Realizing how stupid you were when you were young.
The alternative is not realizing it. Realizing how stupid you used to be is how you grow.
Too bad many people never get to that point and keep the same stupid beliefs they had as children that their dumb parents forced upon them.
And it never ends! When I was 25, I cringed at how I was when I was a teenager, but I was glad that at least I wasn’t like that anymore. Now that I’m in my 30s, I cringe at how I was when I was 25!
Later you’ll cringe at how you were in your thirties, forties and so on.
Exactly! 😫
(hopefully)
I’m in my fifties and still occasionally cringe about things I did last week.
Lol that’s some pretty good self-awareness
Still making rapid developments I see!
For me it is more like, when you interact with young adults - you will able to see the difference between developing and actually developmed brain.
Tho not everyone reaches that point.
And yes. We all been that stupid.No one cringes at the thought of pooping their pants when they were 1 year old. It’s normal development at the time and soon you move on.
It’s the same at any age. It really should carry on like this if you continue to learn and grow through your life.
I have a principle of not judging my younger self for not knowing better. Hindsight isn’t helpful.
Anyway, there are lots of people who don’t learn from their experiences, so they’re fools when they’re in their 70s just like they were fools in their 20s. The only difference is that they had 50 years of opportunities to learn, but because they were fools, they didn’t. That makes old fools even worse than young ones.
That’s the worst part!? Not having to mourn friends and family while being stuck in this ever-worsening world? Or hoping you have enough retirement saved up and invested in the right, safe things since you become less and less capable every day (to say nothing of being less employable). You have to watch as your body gradually fails and your agency is taken away; you also gradually lose more and more of your senses and personality and less and less people who know and care about you are around, you lose your memories and eventually your own sanity and are left trapped in your own mind, not knowing who you are or what’s happening…
But yeah, I do have that one cringe moment as a teenager.
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.
People can’t afford experiences anymore
Most of my best experiences didn’t cost anything except some time.
Those are the best, time well spent.
Yeah, the nervous system works by detecting deltas. Gradual changes can sneak up on you.
Use it or lose it is true of the mind and the body. And it’s better to burn out than to fade away (and no, I don’t mean taking Kurt’s way out).
I feel this way precisely because I keep doing new and novel things: there are so much to learn, think, and try out, I feel I am constantly in a rush.
When I was younger, I either have well-defined tasks or I would hit technical blocks forcing me to stop for a long time. Now, I get to work on all the hard problems to my heart’s desire, and is also more skilled, thus hits way less blocks. I am in a constant race against my own ideas and desires to try new things…
It is cool and fulfilling but also terribly exhausting most of the time :(
I thought about this recently. When you’re 5, a year is 20% of your life. When you’re 50, it’s 2% of your life. Not surprising it goes quicker.
I don’t think that’s true. Time is relative so it’s only accelerating if you’re in a comfy routine with fewer distinct points of reference. There’s an easy fix for that.
From my perspective, I believe it is true. I’m only late 30s, and I’ve been filling my time with more “firsts” than ever before, but I can’t remember the last time I ever thought “damn, time is really dragging on today”.
I’ve got a relatively new career; I’ve been trying my hand at politics (was just 150 votes from winning an election this year!); I’ve been getting involved with volunteer work; I’ve gotten involved in activism, going to protests, anti-racism rallies, removing stickers, posters and flags placed to cause division and hate; I’ve been bonding with the most beautiful parrot my fiancée and I rescued; I’m teaching my son to drive; - the list goes on. My schedule is pretty relaxed, but whenever I look at the time of day I think “hell, how did that all go so quick?”.
I’ve been making a few mistakes just this week because my brain has refused to update the fact that we’re 5 days into July already and we’re no longer in mid June.
I dunno. Maybe it’s time perception, maybe I have early onset Alzheimer’s, or maybe I have early onset Alzheimer’s.
Your life sounds amazing. Glad you’re doing things you love <3
30s? You are still a baby. There is a long way to go my friend. There are literally no limitations on what you can do right now.
I’ve hit a point where I can do a lot of the things I passed on previously because I was always busy or didn’t feel like I had the money. It doesn’t slow anything down. I can’t actually remember all the things I’ve done. I don’t regret doing all these things because I get reminded about them over time, but it’s still just a fuller life, not a slower life. Things I “recently” put on hold have been waiting for years. Projects that were deemed critical at the time have gone unfinished, mostly proving nothing was critical.
