Yes! I am walking out to my car and suddenly I have a searing pain in my leg. I end up almost limping into it. Then I drive home about 15 minutes later and get out of my car. No pain or any sort of feeling where the pain occurred. What happened?
To channel Gene Weingarten, when turning 50:
“Never trust a fart.”
Standing on one leg to put on socks or underwear has become an Olympics-worthy balancing act.
I often choose which socks to wear by how easy or difficult I think it might be to put them on. I don’t even try to do it while standing on one leg. And I try to slide my tennis shoes on and off so I don’t have to bend over to tie them.
There’s a really weird thing I notice… I’ll run into an old acquaintance, perhaps from high school or whatever, and think “wow, we haven’t changed much since we were 18.”
Then I’ll look up our photos from 30+ years ago and think “no wonder, when we were 18 we looked like we weren’t even 10 years old!”
I guess I’ve been old so long that I forgot what young really looks like.
Yeah well that new Webb telescope isn’t helping.
Not long ago, I burst a blood vessel in my eye, IN MY SLEEP. I woke up and the “white” of my right eye was entirely bright red. It took weeks for it to heal.
You can still do that? I have to be sitting down, and even then it’s not easy.
And then there’s the weirdness of being the last member of my immediate family still alive, with no descendants.
This, and not the aches and pains, is the most horrific effect of aging. The fact that, at age 40, you don’t subjectively have anything close to one half of your life left, but a mere fraction of it.
At age 45, I find my sense of time about 100 % out of whack with reality; something that happened two weeks ago “can’t be more than a week ago”, and “a couple of years ago” is in fact five.
Summers used to be really long, but now I have to be careful for one to not slip by almost by accident.
Really old people tell me seasons change like weeks used to. That’s an express ride into the grave.
I’m 60.
My brain thinks I’m 12 and prompts me to sit cross-legged in a chair, or leap down off the bed of the pickup, or climb the shelves in the back room at work to grab something instead of hunting out the stepladder.
Brain is always gobsmacked at the outrage Body displays after such maneuvers.
I never expected that when I was 66 years old, a simple thing like a second cup of tea in the mornings would be an unwise indulgence. It’s just tea! A stereotypical mild beverage for weaklings who can’t tolerate coffee (like me).
But now even a second cup of tea fucks me up. It’s starting to look like even that little bit extra of caffeine can trigger an anxiety attack, not to mention make me pee a dozen times before lunchtime. So add another consumable to the list of things that I can’t indulge in. That list grows longer every year.
The floor somehow seems to keep getting farther and farther away for bending over to pick something up.
That comes in handy, though. If I want to read a newspaper and don’t have my glasses I can just set it on the floor and stand up to read it.
What I have discovered about being older is I no longer care what people think of me, and I can speak my mind when something bothers me.
I’m 76, and the seasons are like months. Summer is half over, and I’m already starting to dread winter.
And you always have to ask yourself, “While I’m down here, is there anything else I need?”
I don’t scream anymore.
I did give a brief yelp of surprise while playing a video game (which itself has become an exceedingly rare occurrence) a few days ago, but I can’t remember the last time I delivered a full-throated, raging, blistering SCREEEEEAAMM.
My parents and nearly all the authority figures of my childhood were Boomers, who had four modes, “flaming asshole,” “petty, vindictive shit kicker” “worthless lazy do-nothing stinking piss stain”, and “egomaniacal self-centered bag of shit”. Everything they did was seemingly designed to fill every day of my life with constant rage. I screamed. I screamed a lot. I screamed my head off on nearly a daily basis. Occasionally some self-righteous cretin would mock me for it or patronizingly tell me to calm down (see item #3), but for the most part their response to it was their response to everything in the world that did not point a gun at their heads: nothing. Which only gave me even more to scream about.
I don’t know quite when things changed, but for several years now, I’ve been very quiet. I can raise my voice a bit when I get frustrated or annoyed (both common experiences in my line of work), but I never scream, or yell, or bellow, or get into shouting matches with anyone.
