I think it's that you don't feel older mentally. I though I would feel a certain maturity once I reached an age where I had a solid, advancing career and owned a house. Turns out, I feel pretty much the same and am just better at dealing with things that arise and pretending that I'm mature. My body hurts more and my face looks older, but I don't feel all that different. I'm sure I've mentally changed to some extent, and I notice it more when I talk to younger people, but I still feel the same.
This. Still feel and act as I did at thirty. This is going to get sad eventually.
So far nothing like my 'parents' thankfully.
I used to think this. I was in my late 20s but still felt like a teenager in my head.
At some point in the last few years, after I crossed into my early 30s, I realized that wasn't true anymore. I don't feel like a teenager, I just feel like a 20 something now. Which is still incorrect but there's definitely been a shift.
Maybe it stopped because when I'm around teenagers, I realize how much distance I feel from them. Not in a "kids these days" way, just in a general sense. A feeling like "...oh...I'm not like this anymore. I remember being like this, I still kind of am, but I haven't really been like this in a while." The juxtaposition is so evident that my unconscious self-perception can't maintain the denial.
I certainly don't feel my age, but my "internal age" (so to speak) has progressed a bit. I guess it's a sliding scale.
I'm in my sixth decade. It's not bad. Finally not giving any fucks at all. It's a sliding scale.
Being Gen X is pretty good.
Enjoy.
Same for me. I don't sweat the small stuff anymore, and fairly much everything is small stuff now.
I think that you don't even notice yourself maturing because it is so gradual. It comes very slowly with life experience. You don't do something impulsive or you handle an emotional situation a little better or you make a difficult decision that younger you wouldn't. I think back to even just a few years ago sometimes and think "What a fuckin idiot that guy was". Sounds like pretending to be mature is almost the same thing as being it
I don't really feel different or more mature or smarter or something, but starting to notice just plain... I dunno, experience? Like I see an 18 year doing something stupid, and I know it's stupid because I did the same thing.
Thankfully, I also still realize just how useful and appreciated my advice will be, so I keep quiet.
But yeah, the BIG generational gap I'm noticing is that I'm okay with playing. Like, gaming, rpg, boardgames, larp. That's cool with my generation and the newer ones. But for the vast majority of 50+ people, admitting that you like having fun is anathema for some reason.
Like I see an 18 year doing something stupid, and I know it's stupid because I did the same thing.
It's weird becaude I never identified with any of this. I never did anything wild and crazy in my teens and so I've never understood when people excuse wild and self destructive behavior as "they are just teens and they'll learn".
I don't mean to say that I've always been more mature than my peers (my humor is very crude and immature)...just that I have never understood being impulsive and reckless, even as a teen.
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It's very common for teens to be impulsive and reckless because they're basically biologically programmed to be so. It's not something they can control, really, it's something they're experiencing. If you didn't go through that, it's all good, probably safer frankly, but it's not like people are aberrant for being reckless while maturing.
I didn't say that it doesn't happen to people. I'm just saying I never understood it because I never experienced that and can't comprehend the mindset. I know I'm not the only person on the planet with the same experience either.
But yeah, the BIG generational gap I'm noticing is that I'm okay with playing. Like, gaming, rpg, boardgames, larp. That's cool with my generation and the newer ones. But for the vast majority of 50+ people, admitting that you like having fun is anathema for some reason.
I'm in my 40s and noticed that as well. People 10 years older than me (now in their 50s) have been telling me I'm too old for games for over 20 years now. I kind of feel bad for them, like they just missed out on being able to enjoy games. Personally, I'm looking forward to LAN parties in the nursing home.
Preach. I just turned 45 and I'm finally starting to physically feel older, but mentally I feel better than ever. I had a lot of mental issues due to being raised in an abusive household and I finally buckled down and got a lot of therapy. I'm not 100% and never will be, but I'm 90% and fighting for more every day. It's great, feeling like I actually have my shit together.
Talking to younger people, people in their twenties mostly, is a bit depressing, though. I'm so out of touch with their culture and I don't know where to even start to get caught up. One lady offhandedly said something "slaps" and I had to ask if that's good or bad. Ughhhhhhhh.
I came here to write this.
I can only add that with years I started doing the same stupid things with no regrets.
Looking back, it would be hard to explain to the younger me, that there are no adults, but just ugly kinds.
This hit me more than a decade ago but the realization that nobody really knows what they're doing. Most people wing it their entire lives.
