Getting Older Isn't What You Think

Speaking as someone who is actually getting old (just hit 60) this is a pretty click-baity title. Of course it's a gradual process that sneaks up on you, and of course you slow down and value quiet more, and of course you start wondering what's the matter with kids today. Does anyone really expect to just wake up one morning and say to themselves, "OMG, I'm old today"?

(Actually, and somewhat ironically, I do remember a very specific moment about 20 years ago when I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a window on a day when I was not looking my best and thinking, geez, who is that old guy looking back at me? Surely, that's not me.)

Bollocks, honestly. When I was 23, I had a girlfriend turning 20. At her birthday party, her friends were talking earnestly about how "depressing" [sic] it was to turn 20. Then one of them pointed at me and said with obvious consolation, "well, at least we're not old like Richard!". When I turned 28 I felt depressed about being old. I went to sit by the river with a friend, and one of his friends who came too had just turned 23. I sighed internally, "oh to be young again, to be just 23!". Shortly after I went to my great aunt's birthday party. She was turning 85. She asked me how old I was. When I told her, she said, "28! A mere spring chicken!". From that point on, I decided never to care about how old I was. For 95% of your life, possibly more, there is someone who thinks you are old, and someone who thinks you are young. Don't think about it, work on the assumption you're young enough to do whatever you want, and give it a shot. You're really only old when you're dead.

I'm 48 and one thing I universally notice, among my friends, is that they don't understand that GAME OVER is near and they should hurry up and do what the want to do. Instead they still feel like they are young, taking me sometimes for crazy for saying: now we are old, there are, if we are lucky, 20, 30 good years ahead of us. So let's use them at our best.

Our conversations amongst ourselves turn to our ailments. The bell curve of people that pass before you do starts to accelerate. My skin, with the help of the sun, has twice tried to -KILL- me.

But the biggie were the veins in my legs. The valves are giving out, my feet are too far from my heart. 15% of my blood isn't getting properly oxygenated.

And then I got that taken care of. A procedure for a thing my father had (he passed 20 years ago)...and I'm really sad he didn't experience it.

Because the treatment made my feel 15 years younger. My balance is better (a factor of the nerves now getting oxygen), my foot and knee stopped hurting....and what gets me is both how much BETTER I feel, but that it was my body WEARING OUT.

Wilfred Brimley (a name that dates me merely by mentioning it) was my age in Cocoon (look it up, kids)...that was where all the old, used up, worn out people found rejuvenation.

I don't feel that old...doubly so now that my circulation has improved.

But you and I both know of 90 year olds that are 'younger' than some 60 year olds.

I am 53 and I have 2 teenage children and work with mostly Millennials and Gen Z, and I can honestly say I prefer hanging out with people younger than me. I have dinner/drinks with various friend groups consisting of 50-60 yr olds and all they seem to do is complain about the following: Health, Politics, Younger People. And the conversation inevitably turns to telling stories of the glory days. When when I am with younger people, I see there is still hope, ambition and energy. I know it’s all part of the aging process but many of these older friends are reluctant to leave their little domains and try anything new. I feel like a 35-year-old trapped in a 50 year old’s body.

I turned 50 last year. I'm biased to glass half full rather than half empty. I noticed a lot of my friends mentally checked out around their forties already. I've been trying to not do that. Fifty is just a number. It doesn't mean anything. There's less left of your life every day after you get born. Some die young, some die old. I could die tomorrow, I could go on existing for another fifty years. I'm an optimist. So, glass half full and plenty left to do and experience. There is a bit of urgency to get shit done because the clock is ticking. You do get more aware of that as you get older.

You don't really get wiser as you age. Just scarred by experience. It takes me longer to do some of the things I used to do quicker. And I'm also doing things that I wouldn't have been able to do earlier in my life because you learn a lot as you progress through the years. It's a mixed bag.

I actually like what I do professionally. So, I'm not looking forward to retiring. I'm actually kind of dreading having to do that because of physical limitations or being regarded too old by others. I plan to stay active as long as I can. Regardless of financials. What comes after that is basically waiting to die. Nice if you can make that enjoyable and stretch it a bit. But for most people that's not a huge part of their life, or the best. Or what defines them for others when they are gone.

A saying that increasingly resonates with me (50's) is that inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.

I think this idea that you become a fundamentally different person as you age is wrong. Things do change - the physical changes of ageing suck, mentally I'm more at peace than I was when I was younger.

But I'm still basically me. I would love for us to solve the problem of physical decrepitude with aging. Even if we lived no longer.

> You stop performing. You stop pretending. And that’s freedom.

Reminds me of a talk Ian McKellen gave somewhere, where he says that we're always wearing costumes and acting.