It’s not because there isn’t anything in the world that enrages me. Hell, between Donald Trump, MAGA, TERFs, all the anti-vax bullshit, rape culture, the Supreme Court’s rampage against reality, the entire video game industry (prime example here), nobody willing to do anything at all about global warming, and an archaic law meant to quell slave revolts being used to rationalize endless horrifying massacres of innocent Americans, there’s more to get enraged about than ever. But lately I find myself trying to avoid such dreadful news. Not just for my blood pressure (which I pay a lot more attention to now than in my younger days), but I just can’t stand to surround myself in hopeless anger anymore.
On a related note, there are two hard truths that I’ve taken to heart:
- If a worthless, putrid, rancid, festering shit stain on humanity (e.g. your typical Boomer) tells you in an incredibly preachy, condescending tone about how something is good for you, such as exercise, eating healthy foods, getting to know people outside your race/class/hometown/interests, saving money, doing housework, getting enough sleep, and showering regularly, it’s still good for you and you should do it.
- If an organization with the cumulative intelligence, charisma, and messaging skill of a diseased tapeworm (e.g. Partnership for a Drug-Free America) tells you in an incredibly preachy, condescending tone that something is bad for you, such as drug abuse, drunk driving, or eating unhealthy foods, it’s still bad for you and you shouldn’t do it.
I really, really wished I’d learned these lessons and given up all-nighters, fast food, and sodas a lot sooner than I did. Would’ve saved me a lot of trouble.
I just discovered one: Someone young enough to be my child may post in a thread about getting older.
So this grey hair business is weird. I was under the impression that at some point, certain hairs would grow out of your scalp grey/white. I did not know that a hair strand mid-flight could decide to change colors. Well harrumph.
I actually don’t mind the handful of greys on my head, and low-key want more. Grey hair is hot, you guys. Get into it.
60’s weren’t even a thing for me, but 70’s are kicking my ASS.
No matter how cool you think the music you listen to is, at some point in the future some version of it will be part of the playlist for a toddler’s birthday party.
[takes a bow] 
Glad I could be of service. Or provide some perspective. Or give you some insight into just how messed up Generation X really is. Whichever.
Actually, I’ve already experienced a lot of the things mentioned here…time seems to go faster (although for me that’s mostly the influence of the Internet and 500 cable channels), loss of energy, can’t do long walks anymore, almost never sleeping all the way through the night, mysterious aches that come out of nowhere, etc. I also started taking regular blood pressure medication at a far younger age than anyone I’ve ever heard of (and it took me a lot of doctor’s visits to nail the right combination). How do I put this…know how the horrors of war can age soldiers by several years? That’s pretty much what my childhood was like, except without the risk of getting killed, meaning that I’d start bearing the weight of years far younger than my sister or any of my cousins.
I’d like to mention something that I haven’t seen here that definitely eased the transition: declining hormones. I know it’s a cliche, but raging hormones will mess up a boy struggling to make the transition to manhood like nothing else. Fixation on nudie mags and highly inappropriate urges striking at the worst times were just the start of it. As my testosterone has dropped off, I’ve found that I not only have no terrible want it now, want it now, want it NOOOWWW rushes whatsoever, a lot things that would get me steaming in the past…don’t. Yeah, this troll or that braggart is annoying, but not to a vein-bursting level. I can handle it. Every time I hear about some “testosterone booster” plugged on the radio, I think, “Who the hell would want this?”
Oh yeah, the big epiphany I had regarding “ignore it”, “don’t feed the trolls”, “they just want attention”, etc.: It is possible to block out aggravations and scumbags that aren’t worth your time…but it takes many, many years, possibly decades, to build up that kind of mental fortitude. My first encounter with a flaming piece of crap on the Internet was 1997, and I’d estimate about one year ago was the point where I could let everything roll off my back. Mental toughness is a valuable life skill that everyone should learn, but to expect hormone-addled high school students to have the inner peace of a Zen master is peabrained fantasy.
So yeah, even if you have a kernel of truth, it doesn’t matter if the rest of your crop is rotten. If that’s not a proverb, it should be. 