This one, everyone is winging it, and hopefully you get enough smart people in a room together they can come up with a solution.
Cooperative smart people. (someone who works with a lot of uncooperative smart people, smarter than me at least)
Don't. I manage smart people. Divide the territory up. Getting them to work together at the edges. People are territorial, smart people are harder because they can give good reasons why they should get more territory. Everyone has their zone of control and everyone is happy.
Also reminder: it is almost always better to have someone in pissing out vs out and pissing in.
I was watching Peep Show recently and at one point Mark says "The world's just people walking around, going in to rooms and saying things." and that's the most succinct description of how the world works I think.
How fast time passes. Years pass very quickly now and the view of the end is approaching faster than I would like.
You didn't ask for advice, but please consider journaling or writing a personal blog. I find that the time passes faster because I have fewer novel experiences as I get older. If I put a dedicated effort into remembering what was unique about my recent days, it feels like I live more of them.
Yeah I'm guessing this has to be why time feels to pass faster. When you're growing, there are so many milestones and rapid changes from ages 0 to maybe 22. Beyond that, everything is the same until you die. That's an interesting way to make it longer.
Each time period (week, year etc) is a smaller proportion of your life.
Anything that happened when I was much younger can't be resolved easily to the nearest year, unless I can identify a specific immutable event like a specific birthday.
I've found making playlists based on music releases from each year helps with this.. for me I can almost immediately remember a year or time period just by hearing a song
Quite a few tracks - does one say that anymore? - I am convinced are 1980s are actually 1990s. I'm Gen X so I should be getting that distinction right!
You can just use the songs you listened to most in a given year too. Assuming you're mainly listening to old music, my original suggestion probably won't work.
Mentally, I still feel like I am the same person as back when I was a teenager, until I actually meet some real teenagers and thought "oh, they are a bunch of children.", and then "wait, was I actually as immature as them when I was a teen? That's not the way I remembered it."
Exactly! When I was younger I wasn't that immature and stupid... Thinks back to when I was younger. OH! Shit. Yes I was.
It's nice to have somewhere where I can stop being a grown-up for a little bit and make some dumb jokes.
The toll of core life events. Having a child, taking care of elderly grandparents/parents. I thought it would be easier. Not easy but "he's not heavy; he's my brother" kind of easier. Maybe it's me, but it feels like I'm constantly running on empty. Caregiver burnout is a real beast.
Yes, being someone’s caregiver can burn you out in ways you didn’t know you could get burnt out. I’ve had the unfortunate experience of being in two end-of-life care giver situations for immediate family in my life and I still haven’t fully realized the complete toll that has had on me.
I'm constantly telling my wife that I feel like I've been in emergency red alert mode for the past year and a half and the idea of another child just frightens me. You want to do this shit again? This has been the worst experience of my life. She keeps saying the next one won't be special needs but I'm good, no more kids for me, divorce me and marry someone else if you need to do that.
Man, that hurts. Even minor needs can make parenting double difficult in a world designed now for both parents working. I hope it gets better.
I feel like every conversation I have with my wife at the end of the day is which of us is able to convince the other that we are the more tired one.
Each additional decade of age seems half as long as the previous one was.
0-10 took forever
10-20 took 20 years
20-30 took 10 years
30-40 took 5 years
I'm 40 and it feels like 50 is next year already.
Uff... I felt this.
This is for you. From another comment
- Even WWII is closer to my birth than I am.
That makes sense based on your perception of time. 0-10 was your whole life doubling, over and over. 10-20, your life doubled. 20-30 your life will increase 33%. And so on.
The amount of pure bullshit I have to go through every day just for an hour of enjoyment in the evenings.
Dude, retirement is where it's at. I retired early and it's amazing. It took sacrifices (modest home, aggressively paying off mortgage, no fancy cars) but it's so worth it. Most people don't take good enough care of themselves and by the time they retire they no longer have their health. :(
I think seeing how fast many people turn into people they would not have liked when they were younger. It's probably part of growing up but many people seem to not remember what they wanted to do better than their parents.
This is painful. My wife's friend turned into her (wife's) mother, the person who she previously claimed she most hated. In this individual's case it's that when she had kids she stopped caring about doing better.
For me it was the opposite. I remember one day, when i had only one very young child, that i sounded like my mother. That was the incentive to turn it around. It was hard work and there was no internet yet to give me advice.
