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.
What steps did you take? I got a gym membership and go 4-5 days a week and cook at home now instead of fast food/take out.
Pain.
You no longer don’t feel pain. You just manage it.
Yeah.
It seems like an obvious answer, but pain is it. It’s not like I didn’t know old people experienced body pain when I was younger, it just isn’t something you really have to think more deeply about. Once you actually get to the point where you’ve got one or more chronic injuries and you stop remembering what it’s like to have a “normal” day, then you realize how little you had to take it into account when you were younger and how little you understood what it was really like.
And beyond the physical pain, it’s just a huge bummer. You constantly have to manage medications, you have to constantly be careful not to do something to make it worse, you have to cancel weekend plans if things go south or stop doing certain things altogether.
Being in constant pain literally changes your personality. You get angrier. More depressed. You lash out at those closest to you.
YUP! Oh, you want to do an activity, any activity, you enjoy? Look forward to two-to-six weeks of a random body part being in pain from it.
I’m jumping on this to say that there’s a good amount of this pain that you can preemptively avoid by taking care of yourself while you’re younger.
Not everything. As you get older your body is stepping closer to the end of its lifespan. But if you don’t manage your fat/muscles/tendons/etc, you shouldn’t be as surprised when you suddenly find yourselves with bad knees that hurt if you ever try to get active again (that’s me!).
If you’re young: plan.
If you’re old: don’t give up. Just try your best to get as much quality of life back as you can, so the last few years of your life aren’t spent in a hospital or assistive living facility/nursing home/etc.
That was what I was going to comment. If you don’t stay JUST AS ACTIVE as you did when you were younger, you just ache. Getting up wrong is a thing. Sitting wrong is a thing. Existing can cause pain.
It’s weird and miserable. Luckily there’s distractions enough.
How old? I am rapidly nearing 60 and have considerably less pain than when younger because the migraines have nearly vanished and I do yoga instead of running. No chronic pain yet.
Perhaps having negative expectations helped as well, I was sure by now I’d have osteoporosis from early eating disorder, pain in joints from years of ballet, none of these shoes have dropped yet. I do feel weaker than my 40s which were my peak but not weaker than my 30s. And so, so much less pain with fewer migraines.
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.
I’m old enough to be experiencing this, but I actually like it like this. I had zero desire to own a Labubu when they came out recognizing it as just that generation’s flash-in-the-pan fad like beanie babies was for my generation.
So many online services are sold for things I do not care about so I have zero to manage on those.
I’m not seduced to buy the “latest slightly incremental increase in performance” item for 99% of products out there because I have something that does the job for me already.
Some of today’s pop music styles I don’t like, but there’s thousands of hours of music I do like (including a chunk of new stuff) so I’m not put out.
Its actually kind of great to be immune to so much of the advertising thats out there today because you simply don’t want what they’re selling because they’re targeting the younger generation.
People who push 100 must feel like they’re living on a totally different planet than the one they were born on.
I’m not even close to that old and I have trouble understanding GenZ conversation in public sometimes.
It’s already weird for me to think about what home interiors and cars used to look like when I was a kid. Those are totally different now.
On the bright side, the grocery store music has started playing bangers these days.
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.
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.
Perimenopause. Sheesh, warn a girl! (And her significant other).
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.
It’s the curse of time that the elder generation only has life lessons for what they went through and the younger generation will live through new things that no one had even imagined possible. So every generation has to figure it out for themselves. Our parents educate us for a world that will not exist when we grow up.
Sounds wise, but that’s a cop out though. The general lessons are almost always universal. Don’t stockpile vaccines for the omicron variant of covid, sure - that won’t occur again as viruses evolve, but…
- don’t dismantle pandemic preparedness procedures within government/healthcare
- do have a ready inventory and rapid response manufacturing and supply chain ready for PPE production/distribution
- don’t count on the general public to be reasonable and selfless in their response to a global threat
- do count on the wealthy, and the media they own, downplaying severity and pressuring you to risk your life for their uninterrupted profit.
ETC, ETC, ETC.
Nobody serious prepares their children for the exact scenarios they saw, they generalize what’s valuable and then finish by teaching them to be ready to realize that you may be in an entirely different situation, and that will be scary, but if you slow down, you’ll realize that there’s likely plenty you can take from my experience for helpful shortcuts.
The weight of the evil of the world never eases, only becomes more intense
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.
Your body ages faster than your brain. Your brain says “go ahead, jump!” Your body says, “aw fuck!”
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.
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.
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.
-
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.
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.
-
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.
I’m in the same boat, and it’s a mixed bag. When they were little I used to yearn for some time alone to do my own thing, and now that I have it I want nothing more than for them to be climbing all over me again.
At least you and I have each other ʕっ•ᴥ•ʔっ
It may get worse. My 3 have all grown up, graduated college and been quite successful. Unfortunately that success has led to job opportunities spread across the country… Oregon, Maine and Arkansas. Having them all gone and so far away is really, really hard. They are doing so well and I talk to them often, but I miss seeing them face-to-face and it’s rare to have them all together. It makes me very sad even though I’m happy for them.
