It takes exponentially longer to heal from physical injury. That’s it so far, except for feeling calmer - older people are exceptional at emotional regulation, which oddly enough is why they are easier to scam, they don’t freak out as quickly.
But mostly it’s the slow healing. I am still strong and flexible but have to be careful and moderate because getting hurt will set me back much more than it used to.
My mom once made plans to come up here (she lived near Miami) to see Tab Benoit with some of her friends - by the day of the concert two of them were dead! She said “if you want to see your friend when you are old, go see them, don’t make plans.”
I was in a mosh pit for the first time in 7 years last year. I got fucking destroyed and was sore for about 2 weeks. I also slipped walking my dog during a big snow we had a few weeks ago and took me a little bit longer to get up than I used too. I am not old by any means and working on getting back in shape, but its starting :(
Not me, but my dad and his gf were at a headshop to get a new bowl/slide for their bong. They texted me and my wife to see “what the kids were calling them now a days” after a guess or two I said slide. They then went on a tangent how the people had no idea what they meant and kept trying to sell them a downstem lol. A few younger guys at my last job gave me shit for calling a banger a nail. Weed lingo sucks lol
You start grasping for the past again. You may have at one point when you were younger, have gotten tired of people telling stories of their past and how things were in the day. But before you know it, you will do it too. A lot of people already are doing it and they’re in stages of their lives that the older people once were who also did it.
You feel like the world becomes greyer and greyer when you read the news about some celebrity that played a role you remembered them in be it a show or movie that passed away. This also applies to knowing about the individuals through the cracks that don’t get as much coverage, like pioneers that helped make things you take for granted, knowing of people that took part of something that made you realize that they were what made something work and not who you thought did.
You get increasingly annoyed at just noise. Dogs barking. Children loudly playing. Babies crying. People shouting. People clumsily doing things that make something break or whatever. You yearn for periods of silence.
You could become isolated by choice, like caught in a web of indecision as to what hobby you want to enjoy. You’re getting older, not younger, so you feel like you have to try to enjoy what you can before you really can’t anymore.
And above all else, you grow more and more distant from the connections you once called your best. There will be a point in your life much later on, where you will be in a nursing home or whatever and you may not have a way to stay in touch with your friends. All of you are on a course of this same life and the sad part is all of you are also racing to your ends.
I just turned 50. I have an extremely good memory for events long ago, like I remember parts of being 2 years old even without difficulty. This is the first year in my life that all those things seem so very long ago though. I don’t know how to describe it, but the fact I was alive before we got answering machines suddenly makes me feel very ancient when it didn’t before. I also try to describe how horrible 1980s parenting was and nobody really gets that, like how casually you were molested or sexually pestered by adult men and nobody cared, or girls at my high school having adult boyfriends, or my teacher dating Tanya Memme when she was underage, and briefly being suspended for it because it was Catholic school, but she graduated and they went right back to it. (Tanya is a good egg though). It seems very alien to anyone I’ve talked to about it who are younger, but it really was like that, your parents did not give one fuck about your safety. That makes me feel suddenly a lot older, because nobody else seems to understand or have forgotten how bad it was.
Holidays are a blur. I don’t remember individual years anymore, and every year I’m started at how quickly it became Christmas already.
Ffs we’re halfway through February already. I was just putting up the tree like 3 days ago.
Too real. Not just holidays, weeks and months go by and it’s like “shit when did it get to 2025??”
Covid made it especially bad. Covid started five years ago. Started, like we first heard the term “Covid”
It’s still March… 2020
COVID really did destroy the flow of time for me.
Children, which to me is everyone born in the 2005+ are already turning 20. Hell, the iPhone can already vote.
Also, Gangnam style. 13 years ago.
Btw I was born in 2004 and I’m 20
Are you also in your 30s? Haha
my fucks slowly run out
Honestly I’ve been getting much happier the less fucks I give.
Inverse correlation
This has become my theme song.
This is the plus side of being older.
I’ve been burned enough times in life that it’s really easy to just write people off that I shouldn’t have let in my life anyway, and I’m much happier in my own little world with my books.
it does get marginally better once you do run out.
A girl that stopped me on the street to ask directions concluded the exchange with “Thank you sir.”
Also, the waiters now automatically bring the bill to me when I have lunch with coworkers.
In the south that’s just being nice, not age
I think they mean specifically to them, and not their coworkers
Yes, all my coworkers, including my managers are now younger than me. So when a manager takes everyone out, the waiters assume that I’m the one treating everyone to lunch.
Yes, I’ve had that a few times. Although being substantially older than your manager is externally no big deal unless you make it so, in the cold dark recesses of your own mind it can really start to grind some gears if you let it.
That first happened to me at 18 and it was so weird. I was helping out at my old school for an interschool music festival—a week of all sorts of different workshops and rehearsals between different schools, culminating in a concert at the end. During a break I was tinkering around on the piano, and a student came up to me and said “excuse me, sir…[some question about the timetable or something, that I definitely didn’t have the level of authority to know the answer to]”. I have her the best answer I could and she went on her way, but I was just stuck there feeling way too old.
Time feels way faster as you get older.
It’s also pretty grim that the people you know are either dying, dead, or have a life altering illness that comes out of nowhere. I feel like there’s a funeral in my family once a month, rather than once every decade.