Also, when my kids were in their teens i found it very helpful when i read a brochure about triple p parenting. I could not join them for a course, but the tip that changed a lot was; complimenting my kids instead *for good behavior *of berating them when they did something that was not 'good'. The results were really good and i felt happier in the process, because it was much nicer to compliment my kids instead of hearing yourself being annoyed when they did something 'bad'.
Edited to add a clarification, in italics
I'm not sure I get it, maybe because I'm not a native speaker. So you said something like 'Great job buddy, that was very much not good!'?
No, i started focusing on the things they did well, instead of focusing on the negative. It's quite easy to only see which behavior is not acceptable and focus on that. But if kids do something positive, it's easy to take it for granted, instead of for instance complimenting them. In other words, my perspective changed.
If i look at my parents; they were always punishing me and if i behaved in a way they liked, they would say nothing, because that is the way i had to be. So, in their eyes it was normal to behave and that did not need to be complimented. So, their focus was exclusively on punishment, no rewards.
Hope this makes a bit more sense (not a native speaker either)
Thanks that makes a lot more sense. I try to strike a balance, but focusing on the positive sounds gold. I'll give it a try.
Praise vs criticism. So on balance more noticing and complimenting of the good they do, over criticizing their bad actions. Actually a lot more effective than criticism, in fact some schools purposefully ignore bad behaviour (within reason) while emphasizing praise for good behaviour.
My kids are quite young still but I've been using a philosophy of both carrot and stick with my threenager and toddler. Reward good behavior first, punish bad behavior when that doesn't work
I've noticed 99% of parents become so fucking boring to hangout with. They either stop coming out, or are tame versions of their past selves.
I can see how life has brought out deep compassion in me. But I imagine my younger self would hate me and think of me as a pushover who is not enjoying life, basically a loser who wasn't radical enough.
How "not old" everything is. I'm not old, but when I was young I thought people my age were at the general end of one's life. People also are surprisingly clueless.
Same idea but in, perhaps, a different sense:
When I was young, landing on the moon and the US war with Vietnam were all “in the past” and when I was young everything “in the past” had equal weighting and distance from my existence.
As I get older, I look back on things with the perspective of equidistance, time-wise, from my birth (or sometimes from ~adulthood) and events within that ever growing range start feeling like “not that long ago”
- The Vietnam war ended only 3 years before I was born!
- Apollo 11 was less than a decade before I was born. I’ve experienced that 9 year timespan three times in conscious memory and five times in my life.
- Even WWII is closer to my birth than I am.
- Heck, even the Great Depression was just starting to recover.
The older I get, the more recent everything seems.
I relate very much with you on this comment.
It's bizarre to me these days to really realize and contemplate how close events like WW2, Kennedy's assassination, the moon landing, Woodstock, etcetera actually all were to my birth.
But as a child and even into my early 20s most of those events felt like practically an eternity away.
It really puts it into perspective when I think about the fact that I moved out of my parents' home and started working full time over 30 years ago...
First saw the Grateful Dead in concert over 30 years ago... They'd already been performing for over 25 years at that point and seemed like such a massive juggernaut that had just sort of always been around.
when I was young everything “in the past” had equal weighting and distance from my existence.
As a young person I relate to this feeling. Sometimes I forget how close to my birth some historical events were. Like, 9/11 was just a couple years before my birth, and the end of the USSR was closer to my birth than I am (and by quite a margin). Which... to me, the USSR feels very much "in the past".
How much disdain I have for change (“they are just making it worse!”) aka grumpy old man syndrome
If it was around before you were born, it's perfectly natural.
If it was invented when you were younger than 10, it's new, cool, and exciting.
Invented between ages 10 and 25? Innovative.
Between 25 and 40? Silly to replace something that was working fine.
Over 40? The work of the Devil!!
Many things are really just getting worse, though.
I'm in my 20s, I love new stuff, and am excited for new technologies...
But the stuff that existed for the last 5-10 years? Yeah, they're just getting objectively worse. From social media, to Google, to basically almost anything that private companies control.
Not everything is getting worse, but enough are that it may be difficult to discern at times.
Enshittification is real and driven by profits. We're out of the "wild west" phase of the internet, companies are now trying to capitalize every last square inch of it.
I work in IT. I tell everyone once I retire all the electronics are gone and I'll be on my front porch shaking my fist at the clouds.
Honestly, this one sometimes surprises me too.
Like, I'm okay with it... I've accepted being the grumpy old man but it still surprises me how often it feels like my default state the older I get.
