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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
naaa...i want to talk more about best parts of getting older.
Less tolerance for bullshit drama. you seen enough of it. It just doesnt evolve.
Like learning to shift your time better. not waste so much of it like when you're young. especially on dumb drama. and if you learned well: you learned the parts you took in it and are accountable to the choices you make and get some control over your choices. like good people vs bad people to have in your life.
stay learning new things. It is good for the brain. get a hobby. play an instrument. learn to play your favorite songs. write a book about your life. You can always kick ass in life.
learn how to eat for nourishment. not just for pleasure. cook including both. then you can be even healthier than when you were young.
Move a lot more. Like a lot more. dont get used to just sitting on the couch. Couches can turn into a coffin. its fine to watch your shows for some of the day... just dont let the couch turn into a coffin under you. get walkin. especially if your job is sedantary. not enough time? wake half an hour earlier and walk. helps you fall asleep at night when you need to.
Less fear of death. You start seeing enough of it to get the idea. An acceptance. You can still be scared of the dying process though. especially dying with a lot of self imposed suffering like being catastrophically obese and unable to move. hoarding. being abandoned. abandoning yourself and not reaching out for help or doing something about mental health. letting yourself down on your own watch. but death itself is just more of a rebirth. The fear is that you lived too stupid/blaming everyone and holding no accountability and you dont want to have to do all of it all over again with the same amount of stupid. there is enough examples of how not to live. pay attention to that. you owe yourself on that.
Be wary of burnout. That shit takes years to recover from.
I'm thinking of moving from my higher paying career field to one that will pay me a nearly break even salary (for this living area) because my heart just isn't in this anymore. Talking days of staring at the screen and not doing anything. Feels bad yo.
Money ain't worth it. Find something that makes you happy!
Can confirm. Do not recommend.
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).
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your body ages faster than your brain. Your brain says “go ahead, jump!” Your body says, “aw fuck!”