And that’s not to say to have a full life, you have you be bouncing off the walls from airports to other continents to concerts to festivals to soup walks to ski resorts to motorcycle rides to beaches to parties to home improvement projects to artistic endeavors. That’s just my flavor, slotting things into the schedule as they fit.
This is true. I barely notice summers anymore. They used to stretch out and now feel compressed into 6 week stretch when other people aren’t available.
One of my kids freaked out the other day when he realized it was July and we still hadnt gone to the pool! My wife and I had barely noticed, our weekends have been busy, but the summer is already 1/3 gone!
We went Saturday
Time is literally accelerating according to scientific studies as well.
We’re always moving through time capped at C minus velocity through space, so the only way that could accelerate is if we’re slowing down moving through space?
Source: AzerNews https://share.google/OHbtuFQKe5MMVaUcC
The older you get the less time with friends and more time alone you have.
Which is why it’s a good skill to learn to be comfortable being alone. Had to learn this the hard way my first year of living on campus and not really gelling socially with my dormmates.
Being neurodivergent and coming from high school where most of my friendships were formed from convenience made forming new friendships complicated in college.
To some degree that’s true, but socializing is obligatory for brain health as you age
Yeah, you realize how many “friends” were just acquaintances and disappear.
Happy cake day!
You start to realize there’s only a finite amount of time left and start having to choose what you’re going to start based on what you’ll be able to finish and what you could have spent your finite time on instead of.
Also loved ones and close friends passing away is hard, but the state before that… getting ill and their health going downhill… no longer able to be the person you grew up with. It’s mentally rough.
Finally, your body no longer being able to cash the check your mind wants to write.
the state before that… getting ill and their health going downhill… no longer able to be the person you grew up with. It’s mentally rough.
Having to be the primary caretaker for my dad before he passed while trying and failing to reconcile with the emotional abuse and detachment from my childhood still fucks me up to this day.
I hear you…I live in a different part of the state than my parents now, but when I see my dad, who used to be a big strong guy (and a bit of an asshole), wither into a ghost of his former self is hard to process for the reason you mentioned. He was emotionally and a little physically abusive, so I battle empathy and bitterness in my head.
I’m sorry, that sounds so difficult. I’ve already seen so many in my life wither as they had to become caretakers and/or caretakees, and I’m only 40.
One of the things I’d say to your first paragraph is that you’re never too old to learn something new. I’m a driving instructor and I’ve had learners who are over 60. Though, sadly I have seen first hand what you’re talking about. One lady I taught a few years ago at 62 years old had to stop taking lessons because her hip was going… Our last lesson was the last time I saw her 😭
Yeah, I meant it both ways.
1.) What you choose to do and what you decide isn’t worth your time gets seems to get increasingly a more important choice to make.
2.) You also start to realize “I’m not here forever, I should get off my ass and do that thing I’ve always wanted to do. I’m not getting any younger.”
I mean, time is always finite. We just seem to start with the delusion that it’s not.
The body is like a machine, and the older you get: parts suddenly break down and can’t be fixed anymore. Some parts got damaged when you were young (meniscus, teeth, hearing) and they then start causing problems when you’re old. It’s practically impossible to loose weight after 50. Your libido goes down the drain.
I’d say depending on the person, losing weight becomes hard in your 30s if you don’t keep up with it.
Hi, it’s me, I’m the one who hasn’t really kept up with it aside from changing my diet. Nothing drastic, just cutting down on what I eat, in no small part thanks to the economy.
Also, all my weight caught up to me in that I have high blood pressure and mild sleep apnea, both of which can be controlled if not eliminated outright if I just exercised more.
The average American lifestyle kind of discourages exercise and eating well. It’s also very stressful. I certainly can’t fault people for not doing it. I imagine those conditions exist a lot of other places too. I also started gaining a bit more weight in my mid to late thirties but I also rediscovered bicycling during that time. I didn’t really lose any weight, but the way it was concentrating in my belly slowed down or even reversed a little bit. I’m amazed at how much it balanced my mood. Still working on those glutes of steel though.
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I’m a guy, and I imagine you’re correct. Hormones change over time and with age. I usually get blood work done when I go in for a physical and have had those conversations. Everything is looking good, I’m just getting older. He did encourage me to keep up the exercise.
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Yeah, I have put on as much weight from 50 - 52 as I did from 40 - 50. But I have moved from working hard to hardly working (moved into a management position) so it’s hardly surprising I guess
I’ve done that move before, but much earlier.
I think about it occasionally: when you’re a baby/kid/teen/youngadult, you’re eating for energy and for growth. But once you’re fully grown, unless you’re building a ton of muscle, you don’t really need to eat nearly as much.