My friends a GP in the UK and they've said there's been an increasing amount of people come in for "tiredness".
It's probably more about the state of this world rather than your age
Yeah you’re not wrong.
I feel like I can’t get ahead. Always running. Hell, I even do well for myself, good job and income. There’s always “just one more [X]”. And then we die.
I've only gotten MORE healthy and strong.
My sex drive hasn't gone down like media tells me
Retirement is a fantasy
When I look at homeless people I think 'that could be me in 4 months if I miss 2 weeks of work.
That i succeeded in raising my children much better than my parents raised me. As a result, my now adult kids are happy, compassionate, have a good life, and they really love me :-)
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My 'resolution' this year was to be ruder to people. I've spent my whole adult life feeling obliged to be chronically nice and polite at all times. It's definitely the right position to take generally but sometimes a little bit of rudeness is warranted. I don't have to let old people at the bus stop talk at me rather than with me; I can tell them to fuck off if they're being bigoted or obnoxious. I don't have to let the pharmacist condescend to me when I was right about my prescription being ready; I can say 'I told you so', no matter how childish it might be.
The I-don't-give-a-fuck attitude has done wonders for my mental health
Same. If I hear you say out loud some anti-lgbtq crap you read on Facebook I'm calling you out, and I don't need to be a prick about it, but condescension goes a long way.
I've acquired this recently and it's made work a lot easier to deal with.
I've realised nobody ever gets fired in the company I work in (and I would 100% take the severance package if offered redundancy). I've spent 8 years being a team player, giving extra hours for nothing, and becoming one of the most knowledgeable people in the world for our system, only to be given a middle finger of a raise after a 6month fight (in which I was told almost immediately they'd take care of me and I'd be happy with it.
Well. Fuck them and their 7.5%.
Ill take the minimal amount of extra cash but as far as I'm concerned that's SOME of my back pay for the efforts over the last 8 years. I am putting 10% effort into my job and 90% into finding a new one now (which will come with another 5% for a sideways move anyway).
A few years ago I wouldn't be able to stop myself trying to please everyone even after all that, it's so refreshing being able to turn off that switch which says I should care about my job. All it took was nearly a decade of mistreatment before realising they didn't give a shit about me....
The thought of dying gains more optimism because you get more and more fatigued by people and their bullshit. The toxicity, self-entitlment, tribalism, narcissism, hate... There's enough of them out there to just ruin it all enough that it gets exhausting and saddening. I figure by my old age, I'll be happy with checking out.
If there's an afterlife and it has to be shared with people of Earth again, I'll be so pissed off.
How much older people "don't know fuck about fuck".
As youngling I thought elder know something and I believed them.
Now I know they didn't know anything, same as me and my friends don't.
This is the reason my wife and I will admit we don't know to our kiddo. When possible we explain how we can find out. Growing up without a sense of how being older actually is has been wild.
When I was a kid I thought adults knew stuff and had life figured out. I grew up to realize that no one knows shit.
Same. Grown ups have all the answers. Until I became one and learned there are 3 types of grownups: -people who think they have the answers and think you are the dumbass -people who know they don't know stuff and only sometimes think you are the dumbass -people who don't know stuff, don't know what they don't know, could not give a crap about what they should know and you are in their way.
The fact that I continue to grow older. I've had multiple horrifically potentially fatal health issues that should have killed me decades ago but I'm still here and somehow healthier. Wtf.
So agreed. Living on includes facing death. It's kinda confusing, this strong idea we have of The End. Reality is we get to think its over many times before it is.
How much everything still hurts. Physically, emotionally, everything. How much I hate that I'm still trucking away, trying to do the right thing.
And it's so lonely.
It doesn’t have to be lonely. Just find some hobby and join a group. Most people younger or older feel great about having older people talk about projects and things they’re passionate about. It’s surprisingly welcoming.
It's kind of a privilege to have time or energy for things like that. I'm a single parent of abused children with significant mental health issues, and was a victim myself. Any time I find is spent maintaining my house or crying into my pillow. If my oldest manages to become a functional adult, maybe I'll eke out some scraps of energy.
I hope you do. It's hard to parent through trauma, especially when you have to maintain a job as well. I'm sure you are a great parent though and your kids have their best chance at being functional adults because of you. Stay strong❤️
It turned out that I couldn’t be or do anything I wanted after all. All that money I earn goes to other people.
Yeah they say things like "just be yourself" and "you can do anything" but generally if you actually try it people get really mad lol.