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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You aren’t getting any more teeth, so take care of the ones you have.
Stress produces cortisol. Cortisol reduces your empathy.
Like Casandra, knowing the future won’t make you happy or get people to listen to you.
Intelligence is setting your medication to automatically arrive when you run out. Wisdom is having it arrive a week before you run out.
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.
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.
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.
Holy fuck those hormones are a source of unbelievable energy and getting to that feeling you get naturally in your 20s and part of your 30s takes a lot more effort.
In your mid 30s all the pets you and your friends got as your first pets as “adults” die. That first dog for your first place? Dead. That first cat after college? Dead. They all die in the same ~5 years period so you relive your loss through your friends over and over, and dog save you if those happened to be the pets your children were born with… it’s so hard
RIP Evey, Momo, Bonnie, Otie, Maddoc, Buddy Lee, Twinkie, Blue and Pippen, among so many others, we still miss you 💔
It fucking hurts.
Seriously, every day there's a new ache or pain. Things that never hurt when I was younger now hurt if I think about them wrong.
Body on Monday: "So we're taking a step today, are we? Not without your ankle suddenly feeling like a knitting needle is being driven through it for the next week".
Body on Tuesday: "Sneezed, huh? Enjoy the feeling of your lower trapezius muscles being ripped from your back!"
Body on Wednesday: "Did you turn your head slightly to glance over that way? Boy, you don't like this neck, do you?!"
Body on Thursday: "Yeah, nothing fancy today. Just flaring up this old back injury, because you turned over in your sleep".
And so on ...
The weight of the evil of the world never eases, only becomes more intense
The future seems distant but the past is an instant. Your life seems like it went by in a flash.
No purpose, no goal. My entire life has been driven by: goto college, meet someone, get married, buy a house, have a kid, pay for college, save for retirement. Ok, done?
A lot of comments here with legitimate aspects of getting older, but not many that aren't fairly common knowledge.
I offer the compressed sense of time as you age. Everything just seems to go by faster and faster leaving you wondering where all your time went when things are over.
My personal theory is that this is kinda like an "echo" in Minority Report.
Basically, when you're still fresh, everything is new. Brain is like "Write this down! Interesting!"
But a lot of adult life stops being an adventure. You clock in and out, automatically say "fine thanks, you?" to the thousandth "how's it goin" that year, drive the same route to and from the job, the grocery store, etc...
The brain has seen this before. The experience isn't novel. It tosses it out with the trash. Why hang on to a million copies of "Went_to_Work_did_stupid_job_had_reheated_chicken.mp4" ? You also are getting crappier sleep, so things don't record as readily to long term storage.
Heck, I would clock in, hear the stupid "ding" sound, and legit not be sure if I actually just did that or if my brain was recalling the billion other times I've done it, 30 seconds later.
So anyway, I guess what I'm saying is, the key to a long experienced life might be to keep your brain "guessing" by switching things up, trying things differently, always learning new skills, trying to interact with different kinds of people.
The endless, rote, routine is a certain kind of hell.
Anyway, I'm no neurologist or anything, just another frustrated working class, but I think I'm on the money here lol.
Watching my little babies run around the house as big kids is crushing the fuck out of my heart. I love them and they're all healthy and happy and that's great but holy fuck its going so fast and they're gonna leave me and idk what I'm gonna do. Brutal shit.
A global pandemic into a sustained recession and silent great depression will derail all the outcomes you'd built momentum towards in earlier life. You will never really fully recover. Whatever you do gain back will be a shadow of what was going to be.
So try to plan ahead for that, Kiddo.
It's traumatic for many. People start to realize that they actually age in their 30s and turn to weird shit because they don't know how to deal with trauma of aging.
Rampant discrimination against older people, especially women is crazy and something you don't fully notice until you or your peers are affected directly.
I'm still pretty young yet but one thing I've noticed with growing older is how less and less people your age seem to want to have fun. I don't mean acting silly I mean finding time for joy in life and expressing that inner child. And yet they still make mistakes and deal with them like a kid would :/
It really feels like being with children acting like adults, who have forgotten how to be children. Just weird lol.
You have to live with all the mistakes you've made your entire life.
In my 30's, if my pee was extra yellow I'd think "Wow" and then get on with my life. In my 70's, if my pee is extra yellow I think " My organs are broken! I'm dying!".
Young people getting dumber.
Perimenopause. Sheesh, warn a girl! (And her significant other).
naaa...i want to talk more about best parts of getting older.
Less tolerance for bullshit drama. you seen enough of it. It just doesnt evolve.
Like learning to shift your time better. not waste so much of it like when you're young. especially on dumb drama. and if you learned well: you learned the parts you took in it and are accountable to the choices you make and get some control over your choices. like good people vs bad people to have in your life.
stay learning new things. It is good for the brain. get a hobby. play an instrument. learn to play your favorite songs. write a book about your life. You can always kick ass in life.
learn how to eat for nourishment. not just for pleasure. cook including both. then you can be even healthier than when you were young.
Move a lot more. Like a lot more. dont get used to just sitting on the couch. Couches can turn into a coffin. its fine to watch your shows for some of the day... just dont let the couch turn into a coffin under you. get walkin. especially if your job is sedantary. not enough time? wake half an hour earlier and walk. helps you fall asleep at night when you need to.
Less fear of death. You start seeing enough of it to get the idea. An acceptance. You can still be scared of the dying process though. especially dying with a lot of self imposed suffering like being catastrophically obese and unable to move. hoarding. being abandoned. abandoning yourself and not reaching out for help or doing something about mental health. letting yourself down on your own watch. but death itself is just more of a rebirth. The fear is that you lived too stupid/blaming everyone and holding no accountability and you dont want to have to do all of it all over again with the same amount of stupid. there is enough examples of how not to live. pay attention to that. you owe yourself on that.
You get smarter but young people keep being dumb.
All right all right all right.
Rapid aging happens like growth spurts. Around 40-44 apparently again around 65. Small print becomes a problem, body does not handle alcohol as before, body aches and pains become constant. Exercise is essential, but a setback from an injury or sedentary lifestyle is difficult to escape from.
when you hit about 45, your mental age is currentAge-20 years-ish but doing an activity associated with mental age can come with some surprising consequences, mostly unhappy surprises at that. But as you continue to age you start accepting who are and start making less stupid choices that are associated with how you mentally feel.
Getting older is great! You've been around long enough to see how some things change while others stay the same. You start to care more about some things and less about the rest. Every year is my favorite age! Except for the year i lost my mom- that was worst thing about aging.
When you're young you vow to yourself not to change which as it turns out isn't that hard. Trouble is the world changes around you. Then you find yourself shaking your fist at the clouds and realize you sound like your parents
While it is commonly shown in media, the "seeing everyone you love die" thing is generally reserved for immortals; but it can happen just getting old, too. You'll likely die long after your grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles. And if you're very unlucky, a lot of people younger than you as well.
