Who said this? I think it’s my new sig line. 
FWIW, I agree with MLS - keep making new dreams.
Looking back at the past isn’t helpful. You can throw your neck out doing that!
Yeah, I have lots of moments like that, so I sympathize. Like when I realize I’ve had friends for 20-plus years and when I realize I was a working adult in like 1985. Time does go too exceedingly fast.
On the plus side, I look like I’m 25 (I’m 43 actually), and it’s also weird to have people react to me and treat me like I’m a twenty-something. I don’t even tell people my real age anymore. Not worth the explanations/apologies/whatever.
This Wise Old Wench says:
[WOW] None of us has any guarantee or control over how long we will live. The only sure thing is that the unexpected will happen, whatever that might be. So we all must find our passion and live passionately in the present. [/WOW]
Well, I am [sub]mumble, mumble 47[/sub] and I’ve been sympathizing with Bricker for several years now. Awhile back I decided that old age is what happens to you while you’re trying figure out what you want to do when you grow up :). When my wife asked me what I wanted on my 45th birthday, I said “my 25th birthday”.
Hey! I’ve been saving daylight every year since I was five and now I find out that you can’t withdraw any of it!
Now that my daughters are 21 and 19, I’m starting to see a glimmer of the “life getting in the way of your dreams” syndrome as they learn to deal with the business of being responsible for themselves.
My eldest has an incredible singing voice. [Shameless Brag] She made the Texas State Choir 2 years in row - which placed her in the top 20 high school sopranos in the state[sb]. She started at Boston university last year as a Vocal Performance major, but this year switched to English, with an eye towards becoming a music editor. She will probably make it and do very well, but she really had a shot at playing Christine in Phantom. How will she feel about that in twenty years?
My youngest daughter has shown a rare gift for all things artistic - sketching, painting, sculpting, etc. - and has entertained (obsessed over) plans for fashion design and interior design but is entering college with the intention of pursuing photography. I realize there’s a huge chance that she will change her mind yet again, but how many "what if …"s is she going to carry along with her by the time she reaches her forties?
I’ve considered having The Talk[sup]TM[/sup] about their futures with them, a la Ward Cleaver (where did I put that sweater with the leather elbow patches?), but have mostly been more subtle, and just tried to ensure that they had good reasons for their decisions. And I also let them know that if their decisions proved not to be for the best, that I would always be there for them to say "Neener, neener! I told you so! 
", but I hoped that they would be able to say it to me instead. I would really like to be able to help them see their lives with the perspective I’ve developed over the years, but a.) you can’t teach experience, and b.), I don’t really know how their futures will turn out. I just know that no matter what they choose to do with their lives, in 20 or so years they’ll be the ones with wistful thoughts over the dreams that will never be realized.
Just like all of us.
Wow, this is longer than I thought it would be.
Old age is Mother Nature's way of rewarding you for not dying young.Crap. I’m never gonna be a paleontologist.
I never got around to seriously applying to graduate schools when I was in my twenties, I was still trying to figure things out, no hurry, school’s always there. Now I’m married, work 40 hours a week, have a three year old and another on the way.
There’s no way I can start a science career now, my family depends on my working, I’d have to wait 18 years until the youngest goes off to college before I could join her. Then I’ll be 57. Not exactly a promising age to start graduate school.
And heck, I have no idea if I’d even LIKE doing that kind of work all the time. But it’s always been in the back of my mind that I COULD do it…if I ever got motivated enough, got a little money saved, took a chance. Now I’m starting to come to grips with the fact that I’m never gonna be a PhD professor. Sure, I can do amatuer and volunteer work, and that can be valuable. But I’m never gonna be a professor.
Thank you for crushing my dream, Bricker. I hope you can live with yourself.
I’ve posted similar sentiments before, and I’ll post them again. I feel way too damn old, yet I have the body of an 18 year old. Well, 18 in a few weeks.
I started posting here back when I was 16. In 2 years, I have done absolutely nothing on here of note, which is rather odd. Hopefully, that doesn’t become a metaphor for life.
It’s just that life moves way too damn fast these days. For me, atleast, I go to bed and wake up in the next week. I became best friends with the greatest gal ever, however, I know next to nothing about her and it seems like we hardly ever talk. I’ve known her for 4 months, which is completely insane.
Of course, I have a continual midlife crisis. I feel like I’ve accomplished nothing and am too old to achieve anything, and that is me at 18.
I just don’t want to vote, I don’t want to buy cigarettes, and I certainly don’t want to be drafted. I just want to enjoy my life. With school and modern society and my attempts at upward social mobility, I’ve become too busy living to really enjoy life.
(By the by, these are always good threads. Hooray!)
You cannot know just how much I needed to hear that today. Thanks.
