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.
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.
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.
Pain.
You no longer don’t feel pain. You just manage it.
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.
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.
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!
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
Your body ages faster than your brain. Your brain says “go ahead, jump!” Your body says, “aw fuck!”
Three main things from my personal experience.
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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.
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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.
Losing friends is probably up there.
My best friend since childhood died last year and that just destroyed me. Lost my mom just a couple months later which made things worse, but not as much as everyone thinking losing my mom was the only major loss I’ve had in the last year. I hate how much losing my friend seems to just get ignored when talking to even my therapist about all the things that has happened to me over the last year.
First you go to birthday parties, then party parties, then graduation parties, bachelor/bachelorette parties, weddings, your friend’s kid’s parties then funerals
It never stops feeling weird and shocking to me how many people I’ve known that died before age 30.
What got them? Diseases? Accidents?
I’m 60 and gave seen a lot of water under that bridge. A really good friend of mine who is in their early 40s and just got a cancer diagnosis this week. It never gets easier.
Well I’m guess I’m lucky that I don’t have friends.
work on that, if you can.
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.
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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.
A lot has already been said, but one I didn’t see that I truly never expected is that I’m losing my grip strength. I drop things all the time now, and those pickle jars don’t open nearly as easily.
Nah it’s the cans that are getting tighter !
staying fit and healthy takes effort.
when you’re a kid, you’re active. you heal fast.
when you’re an adult, you are often sedentary, and injuries heal slowly. you have to work at it, either by choosing a lifestyle that facilitates it or by making time for it.
