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.
Feeling confident without makeup.
Realizing that the pillars of success written by governments or institutions is bullshit and caring more about good people.
Feeling comfortable with a small social bubble. Quality over quantity.
Valuing naps over parties. 😴
The realization that I may never live to see capitalism collapse
These are all cute, but when you start to lose your balance just turning your head or with basic movements, you really start to feel old.
It's only a matter of time before you start falling.
Once you start falling, you start dying slowly
Looks at a picture of a family dinner from 10 years ago. One third of the people are now dead…
- At 30 you reach the peak.
- At 40 you start to have small health problems that don't go away and are mostly annoyance.
- At 50 you seek help because it's more than annoyance. You get your first permanent medication.
- At 60 it's somewhat limiting and for the first time causing Intermediate pain.
- At 70 it's debilitating and pain is a familiar companion. You might have your first seizures.
- At 80 if it hasn't killed you yet, it soon will. You are probably an invalid or close to it.
- At 90 if you are still hanging on, you are waiting for death and welcoming it.
That's pretty much it, ±10 years.
Losing the people you love in very different ways.
Cuts and such heal WAYYYYY more slowly.
I also seem to bruise easier.
Every fart is a gamble
Gray pube.
The rage inside has only ever increased. The older I get the more militant I get. By the time I'm 40 I'll be living in the forest defending my country from fascists with a bow and arrow.
Hungovers last longer, so do injuries from sport, easier to put on weight, less patience for bullshit, more selective with whom I spend my time with... There are so many!
Whatever im doing i gotta be careful or ill fuck my back up
- Your former school teachers die. At this point, I think the majority of mine is gone.
- Your gum recedes, and there's nothing you can do about it except to stop smoking. On a larger scale, your circulation gets worse because your erythrocytes become less elastic, for reasons still unknown. Add to this the most damaging impact of UV light and our atmosphere's oxygen - an objectively very aggressive chemical - and you start shriveling, just withering away from the outside. Molecular bonds are simply getting broken faster than they get repaired. Your insides last a bit longer, but their days are numbered, too.
- On the plus side, you'll get to learn new words for body parts you didn't even know you had.
My wife and I get excited every time we come across articles about exoskeleton tech. Can we expedite this a little? I want a mech suit—not a fucking wheelchair—when I reach that age.
Also, a note to the designers: make sure you can use the toilet with it. Extrapolating current trends, I suspect this will become one of my primary activities.
The hairdresser asks if he needs to do your eyebrows.
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
That the experience the issues old people told you about. My lumbar is always achy
I’ve started to lose height as I get older instead of gaining it
Your living expenses increase far more than your pay
Ouch. Why?
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 notice the 55 and older menu. Save some money!
I feel sick all the time
I don't get it, the year on the calendar keeps getting bigger, and I can't figure out why.
I hear this question being asked more frequently
Stuff hurts more than it used to.
Injuring myself in my sleep
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.
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
- Eyesight is getting worse. It's hard to read in dim light, and driving at night can be rough.
- Takes my body longer to recuperate from anything that it doesn't like - injuries, alcohol, upset stomach.
- Age spots. I thought they were just freckles but my dermatologist says they're age spots. I'm only 43!
Aging is funny, because there's always someone who thinks you're ancient, and there's always someone who thinks you're still super young. I was at a bar a couple weeks ago, and these two dudes were complaining about how old they were getting.... so I asked, turns out they were the ripe old age of twenty-eight. Which made me laugh a little, because 28 is still pretty young. And when I told them I was 43 they couldn't believe it. I guess in my twenties I didn't have an accurate idea of what people in their forties looked like either. Conversely when I made some comment to my parents about being middle-aged, they laughed at me because "you're in your forties, you're not middle-aged!". So it's all relative. My dad said something that stuck with me: you may feel like you're getting older, but when you're my age (he's 75) you'll realize how young you still were, and how much energy you had. And that's helped me be aware that even though there are some aspects of aging that I really hate, there are plenty of good healthy years left.
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."
diminished eyesight, especially at night.
oh, and of course, making some references that some of the youngsters don't understand.
(also, using the term "youngsters")
It's interesting to me that I don't see myself aging in the bathroom mirror…until I put on my glasses. Then it's obvious. Also, I didn't used to need glasses. But nature's gaussian blur filter is awesome. My wife looks as good as the day I met her too!
I no longer feel a sense of unrealised potential for myself I guess. That's it, I've got what I've got.
The clothing styles I wore in middle school are cool now, except those damn low rise flares will not work on me at 40 because my mid-section would flab out everywhere. Damn kids.
My shoulder still hurts from last week when I slept funny.
The idea of staying out past 10pm sounds terrible.
I almost set up a breakfast date with a friend for 7am.
I'm really excited for a larger capacity water heater.
I'm starting to do that thing where I look down to focus on small text right in front of me.
Past 25 I started to realise I couldn't remember everything that everyone had said to me. This was also around the time I developed a social life, so it could just be that my brain had more to manage socially.
Past 30, I stopped caring about appearances so much and started working on developing mental skills. I was able to defend my beliefs better, make more on-the-spur jokes.
Past 35, I no longer care about anything. I have bouts where I'm in interested in building things, or conversing. But now? Eh, work/sleep is enough.
At age 30, I noticed I couldn't skimp on sleep anymore and hangovers were much worse than in my 20's.
In my mid-30's my eyesight started to blur and I had to start wearing glasses.
At 40, my digestion isn't as good as it used to be and I take supplements. Also, it's harder to memorize things now, and I no longer have the option of missing workouts or daily stretching, because I notice it much more if I haven't done these things.
I worked construction from 14-20. Nowadays I work a cushy desk job. Still whenever we need something sone in our house (which is a lot, my house is a degrading shack) if it's something I'm comfortable doing I do it myself. Every once in a while there's a job that just kills me and I feel like I need a week to recover from.
Last weekend I put new drywall up on my kitchen ceiling. I used to do it all the time with ease, by myself, light work. Nowadays I'm glad my wife wasn't home to see me struggling. I had to pull out all my tricks and it was still fucking rough.
Hair falling out
Using any tool that vibrate much like a string trimmer will irritate where my spine is pinched and I'll regret it for months. It makes me feel useless. Fusing 4 discs in my upper back or neck would almost guaranteed make me feel more useless.
I definitely can't pretend I'm young anymore. It isn't just pain, and when it is pain it's not the worst pain. It makes me unable to feel my arm. I had to get an epidural of steroids to get the inflammation down to get feeling back, and I seem to be at least mildly allergic to that .
New technology is harder to adopt.
Scattered gray hairs on head and beard. At this point, they look kinda good because I’m mostly retaining my natural color.
Used to be super skinny. Metabolism slowed and I have a beer gut.
Far less interested in pursuing hobbies into the wee hours of the morning. I like to go to bed by around 1030pm and wake early even on weekends. I woke naturally at 6am today (Saturday).
Feel out of place in some younger crowds like concerts for young artists. We were definitely some of the oldest people at a 100 Gecs show.
2 drinks making me feel 100% worse
If I sleep wrong I wake up in pain.
It takes me longer to recover from the consequences of playing ice hockey.
My knee inexplicably hurt for a few days a couple weeks back.
It actually takes effort for me to get out of my car. Like I'm having to pull myself out.
All kinds of random aches that just just become the new normal.
Im not old but general lack of energy compared to when I was younger. Likely a symptom of both age and more responsibilities. And this pain in my leg I’ve had for months.