I’m never going to be healthy. I know it. I’ve been sick, both mentally and physically, most of my life. When I was in my 20’s, I used to believe that if I just ‘stuck to it’, I could be okay.
I didn’t stick to it.
Good lord, today was a bad day to read this thread. 
Warm hugs to everyone
I’m not glad to see someone else in that position, but at least I know there is good company. I’m playing high stakes poker with piles of pennies at this point… as the big dealers of Physics research $$ collect pot after pot.
I’m 51. Like most people, I guess, I have had a series of revelations over the years that certain options, even ones that were for other reasons impossible, were now precluded because of my age. Pro athlete, cop, soldier, the list goes on. I guess it’s part of the process. I agree with what several have said here about continually adding to one’s list of dreams or goals. Sometimes doors that appeared closed turned out not to be, and sometimes others will point that out for us.
Five years ago, I moved from a big city to a small town. As part of the move, I had to quit the band I had been in for over 10 years. I considered myself retired from my part-time music career, because I had no musical contacts in my new home and was getting a bit old to be playing rock and roll in bars. After a couple of years in my new home, one of my wife’s nieces asked me to help her form a band, and now I’m playing again, with a band of twenty-somethings.
Also, my wife persuaded me to return to college to finally get a BS. At this point in my career, it won’t change anything financially or professionally for me, but I’ll make my mother happy and give me a feeling of long-overdue accomplishment. Bricker may enjoy something that happened in the second class I took, a writing class. The teacher thought I wrote fairly well, and I chose topics that had to due with law and government, so she told me “You ought to go to law school!” I told her that I would be 52 when I finished my undergrad degree, and that it might be a little late for me to pursue that goal, but I appreciated the compliment and the encouragement. It’s still possible, just not something I think I’ll do.
ArrMatey!, I’m sorry.
I once dreamed the impossible dream. Then I dreamed the unlikely dreams.
Now I dream about sleeping in another thirty minutes before the dog starts whining that he needs to go out.
I’m 30, and I feel like I’ve accomplished absolutely nothing with my life. It’s reassuring to read threads like this, so at least I can know I’m not the only one, or the oldest, or the youngest.
Well, it’s not that I’m pining to be a professor, exactly. Just that there was a time in my life where I could see myself there. I’d dreamed of being a paleontologist since I was three years old. It’s not so much that I want to be a professor, just that you need that position to do real research. Although I know one guy who used to drive trucks who got a job as a preparator at the museum and now makes a modest living doing paleontology work. But that kind of job is really low on the food chain, you’re always going to be a flunky working for someone else if you don’t have that union card.
Maybe the horror stories from friends who actually went into PhD programs made me chicken out. And the day to day life of a academia for a junior member…well, it sounds awful in a lot of ways.
So it’s not exactly that I’m upset not to be teaching Biology 101 for mimimum wage and doing some senior professor’s research for him. It’s more the idea that I don’t even have the option to do it even if I wanted to.
I have the heart of a little boy … I keep it in a jar on my desk.
Looking back, I’ve always been too pre-occupied with planning for the future so I never seemed to enjoy the present. I’m still doing that. I’m 39 and planning to get an M.A. in History by 50 so I can … uh … do something different than what I’m doing now. So now I’m working for the future and will probably regret it when I look back and think I didn’t live life to the fullest at the time. You can’t win.
In the words of the immortal Benny Hill, “If I had it to do all over again, I’d do it all over you!”
And underneath those clothes, you’re NAKED!
I had the same impressions receintly and I’m 36. From a career standpoint (mentioned in another thread) I’ve peaked…the problem isn’t capability, it’s finding something with a similar income, including retirement benes…especially in light of th efact I’m helping to raise two kids. So current unfulfilling job with good pay, or a better job for a 20 grand cut in pay? Not the responsible thing to do for the kids.
I’ve got a hotrod that kept me in a big project for 7 or 8 years…now it’s mostly done and there’s a big hole in my life where that hobby was.
So, I’ll heartily agree you’ve gotta keep adding stuff to the list as things fall off.
Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention…
I got tripped out by that stuff around the time I turned 40. But then something magical happened, or didn’t happen. I turned 40 and poof!..I didn’t collapse into a heap of aged dreck. I formed the band in my sig (I’m rocking again!) and guess what? I’m not going to be a rock star (looking back, I never was - you have to sell out to do that!), no screaming teenage girls are going to shed their panties for me, and playing a set of high-energy rock n roll wears me plumb out. But I’m having a good time, and I actually exist in a musical sense.
I’m not planning on any mid-life crisis, because my mid-life is better than my young life. Like Oscar W. said, youth is wasted on the young.
Way to go! Great attitude.
tosses her granny-pants to An Arky
Actually, I have a bad attitude. Just not about that aging stuff.
And teenage panties are overrated. MILFs are the hottest, by far. 