I can relate, I've acted when I was younger, to try to fit in, be acceptable, make friends.

A while ago I stopped caring. I have no friends on earth, and I'm fine with it. The few times I tried to connect with people while allowing myself to fully be myself, it never worked.

I wonder if they were still just acting.

The older I get, the more I've come to appreciate that "old" doesn't mean much. There are people in their late 30s that act like the median 60-year old. There are people in their 60s that act like the median 40-year old. Some people are inactive, less curious, and opposed to change early on. Others are active, curious, and always learning and growing even in their 70s.

I'm 69, starting a cofounder search for a new venture in the blockchain space. I don't feel any less capable than I was. I suppose I may have a bit of acquired "wisdom". I'm wondering how much ageism will be in my way.

I've lived through a lot. Had some successes; also had cancer (I'm 8 years out from that and my statistical outlook is excellent).

I like to think of people like Clint Eastwood, still capably directing in his 90's, and Eliot Carter, who was still writing chamber music post-100 that gets performed. 69 is nothing.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-robinson-46a66/

I am 54 and have tendonitis for two weeks after moving, so bad that I can barely lift a full coffee mug with my strong arm.

I moved three times two years ago with zero issues.

Also went to the ER with atrial fibrillation a year ago and now have a prostate cancer scare.

Also lost both parents in the last two years.

Age 44 was paradise compared to this.

In the 1980s, I very much took to heart Grace Hopper’s advice that it’s easier to apologize than to get permission. This suited 20-something me just fine.

Now I’m more in the camp of “Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment”.

> often blamed for the world’s problems or pitted against younger generations

Generation pitting is a red herring. Divide and conquer has always been a useful technique to distract from the real causes, usually by those behind them.

For me, I feel like many of the thrills that I experienced in my 20s are mostly gone. It gets old after you've had your thousandth expensive cocktail or your hundredth wrecked morning from going to bed at 4am.

I still very much enjoy those things, don't get me wrong; it's just not as OMG as it was in my 20s.

There's also the money factor. Much of my 20s was spent doing more with less. Exchange/Zimbra servers with PCs people threw away. Fighting with kexts at 3am so that I could get Wi-Fi working on OS X Tiger on my old Windows laptop. Waiting 30 minutes for the off-peak N train at 01:00 after drinking too much. That sort of thing.

I can afford comfort now. I pay for Fastmail. I have all of the Apple kit. When I'm doing something late at night in NYC, I take an Uber. That's been the best part of getting old for me.

Despite all of this, I think you're only as old as you feel. Example. This dude entered my powerlifting gym the other day. He was easily in his 80s. He asked me when the next powerlifting meet was.

I didn't know and couldn't help him, but I definitely knew that he is what I want to be when I grow up.

(An aside. One thing I'm really glad I learned recently is how to enjoy pacing drinks.

It takes me an hour to drink a good old fashioned, or even a shot of whiskey with some ice. A heavy bourbon barrel aged stout is an actual two hour session for me.

I was forced into doing this because of GERD, which is more under control now, but being able to really enjoy my drinks without getting drunk or destroying my sleep quality is a great acquired benefit.

Another benefit from doing this is realizing that staying out late is ONLY possible if you're going to drink a lot.

It's harder to drink a lot when you drink slowly, so you ultimately become the "old guy" that ducks at 20:00.

Given that I've done so many late nights out, I'm okay with that trade-off!)

You know you are old when you look out the kitchen window, see it is raining, and think to yourself, "This is good for the garden".

The good stuff, if you're lucky, is that you figure out what you want and care a lot less about what other people think (except at 2am when one likes to ponder embarrassing incidents across the decades).

The bad stuff, unless you're lucky, is that people you love keep dying all the fucking time.

I believe they call it "the human condition" ... but then I'm only in my 50s, so I guess we'll see?

I had a near-death health emergency 5 years ago in my late 30s, which turned out to be due to a chronic but perfectly manageable set of conditions I didn't know I had been developing.

Part of that management is a commitment to healthy living: daily vigorous exercise, dietary restrictions, and sleep optimization. I was on and off in shape before then, but the motivation to avoid sliding into a very marked decline due to those conditions has resulted in my achieving better health and higher fitness now in my early 40s than I had for most of my 30s (even some of my 20s), and the numbers don't lie.

Ceteris paribus, if I had adopted this lifestyle in my 20s and 30s I'd probably have then outperformed my current self, and I certainly cannot recover as quickly now from overexertion, but that's besides the point. Do we look at people in their 20s with cystic fibrosis or in 30s with multiple sclerosis and say they're doing "better" than the average person in their 40s or 50s optimizing their health?

I'm 50 and my life isn't what I wanted it to be, and now I'm out of time. It sucks.

