Ask Lemmy

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.

Pain.

You no longer don't feel pain. You just manage it.

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.

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.

Be wary of burnout. That shit takes years to recover from.

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.

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.

Perimenopause. Sheesh, warn a girl! (And her significant other).

Your body ages faster than your brain. Your brain says “go ahead, jump!” Your body says, “aw fuck!”

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

You're tired all the time. You realize there's degrees of tired and you figure out how to do things at different levels.

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.

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.

Three main things from my personal experience.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Realizing how stupid you were when you were young.

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.

Losing friends is probably up there.

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.

Young people getting dumber.

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?