Hot take but I think it’s because people stop having or seeking out novel experiences. Most of people’s lives are repetitive and boring jobs with barely any time to zone out in the evening. And once your kids move out and you’re with a long term partner, hardly anything is dynamic in your life. Or fresh. Or unexpected.
Having to do something on a weekday evening is a huge inconvenience.
I feel you, I hate it.
I don’t distrohop or tinker with my Linux install anymore. I just install Linux Mint XFCE edition and don’t even bother changing the background.
20+ years ago i spent hours each day developing my own lcars interface based on enlightenment; now i just use whatever x-windows environment the distro i’m using at the moment defaults to.
we must be twins separated at birth. lol
Me too. But I stopped hopping ten years ago and settled down on Alpine, Void, or Gentoo, based on how fancy the hardware is, and the use case.
To me, the hopping part relates more to tinkering and fine-tuning. Today I prefer things just work. I wish no down time on all my devices and servers, because who has time to figure out why my photo doesn’t sync to my NAS, or dig up that piece of paper when my password manager does not respond because of the proxy service is down?
Tech also just isn’t advancing and changing as much as it was when we were younger so it’s not as exciting anymore
And when it does change it’s to enshittify it. It’s been a decade since I was excited about any new technology. I used to love it too.
I don’t get that at all. To me it feels like there’s so much progress happening right now.
I don’t think this is true.
It’s not exciting to me any more because I hate the way it’s changing the world.
In the 2010s it felt like tech would save us.
I think it is stagnating. people having more access to technology based gadgets but the only thing that changed is earth abuse to support production of gadgets. So not only is it not saving us, it is literally killing us.
all my friends are either dead or my enemies
Male pattern baldness sucks, esp as a trans girl
Injuries take longer to heal and recovery from the gym is slower
Hangovers now take two days
Skin dries out much faster (though this might be due to E)
Lots of things like grey hair, moving more slowly, injuries that I would have bounced away from before instead hurting for weeks or months.
But the one that hit hardest was a breakup I had a little while back. She was the love of my life and I fully intended to marry her, and when she ended it out of nowhere I was sad, but fine. She dumped me, and it sucked, but I also needed to finish a staff report for a Planning and Zoning Commission meeting that night. So I moved on.
The thing that upset me most was that I wasn’t that upset. There was a time in my life when I would have been a mess. But as I’ve aged, my emotions have become more regulated.
I miss being capable of that level of joy and pain.
Love definitely hits different in your 20’s. Though, the plus side is when something ends I don’t obsess over it like I did as a young man.
I remember in the mid-2010’s when Guns n Roses decided to reunite and tour, and my first thought was: “Why would I want to watch Axl Rose now that he’s old and fat?” That was a sign.
I had a similar experience a few years ago. I haven’t even tried dating again because trying to rework my life to incorporate another person at this point just sounds like a giant pain in the ass and I’m old enough now that it seems like everyone I meet around my age who’s still single is living a train wreck of a life so it wouldn’t be worth the effort anyway.
You don’t feel older mentally, but your body starts to betray you. I don’t mean stuff like your legs aching after getting up when sitting on the floor, or getting tired easier; it’s the subtle things that really are irritating. Like taking longer to learn something. Getting fatter even though you don’t really think your diet is bad. Taking longer to find that word you can’t think of or the name of that person, movie, place, whatever.
The irritations that add up are the ones that you don’t really expect, not just the ones you do like needing glasses.
Then there’s “time.” Fucking day goes too quick. Used to be you felt like you could get all kinds of shit done in a day. Now? Run two errands and half the day is gone. Wtf.
Also, “lasts”.
You start to realize that there are things approaching that are the last time you’ll see or do something. The last time you visit where you grew up. Last time your kid lived at home. Last car you’ll ever own.
Yeah, the lasts suck.
Also, “lasts”.
You start to realize that there are things approaching that are the last time you’ll see or do something. The last time you visit where you grew up. Last time your kid lived at home. Last car you’ll ever own.
Yeah, the lasts suck.
I remember being in college, and this Onion article gave me a little bit of an existential crisis.
Ouch
The weight gain is really the big sign shit is going down hill. I’ve been making a series of changes since about age 35, and each time the new diet or exercise routine works for like a year or two and then the weight slowly creeps back up. At this point I literally ride a bike 200 miles per week and I will still gain weight slowly if I eat breakfast. It makes no sense.
It sucks. I like breakfast! On the bright side, two cups of coffee and I am not hungry for the next two hours and by then it is almost lunch time so I guess it works out. Brunch it is!
Nobody mistakes me for a teenager anymore.
Kids call me “lady”
I want to go to bed at 9 PM
I get excited for new appliances
I don’t feel happy
I feel like this is not a part of getting older. Arent there things that are exiting to you or make you happy?
Not many. Not as much as it used to be
It was when I tripped and fell over outside my house. The next day my neighbour said, “I hear you had a Fall.”
Yes, when you’re old you don’t fall over, you “have a Fall”. Everyone hearing about your Fall will make concerned noises. (I was perfectly fine! I’m not OLD old!)
I thought you’re gonna say a dad joke so I will!
At least you didn’t have a Winter
Well that took me a minute - oh, autumn, you’re talking about autumn! Ha ha, excellent dad joke.