I think there’s a periodical reassessment of neutral caloric gain/loss that should happen, especially once one’s metabolism stabilizes. In other words, expressly figure out how how much you need to eat in order to not gain or lose weight, once your lifestyle and energy use is stable.
This is made more difficult because it’s actually better for you to eat more and burn it off/use it, than it is to just very little.
Edit: And obviously, this is much easier said than done. But, gotta figure out the goal and take iterative steps to figure it out, right?
Woah there. I agree with part of this but so much is more a “use it or lose it” situation. I’m almost 60, husband a couple years older, we still fuck every day and I get off at least once a day still. I do think it’s muted a bit, slightly less intense usually but way more multiples, so it kind of works out.
Did gain weight at menopause that stuck - sort of gamed that by starting out underweight so I’m still not fat, but agree wholeheartedly it doesn’t fall right off like it did, part of that I think is my worry that if I lose it my bones will suffer, so I don’t want to diet. Still in good shape just smack in the middle of healthy BMI when I was aiming for the bottom of it.
Teeth are STUPID, we should not get the final set so young.
Everything takes so, so long to heal now.
My mom said the worst thing about getting old was that you could not make plans. She planned to come up here to see Tab Benoit with a group of friends but by the day of the show two of them had died.
we still fuck every day and I get off at least once a day still.
Uh. I don’t know that that’s normal. You have my envy, though.
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Y’know the bathtub curve? It applies to any complex system. Beyond a certain point, entropy hits multiple subsystems in parallel. You can mitigate it, but the effort to do so increases over time.
.
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.
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.
Cortisol reduces empathy
That makes a lot of sense
People who don’t take care of themselves can’t take care of others.
And your gums. Actually floss. No one wants to but your 60 year old self will thank you.
Wearing braces for the first time at 60, because my teeth decided to start moving around enough to affect eating. And it’s just getting worse from here. I brushed: no cavities ever. I have good health/genes: one root canal is my only tooth issue. But I hated flossing and rarely did, and my dentists pointed out gum health over the decades, so here we are
Like Casandra, knowing the future won’t make you happy or get people to listen to you.
I wish you’d told me this years ago. I still struggle with needing to be proven right. It’s exhausting.
It’s still better to know than not know though, right? Right???
This is the way
Stress produces cortisol. Cortisol reduces your empathy.
Thanks, needed that today, really helps.
Not to belittle your point cause people should actively take care of their teeth but
Like Casandra, knowing the future won’t make you happy or get people to listen to you.
I’m guessing most people on Lemmy have already experienced this.
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Like I say at work: I’m here to share my knowledge and experience, not to be an Old Testament prophet. If you choose not to listen, it’s on you. And I keep minutes in case anyone asks “why didn’t you tell them?”
To watch your body deteriorate more and more, and your brain as well. It makes life harder, little by little, every day.
Old people don’t do so many things anymore because they just can’t, because it gets too hard.
Not doing things anymore that you have always done, that is one definition of dying (some start it very soon in their life). In the end you don’t do anything anymore.
Unforeseeable circumstances like injury or illness aside, much of the bodily degredation people succumb to is voluntary. Our bodies are very much “use it or lose it” and if you’re sedentary and disregard the importance of diet, you’ll have a bad time.
Things like arthritis and other autoimmune diseases are life changing, probably more common than you think, and probably affecting younger people than you think.
Not really.
Very little is really in our control, after all, despite what the medical world loves to shout at us.
Not saying don’t work at it (do what you can) aging is a real bitch and causes changes we simply have no way to prevent - and not just disease, just aging.
Wat? The first sentence was an acknowledgement of illness and injury. I’m not discounting those realities at all.
In the context of the message you were replying to you were definitely downplaying the proportion of people’s physical problems that are not in their control. The fact you did a slippery slimy acknowledgment that uncontrollable problems exist at all doesn’t absolve you of that.
“slippery slimy” wow, ok.
I’m already seeing this and regretting this in my 40s… relatively young, but a lot of little problems that my peers brush away as being inevitable, i know i could likely have avoided if i was more active in my youth.
Its all about probability. Nothing in guaranteed. But i could probably avoid a lot of issues if i was more aware and active in my youth…
I’m super active now, and i aspire to be like an 82 year old man i met who walks 20km every day
Someone on Lemmy told me your body will hurt all the time in your 30’s. On the subject, old people IRL were all like WTF no. I’m guessing the cohort here is pretty sedentary.
What a hybris.
