Yet another reason to hate getting old This is a thread I just started about water coming into my basement. I just realized what doubly sucks about getting old is that I’ve run out of parental figures who can help give advice in these matters. My dad has died, My wife’s dad (the carpenter) has been dead for decades, my stepdad is incapacitated. Crap, I’m worthless when it comes to important knowledge and skills and I’ve run out of old people to seek advice from. I’m down to the second tier of older friends who can give advice. I totally appreciate the help I’ve gotten, but this is yet another reason I miss my parents and hate getting old.
Soon enough, I’ll be the ‘old guy’ people are going to ask for advice…thats scary…I’m not qualified to be old and knowledgeable.
I’m so glad we got message boards and Google before I got old enough to be considered old and knowledgeable. You’ve got people here to ask, even if you don’t have parental figures in your own life who know this stuff.
I think getting old is more difficult for men than for women. (Once we women get that whole “beauty” thing out of the way.)
I figure if you don’t’ want to end up in a wheelchair staring out a nursing home window for the last ten years of your life it’s going to take an attitude adjustment. Ah, the work never stops, does it?
I sure don’t want to spend my last years bedridden but it’s distinct possibility. That means I’m going to be spending a heck of a lot of time with myself and to that end I want to make myself as enjoyable a person to be stuck with as possible.
Here are a few gifts that have come without me having to do the work:
Nobody pays much attention to little old ladies and you can get away with murder.
People help you without you having to ask.
This one’s for OpalCat.
As the baby of the baby I’m now on the top tier. Both of my parents were the babies of their families also so they spent their final years with no elder relatives. It is lonely. It’s lonely in a wholly different way than any other kind of lonely.
Mom and my MIL both died within weeks of each other and there were a few moments when I felt like a three-year-old whining, “Don’t go away and leave me yet. I’m not ready!” So I sympathize with you.
But we’re not writing the final chapter yet; just near the end of the book. So plan to make that last one a good ending. That’s the best gift we can leave behind.
And, yes, I do have days when “old age sucks.” I just don’t want to live there.
This was the aspect of getting old that I was most unprepared for. Friends die, change, move away, and the replacement pool keeps draining. I’m having to adjust a lot of my world to a solo act, and finding I don’t “fit in” at stuff I formerly enjoyed.
How many places are there where an old guy by himself doesn’t look, at best, out of place, or at worst creepy?
I spend a lot of time hunting because it’s not unusual to be by yourself, and it’s the one place I know exactly what to wear.
When you’re old, you no longer talk with older people about your diseases, medications, surgeries, knee pain, back pain, cataracts, dentures, Alzheimer’s, Medicare, the “donut hole,” reverse mortgages, Social Security, and thousands of other things. Younger people don’t want to stick around and hear all this shit.
Sometimes it feels like suddenly the warranty just ran out. Dr’s, pills, it definitely sucks. No one wants to be frail or infirm or wrinkled but there is no escape, it’s coming for us all. I reckon part of your task, through your earlier years, was to learn that some times you just have to graciously accept what you cannot change.
Living a long life means watching most all your friends die. I think I’d rather not, actually.
I’m pissed because I want to know WHEN I’m going to die, ballpark wise. I hate the idea of planning a kickass retirement I might never see! If I knew, I could take the money and spend it, knowing I wouldn’t need it for the future!
And then again you don’t HAVE to graciously accept. You can turn into one of those crabby old souls, I suppose. I know it wouldn’t work for me.
I lost all five of my closest friends in my thirties. It was just a weird quirk of fate - none of us over 53. We were so suited to each other. You don’t find something lke that again easily. I have to consciously make an effort not to compare nw possible friends with the ones who died because it seems like no one would ever match up.
As long as we’re pointing out the negatives, am I the only one here who ever thinks there’s not much sense in discussing complicated subjects anymore? The conversations and arguments have become so predictable they hardly are worth the effort of having. It’s a sort of nothing-new-under-the-sun feeling.
I am in my 80’s I do not think of my self as old; just older, I have been getting older from the day I was born. I believe we only live in the now, the past is gone, we can learn from that, the future is not here yet. So for today I try to look around and see how I can make life better for myself, or for others, It sort of makes getting older a thing to be grateful for. If I had died at 24, I would have missed so much good in my life. although I am not a Christian, I do like the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, he asks to not seek so much to be loved but to love. If one has love then they can give it, just as if a man is rich he has money to give away, a starving man cannot, so he must be given Love (or Money in a poor man’s situation),so one can use that as an example.
I found out when I was very young that anything shared that is good brings back good. I believe we have become a culture of things. I use the example of what we say a noun is: a person, place, or thing. we seem to put things first, then place, then people, we have it backwards; there is nothing wrong with things(in my opinion), but people are more important.
The ER to me on older stands for emergency room, then if we can’t be helped there one can say she/he was old!
59 years old here. This hit me first at work a few years ago. I have been a programmer for 25 years, at my current company for 12 years. Throughout my career, I took great comfort in having very experienced programmers around me who could answer questions from their vast wells of experience. Then one day, when I had one of those questions, I realized I was now the oldest, most experienced guy around, and I’d have to figure things out for myself or ask a damned whippersnapper. The same thing is happening in my personal life. My parents’ generation of my family is dead or senile, and my kids are adults and having kids, looking to me for wisdom. Seems like a perfect time to use my seldom-used signature.
