Not being able to bounce back from injuries like I think I should makes me feel old. I sprained an ankle last summer, and that mother hurt for a good two weeks and bothered me for a month. And there is officially Something Wrong with my shoulder. I hurt it swimming about three years ago (!) and it still hurts like a bastard when I do certain things in yoga. The fact that it’s hurting three years later implies to me that it’ll never get better and it’ll be this way until I die. Stupid biological brain-transport unit. When can I transfer my consciousness into a shiny robot body?
But the main thing that makes me feel old is having a real grown-up job and real grown-up responsibilities, and having to forgo doing the things I like to do because they’re interferening with the things I have to do.
I hurt my ankle when I was, like, 8 or 9 years old. It doesn’t hurt now, but if I put pressure on it in this one specific way, the ankle won’t hold up, and I’ll fall right over. I have other minor injuries from childhood that never really healed over. So I’m not really sure how much age has to do with the ills you describe.
The main thing that makes me feel old is the lack of a “real grown-up” job. I’m a grad student, full time, being supported with a TA. I feel really old pretty frickin’ often. My students are all at least 10 years younger than me. Many of them don’t know anything from Monty Python. That makes me feel really old.
Earning crap TA wages while all my friends get real, live middle class pay makes me feel very, very old.
I’m too old to have had so little accomplishment in my life. I’m too old to not be earning any money. Most people I know who are my age are either: 1) Working on an actual career, 2) finishing up their doctorates, or 3) working on getting a tenure-track job. I’m still trying to finish my master’s. That makes me feel old and like a total loser.
Walking through a crowd at a gaming convention, carrying a backpack full of D&D books and a sack with three boxes of miniatures, some young whippersnapper dodged past me and said, “Excuse me, sir!”
The summer after I turned 40, I had to start using reading glasses. Now, I need them to hook my front-hook bras and to see the food on my plate.
All of my doctors (GYN, dermatologist, dentist, back surgeon) are younger than I am.
I remember that my first car, a Chevy Monza (which was basically a Vega in sheep's clothing), brand-new off of the lot with a cassette deck (no 8-track!), air conditioning, and automatic transmission cost less than $5,000.
I rarely “feel old” — it seems pretentious as of yet, I’ve not even a half-century behind me —but the moments that stick out have been where I speak of something commonplace and get blank looks and only then realize it hasn’t been commonplace for an entire generation or more.
Talking with college-bound niece about childish brats in class, I made reference to the Bell&Howell projector carts and how the class clowns would make obscene gestures and shadow-puppets in the white-light that would follow the last bit of film slipping past the bulb as it would start flapping around the takeup reel before the teacher switched the thing off. That one took about 8 paragraphs of back-fill explanation by the end of which I felt like someone from the age of gaslights and cobblestones. Hmm, no, I guess they don’t use those any more, just hadn’t thought about it.
Talking about practical jokes with coworkers, I told about the time we filled an instructor’s car with tightly wedged balloons that had been stuffed with “punchies”, the little chads that get knocked out of computer punch cards, before they had been blown up, so that if he burst any of them he’d get confetti all over his car. Now, if I’d been directly speaking of punch cards, I would have been well aware that the world had moved on a long time since, but somehow, for some reason, realizing from the blank faces that a mention of punchies had identified me as a relic from before the Modern Era was quite disconcerting.
When the music that was popular during my 20’s started getting a lot of heavy play on oldies radio stations. That, and when I got my first gray pubic hair.
When, during a children’s service at church, the minister said something to the kids about them not being able to remember the Gulf War (first one). They weren’t little kids, maybe ~10 at the time, and it just shocked me that enough time had passed that they wouldn’t remember that. It was such a big event during my childhood, and it’s so hard for me to remember that it’s been 14 years since then, so kids can be teenagers and not have even been born when the first Gulf War occurred. Somehow that made me feel old (and this happened a couple years ago so I was only 23-24!).
One night, while waiting in line to get into a bar, everyone was being carded. When I got to the door, and started to produce my I.D., the bouncer said “That’s okay, you can go in.”
Not getting carded. After all the years I groused about what a hassle that was, it really hurt to not get carded when everyone else was.
This is slightly off-topic but my nephew (he’s three and a half years old) asked me recently what the “twin towers” were. It occurred to me that, being born a month after 9-11, all the current events that are happening now will be history by the time he’s old enough to comprehend them. And that the World Trade Center will always be a thing of the past for him. That was a weird, existential moment for me.
For me it was when I went home to visit my dad (in another state), noticed a hot babe on his street and thought to myself how sexy she was, and then later got introduced to her as the daughter of a childhood friend.
… I remember when she was born!
… Heck, if I’d had kids at 19 like my friend did, she could have been my daughter!
She was home from college that summer, meaning that I could have had kids in college by now!
It first hit me that I was getting old when I heard a song that had been banned from my high school dances, “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” by Elton John, being played in an elevator.
My realization came when I started to notice a lot of younguns using the word “like”, to mean “about”, and when writing it, and sometimes when verbalizing it, to insert commas before and after it. Do they teach that Valley Girl crap in school now?
I really felt old when I was talking to my parents after they came home from my sister’s wedding this weekend. I was taken aback when I realized that my little sister is a twenty-four-year-old married woman.
At work, every time I come across an application form from someone born post 1985, it gives me a funny turn. How can people born in the mid-eighties possibly be applying for proper jobs? They’re ten, surely?!