Not really.
Very little is really in our control, after all, despite what the medical world loves to shout at us.
Not saying don’t work at it (do what you can) aging is a real bitch and causes changes we simply have no way to prevent - and not just disease, just aging.
I disagree, most of that is very much manageable. You can age very gracefully if you invest into yourself. In fact I do much more in my 40s than I ever did.
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.
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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.
-
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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The weight of experience.
The heartbreaks, failures, disappointments, and losses you experience in your youth accrue and do permanent damage over time. Also, everything you loved in your youth will be unrecognizably different or gone completely within 20-30 years. (Which is why I recommend people get in the habit of journaling.)
Also, you won’t digest food as well as you age and your digestion’s going to get weird.
your digestion’s going to get weird
Suddenly, I can’t handle porter beers anymore. All other beers and alcohols have the usual effects, but porters give the worst hangovers even with minimal consumption.
At random, I struggle with milk. Happened consistently for a while, I stopped drinking milk. I started again after a year or so, I was fine again. Nowadays once a year or so milk hits wrong and I can’t digest it, while I can most of the time.
Caffeine hits way more as well. I used to not care, now two coffees/a big coke and I can’t sleep for hours.
Something like 70% of adults are lactose intolerant. It’s well known milk was very much an infant thing and not really for adults as we evolved.
However we have a very powerful dairy lobby which tries to tell us we’re all wrong and we do want the extra cheese.
Regarding caffeine and alcohol: I feel like combination dehydration and awareness really hits. Like you become more aware of how things affect you, but I’ve also noticed a TON of people most don’t drink fucking water and enough water. Like, holy. Drink more gd water.
I’m usually significantly over the recommended water intake in summer, but in winter I kind of forget water exists and I have to force myself to drink
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Also, you won’t digest food as well as you age and your digestion’s going to get weird.
Me becoming lactose intolerant in my early to mid twenties hit me like a fucking truck in the worst way possible. I ate an ice cream sandwich one day and was constipated for a week.
It’s quite the opposite for me. It can have a delay of half an hour to a few hours, but eventually my digestion goes:
🚨 🚨 🚨 Lactose detected. 🚨🚨🚨
Everything OUT! RIGHT NOW!
I developed a pineapple allergy late in life. Not sure if it was due to COVID or aging but if I eat pineapple now, my tongue gets a bunch of circular sores that last for days.
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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 a 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’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
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.
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 hear old people talk about this, but then they run every large business and government, have most of the money, and get like the majority of government services as well.
That’s why country clubs and those 55+ walled suburban enclaves are a thing, I guess lol.
Some of the older people do that. Others are 85-year-old wal-mart greeters.
Yes. Obviously, there’s a whole lot of other axes at play here. What “race” and gender they are, how rich and powerful their parents were, if they had a career in computing or slide rule sales…
Just taken as a lump group, and compared to younger lump groups, though, there’s no contest.
Porque no los dos
Sure, maybe. I guess until it’s us young people’s turn, it’ll be hard to know how much is real, and how much is directionless crankyness or early dementia.
And FWIW there’s dumber things to build a hierarchy around. The very young understand little.
The fastest rise in homeless demographic are women over 50. GOP are directly putting your mothers and grandmothers on the street effectively murdering them
Now I want to know what demographic is second, and what demographics if any are shrinking. Do you have a link?
If the increase rates keep going like this, half the country will be homeless in ten years, the entire country in 25.
The second demographic that’s rising is children. The third latino/Hispanic.
The_Age_Structure_of_Contemporary_Homelessness_WEB.pdf https://share.google/ZKc3wwukXoFtp4RU6
State of Homelessness: 2025 Edition - National Alliance to End Homelessness https://share.google/wZ60XTDMMfEq68fwD
The Fastest-Growing Homeless Demographic – Aging in America News https://share.google/a6H4RHJBHu16QBG1l
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Your body ages faster than your brain. Your brain says “go ahead, jump!” Your body says, “aw fuck!”
It can feel like you’re slowly fading out of existence. Almost like you’re gradually becoming a ghost. No one cares that much about anything you have to say or anything you do because you’re old. I’m lucky because I have a home that’s mine and I’m surrounded by family and friends, but I’m starting to realise how hard it must be if you get old without those things. Like becoming invisible alone. Also, it’s pretty obvious now that the end is coming at some point. When it does I hope it’s quick. I hope I don’t see it coming and that I don’t end up being a burden on my loved ones.
I was going to use the phrase “becoming irrelevant”, but you did a better job.
