view from the top of the hill, doesn’t look any different than the incline, they lied to you about that. Your brain and who you are feels the same as your late 20yo brain, but with some well learned lessons under its belt, so you kinda watch everything slide around you, it kinda feels like that time lapse of the fruit rotting. And time moves faster. When you’re 10, one year is a larger portion of your life than one year is, comparatively against 40 odd years, and it literally feels like that. It gets to a point where a year feels like a month. But your emotions and perspective on the world slows down and zooms out, and now you can see the forest for the trees. You realise you were a little brainwashed into thinking certain things mattered, that really really didn’t at all. The flip side of that coin, is knowing what really matters, and appreciating it so much more. You can’t achieve that without trying every biscuit on the tray. My you be blessed with the privilege to learn what it feels like to grow old with yourself. Not all of us do.
That suddenly your job can be taken over by a new technology and your skillset is outdated and your government doesn’t care to further fund your education.
Now you’re getting more tired as you get older and have to compete in a saturated market against young people who are just trying to make it too.
And you will likely work until youre not able to stand for very long.
And then after all that you watch pedophiles give speeches and your country burning in wildfires. And then you get that random “Happy 4th of July” message that makes you drink a long glass of whiskey.
And your hear your cousin is planning her second baby while we all know that the youth for the first time in generations are doing far worse than your parents.
The weight of the evil of the world never eases, only becomes more intense