I laugh at 20 somethings that consider mid/late 30's as "old." Blink and you'll be here too with the same receding hairline, pal.

My body of course is slowing down, to some degree my mind, but I very much feel like a 20 year old at heart and don't imagine that will change. I do at some point probably need to stop living like one, though.

I remember how shocked I was when my buddy got divorced and said, "There. This is a midlife crisis situation. All I need now is a red sports car."

And I said, "Midlife?"

And he replied, "Yeah dude. We're literally in the middle of our life expectancy."

That's when it dawned on me. I had gotten married just the year before. I also became a father at the same age my own father was when I left home for college. The interesting thing is that my timeline matches those in my social-economic cohort. It seems like in that cohort, we are hitting our life stages a lot later than previous generations so there is a discrepancy between our physical age and how it feels to some of us.

I just hit 60. For the past 3 or so years I've always had some physical problem that is longer-term. Most of them are muscle strains (partially torn rotator cuff last year, plantar fascitis before that), and pretty annoying to keep ending up in PT for something new after many years of pretty robust health. Up to a few years ago I was going on 1-2 hour hikes 2-3 times a week and have always been very flexible due to doing yoga at a young age. I can bend over knees straight and put my palms flat on the floor. It's been trying to get into my head that my body just isn't what it used to be.

I seriously don't know what I would do with myself in my old age if I didn't have a project I had to work on.

In my case it's a couple of programming ideas I like to work on, but I guess building/sewing/music-making/etc. might give other people the same sense of purpose.

I was playing cricket with my friends, who had come as families. I am 43. A particular couple had married recently, and my wife had a small talk with the other player's wife. Because we were playing in the same game as equals, and then having friendly chat the age difference did not come up in our thinking. Also, the physique and my perception of the looks were a bit similar too. But casually, when I learnt about the age, I realised that they were 20 years younger to me. I had already started college when they were born has babies. This comparison led to think a bit differently when having a perception about people and time. It was an interesting realization for me.

Everyone is their current age for the first time.

It's almost a tautology, but when I remember it, I feel more dignified about my age and more empathetic for others' age anxiety.

Personally, I can't indulge in the cliche "getting older" attitude and I have little patience for people who do. I've watched Boomers and GenX talk themselves into being decrepit before their time, a habit that in my mind amounts to self-harm. And I've seen it among my millennial peers starting in our 20's (I'm currently early 40's).

The problem is, aging as I have experienced it bears virtually no relation to the aging that Boomers (and the media) insisted we would endure. I look around at my friend group and dating pool and I see people in the prime of their lives: full of energy, not totally stupid anymore, and usually with a decent career figured out. Boomers at that same juncture in their own lives were self-identifying as "over the hill" and obsessing over retirement.

I'd go as far as to say that one the happiest surprises of my life so far has been learning how the aging I was raised to fear is almost entirely a myth. (not to say it was a myth for older generations, who did live and age in a somewhat rougher world)

This might sound silly but I did have a specific moment where I realized “oh I am a ‘mister’ now”. I was 25 and just walking on a city street. Nothing special was happening, I didn’t overhear anyone talking about age. I just noticed it. Legally I had been an adult for quite some time but I just noticed that I had internalized that.

I somewhat expected to have something similar for “old”. It will of course happen gradually, but I will realize it’s part of what I am suddenly.

Can't really relate, to be honest. I feel like I'm more or less still the same person I was when I was 4 years old, I just have more evidence to work with now.

I'm about the same age as the writer and I recall seeing women in heels at Glastonbury over 25 years ago. I'm on the side of sensible shoes on a farm, but it's more atmospheric if people dress up.

Are there any websites where you can see time lapse photo sets of people growing older? Not sure if I should want to see that, but I'm curious.

53 here. The other day I offhandedly mentioned to my S.O. that I have dirty-blonde hair. "Maybe 20 years ago," she said. "You're squarely in the grey today."

You don't just suddenly see yourself as an old fogie. You feel the same inside; maybe more responsible, more jaded, more self-assured, less neurotic or insecure, but you're still the same. But that mirror and this slowly aging body, man. It will outpace your change in perception of yourself. I tried growing my hair out during COVID and I realized I resembled Ron Jeremy, which horrified me. Having a kid just accelerated my aging and health plummet. It's rough.

But again, there's still, like, an immutable element of you inside.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE: It has been ABSOLUTELY SPECTACULAR as a technologist to witness the progression of tech over the last 50 years firsthand. And I have a soon-to-be 4 year old kid (and I could frankly be his grandparent) who I will be imparting the age-old wisdom of the 1980's (and a lifetime of tech wisdom) to. =)

Amazing website! Very refreshing to see a well designed page, since most articles submitted here lean towards being minimal.

