I know that folks on the Internet are largely a pretty young bunch, but you don’t have to be a grandpa to have had a nasty dose of your own mortality served to you. So what first triggered that sense of “I’m not as young as I used to be” in you? When did you first realize that you generation is not the future anymore, it is the present.
For me it was two things. First, when Playboy Playmates started regularly being younger than me, that was a nasty shock. It also made me feel doubly bad because before they were sort of unattainable because they were a different generation than me, but now they are my generation or have simply passed me by.
Second was when I realized that there are teenagers around who don’t remember the Reagan administration. Hell, there are teenagers around who weren’t born in the eighties! I don’t care how old you think you are, if you were not born at least in the eighties you are not a person, you are a toddler who needs to go back home and watch re-runs of Rugrats. I mean crap, these kids have never even played with a regular Nintendo! How can you be a child in America and not have played with an NES?! It is unnatural I tell ya!
When I found my first gray hair. When the neighborhood child I was talking to didn’t understand what I meant when I said I had a rotary dial telephone. When I said something about a record store and my nephew didn’t know what a record is.
I think I was officially old on the day last year when a kid at work, who graduated with a degree in recording engineering, busted the stylus off a $300 cartridge trying to play a record, and then explained that he’d never seen a turntable before.
When all those damn salesgirls started calling me “Ma’am!” And when I started noticing that soldiers, pro football players, police and doctors were younger than me. My optometrist graduated 3 years ago! My father’s heart specialist is my age!
Then I went to the bar and got carded. Amazing how something that used to be embarassing is now the highlight of my evening.
I knew I was old when a guy told me he had not only never driven a column mounted stick shift; he had never even seen one. My generation is neither the future or the present—we are the past.
One day you look up and you see that your boss is now younger than you. You go to the doctor and he’s younger than you. Your clothes feel tighter. You notice that your hair’s thinner and grayer. You go to as many funerals as weddings. Anytime there’s an article about retirement planning in the paper, you read it. And believe it or not, you actually start reading the obits. I would say all this occurs in the 40s sometime.
When I was only 19. I saw a girl and thought, “She’s going to be hot in a few years.” Then I noticed that she had car keys in her hand, which means she was at minimum 16 years old, probably older since I was leaving a junior college campus at the time.
Things have gone downhill at a much faster rate ever since. One of these days I’ll be telling the youngins about our first CD player, which supplemented our record player and cost over $400, some odd machine called a top-loading VCR that used tape to record video, and how I remember a time when there was no such thing as the public internet. I saw ads for something called Compuserve–which I couldn’t afford on my allowance–and instead called BBSs on a 2400 baud modem and liked it.
Crap, half that stuff already sounds old-fashioned.
My presence in a room makes some of my friends feel old. For some of them it’s the only thing that makes them feel that. It’s because I’m 19 and graduating from college. Although even I feel somewhat old at my distane for the youth of today that make my like hard, ie, mall goths.
“Although even I feel somewhat old, due to my distain for the youth of today who make my life difficult - for example, mall goths. (Spoiled suburban kids who read too much Anne Rice and consider themselves superior to anyone who dresses in colors.)”
Recently I felt very old when the woman in the office across from mine, who has worked for our employer longer than I have, mentioned her upcoming 10-year high school reunion. I then shocked her, and myself, by mentioning my upcoming 20-year reunion. I mean, 20 years? I flirt with baristas born after I left high school. Pathetic.
To answer the OP, I first started feeling old when I realized I was older than college football players.
I’m going to be thirty-five on Thursday. I’ve been dreading this particular birthday for six months. Somehow that age just marks the difference to me between young and approaching middle age.
I’m 21 and the majority of my friends are between the ages of 27-35. I’m constantly told I make them feel old. It never fails to annoy me. However, they make me feel like a little kid sometimes, so I guess we’re even.
Good point. One of my very best friends is 71–of course, she plays tennis 3 times a week, volunteers heavily in local Literacy Council, runs a Bible study–
Still she is 30 years older than me–I am sure she doesn’t want to hear me complain about gray hair!!
I don’t feel old at all, which is what really bothers me. Every morning I see this old f-er staring back at me in the mirror and I don’t know where he came from.
The guy in the mirror is fat too. I don’t know who he is, but he’s definately not me.
Well, one of the great maxims about age in the UK is you know you’re getting old when policeman start looking young.
My gf joined the force a couple of years back and I regularly socialise with them. I can’t help but look with mounting horror at how young they look. I swear I stared a bit long at a cop the other day and his brows furrowed and his head turned and watched me walk away. Little did he know it wasn’t a guilty look on my face but incredulity.
Also, going to bars, and girls don’t check me out anymore
Amazing how something that used to be embarassing is now the highlight of my evening.
