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.
The weight of the evil of the world never eases, only becomes more intense
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.
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
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.
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!
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 task or I would hit technical blocks that I need to stop for a long time. Now, I get higher expectations and is also more skilled. I am in a constant race against my own ideas and desires to try new things…
It is cool and fulfilling but it is terribly exhausting most of the time :(
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m in my fifties and still occasionally cringe about things I did last week.
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.
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.
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.
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.
-
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.
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.
The constant sex, the extra money, the sudden inclination to dunk at basketball, watching your dick get larger, hair getting more vibrant, skin getting fuller, the daily blowjobs, the endless promotions, fast cars, things getting cheaper and more affordable, watching your parents benchpressing monster trucks…
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.
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.
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