Getting older isn't what is used to be.

52 years old here. Getting that age is sometimes relieving. I am not that stupid as back then. Got wealthier too. So i bought a classic Vespa scooter lately, couldnt have afforded that thing back then. I love tape decks and record players again, that stuff was also very expensive, now i get it for around 50 € and repair and maintain it myself. Wisdom comes with age, no matter what profession or job you are working as long as you stay interested. Whats coming back as boomerang are the stupid decisions i made when i was younger, now i know better and would like to turn back time. But i think thats pretty normal in all walks of life.

I'm the guy that shows up at co-workers b'days, when they're lamenting getting older, and says, "Ah, to be 50 again."

Give them some perspective before I go back to yelling at clouds.

> this whole ageing conversation has been dominated by the Boomers, often blamed for the world’s problems or pitted against younger generations. A tad unfair.

I'm in my mid-fourties and until recently, it seemed logical & righteous to place blame at the boomers' feet. Today it seems a lazy and naive, ultimately serving to further atomize/neuter the next generation. I expect my comeuppance is imminent. Oh well.

Getting older for me (66) just means more memories. And I really want to go back, but I can't.

As I read this I kept thinking "she seems awfully young to me" and "what did I expect?"

“But time makes you bolder/Even children get older/And I'm getting older too.” -Stevie Nicks, “Landslide”

> I guess I’m feeling reflective. I’m turning 50 soon.

LoL. Being in my early 60s I guess I'm feeling like this guy felt when the pizza guy in his anecdote said he felt old and wise at 36.

There was a time the only thing in my fridge was a six-pack and a jar of mustard, and now I alphabetize my spices and own three types of salt. Not because I aged, but because I noticed. We used to chase every signal, every glitch in the matrix, now I chase quiet mornings and working power supplies. The trick wasn’t learning to settle down; it was learning what noise to ignore.

No, getting old isn't what _you_ think...

In response to:

> I’m turning 50 soon

I'd have to reply with:

> “Add a decade, mate, and then we’ll talk…”

I felt young all through my 50s, and was routinely running 12 to 20 miles/week. But things really took a turn, for the elder, in the first 1/2 of my 60s. This is where I currently sit.

I have older friends who say, STFU, you don't know s1it about old until you're at least in your 70s, and in the modern world most people don't start to feel geriatric until well into their 80s.

We almost need a new age designation between traditional "middle-aged" and "old", sort of like the recent addition of "tween-ager".

My cynicism and skepticism are way up. That's mostly because I actually have seen most emerging trends before. Not the actual tech, but the corporate application of whatever shiny new thing is all gaga at the moment.

The most depressing part, is confirmation that it is nearly impossible for new generations to learn from those ahead. This is mostly confirmed by my own behavior in my youth so closely resembling what I observe in current youth.

Don't worry, wealth is like rust, it never sleeps. And the ever ratcheting vise is clamping down on the young. I'm sure it's all because "old people ruined everything!"

All I can say to that is: STFU...

Actually, I could say a lot more, but no one would listen anyway...

The one thing I stay cognizant of is that both the opportunities, challenges and strategies to get ahead are different today in technology than when I graduated in 1996. It helps that I was in enterprise/corporate dev until I was in my mid 40s and then fell into BigTech and started talking to and becoming friends with new grads.

I’m not in BigTech now and would rather get an anal probe with a cactus than ever go back. But I’m also not one of these old boomers at 50 who don’t understand why people “grind leetcode” to get into the top paying companies and I recommend they do so.

On that same note, even as late as 2016, I got my house built in the burbs of Atlanta in the good school system for $335K.

That wouldn’t be possible now. I sold it 8 years later for twice the price and moved. But I couldn’t comfortably afford it on what senior enterprise devs still make in Atlanta theses days (I no longer live there and I pivoted slightly from enterprise dev)

Disclaimer: 55 year old here. I've been programming computers since I was 8. I say this only so that it is understood that I have seen multiple generations of humanity acquiring and discarding multiple iterations of technology, and can punctuate my life by the name of the system your parents have in the attic, probably. As a hacker.

Getting old really sneaks up on you. You're having your best years, then you're having some more best years, and then .. suddenly .. you're in the middle of some years that aren't going so great, and well .. things go a bit down-hill from there.

Which is to say don't take your youth for granted. 55 is not 'that' old, but I can count through the decades the souls I've seen come and go, finally. And I know I could soon be among them.

So as I consider how quickly the last 10 years have passed, and how quickly the next 10 years may pass, if at all, I can say this: don't waste your time. Its all you've truly got. Material things come and go and don't mean anything - the people you meet along the way, the wonderful, intelligent and inspiring things you will see - this is what life is providing you.

Don't take it for granted.