Your body starts breaking down long before you’re ready or expected, despite every warning you heard your whole life.
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.
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.
My grandparents died when I was 7. Mom died when I was 25, my step dad finally in 2022 and my biological father just last year. I’m 40.
I never knew my grandparents. My aunts and uncles all passed over 15 years ago. When my mother died 10 years ago I looked aty siblings and said “we’re the old people now” because there were no adults from our youth left alive.
The future seems distant but the past is an instant. Your life seems like it went by in a flash.
You’ve just got to assume any moment now you’ll be elderly and on your deathbed. You never waste time that way.
It sure comes with constant existential angst though.
“If this was my last day alive, would I seriously wanna be going to work?”
…“K, but you gotta plan a little further ahead there, buddy…”
For sure, “live like it’s your last day” is a very different thing, and not good advice. You should also take your chance at making whatever memory when it comes (within reason), but you should also go to work (preferably at a job you can at least tolerate).
There’s things that don’t fall in either category that you have to ration, though. Slot machines seem like a pretty uncontroversial example. Gaming or streaming can be worthwhile, YMMV, but few would argue every hour done has been worth it. Doomscrolling is a little bit of a self-own to put on Lemmy, but the same for that.
Basically, it seems like old us would want us to use time, not waste it.
You have to live with all the mistakes you’ve made for your entire life.
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
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.
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.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.
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You’re getting tired. When you ride your bicycle, it always goes uphill, even when in fact you’re going downhill. And the older you grow, the steeper it gets.
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 !
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.
Yup, a week is such a long time in school, I’m in my thirties and I see months go by so quickly
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.
Losing friends is probably up there.
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.
First you go to birthday parties, then party parties, then graduation parties, bachelor/bachelorette parties, weddings, your friend’s kid’s parties then funerals
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.
Well I’m guess I’m lucky that I don’t have friends.
work on that, if you can.
Your life isn’t going to get better. Those old “It gets better.” campaigns used to seriously piss me off. You are a slave to crapitalism until you die
My life got better as I got older, but I don’t live in the States, so maybe that’s a factor.
Bold of you to assume it’s going to stop after I die, fully expect to be reanimated and used as cheap labour at this rate.
I’ve got good news for you!
So dementia sets in around 42??!???!
I’ve got good news for you!
…huh. That’s kinda exciting, but I’m curious if that’s still accurate.
…then again, I’m also hanging out at the bottom right now :p
I think I’m mapping the negations of negations correctly - that link says not only is it still current, but seems to be very nearly universal?
Correct
I mean, redraw this graph as “happiness” vs “year of birth” and it’ll look way less optimistic!
Thank you. This actually does help.
That about seems like the age you start truly internalizing “Lol all these things they told me were important, aren’t. And I don’t care lol.”
We have to spend so much time in that state of dissonance, deprogramming ourselves, realizing their best interests are not in ours.
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 …
I’m 70. Nothing hurts. It’s not inevitable, though the odds worsen as you age.
Exercise helps. Stretching is more challenging, though. You need to go slow and maintain correct form or you’ll wish you had.
What really sucks is that friends and family my age are getting ill and dying at an accelerating rate.
Right on. My school’s Capoeira mestre is in his 70’s. Healthy as a horse, flexible, freaking ripp’d, and has the wisdom and experience to still take anybody down. Needed his hips replaced recent though.
I can’t possibly train that hard. That’s what happens when you make a martial art your entire life. But I’m hoping I can at least avoid becoming a shuffling little shrimp-postured man by staying moving and flexible. Lol
Survivor bias probably. There was picture of Ernie Hudson on Lemmy recently who is just crushing it at 80. Given large enough numbers there are some people who will just defy all odds for a while. And they will attribute their longevity to something other than chance. Capoeira, cooking with bacon grease, use/abstinence of alcohol, hard work, protecting leisure time. None of it means anything if you wait long enough.
You get smarter but young people keep being dumb.
All right all right all right.
It’s an underrated tragedy.
I’m not ancient, but I do think about all the shit I had to painstakingly learn, and that everyone who’s born has to painstakingly learn it all again.
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 💔
My wife and I have been married for 15 years, our 9th cat is now 2 years old.
We started with my two, and her two. Magic (1), Carmen (2), Max (3), and Paddy (4).
We lost Magic and Carmen (siblings) when they were 15. Then Paddy.
We took in Whisper (5), as a stray, then got Rocket (6) and Keanu (7).
We were forced to downsize and limited to two cats. Our son was attached to Max, and took him. He later died from cancer.
Whisper DEMANDED the outdoor life and was adopted by a horse farm where he was hit by a car.
When we bought a house, two of our neighbor cats had litters so we took in Lorelei (8) and Willow (9).
