What, for you, were the most unexpected things about aging?

I was the opposite. As I aged, I was excited at how much progress was being made. Technology! Science! Entertainment! Yeah, there’s been plenty of bad shit along the way but I always thought the future was upward and onward. Progressive. I thought by the time I retired life would be, well not a utopia, but pretty damn good. Instead, here I am and what I got was Twitter Trump, a pandemic and corrosive social media. Not the future I expected at all.

I had a [seborrheic keratosis](http://Seborrheic keratosis) removed earlier this year. Noticed it wasn’t going away and kept getting scraped off, so I went to the doctor, thinking it might be something serious.

Felt like she took a good chunk out, but it actually wasn’t that deep. It was right at the bra line, so I couldn’t just leave it, unless I wanted to put a bandage on it every day for the rest of my life.

The other thing, is how much time I have to spend every day to do stretches, etc., to make sure I don’t deteriorate more. After 3 days of not doing my jaw exercises, my jaw will ache all day and it will be uncomfortable to chew.

So I’m pretty good about doing my jaw, shoulder and foot/ankle exercises. Because if I don’t, I hurt.

Not only the ears, but also the nose. And not just inside the nose, but on the outside too.

Manopause: everything is bigger, hairier, and closer to the ground. (stolen from a Red Meat comic strip)

I didn’t realize how much better I would feel emotionally as I grew to understand myself more clearly and worried less about what other people would think of me. Meanwhile, the people I like best keep thinking better and better of me anyway.

On the down side, I didn’t realize how much spinal problems could interfere with life. Not that I’m that bad – I don’t lose all that much time to such problems. But I grew to be very impressed with how afraid to move I could be, how much functionality could erode away, and how many different things can go wrong with the spine. Now I wonder what the various growing disabilities are going to leave me with.

Heh. One Christmas morning when I was a teenager, my dad opened a present from Mom and got all excited about it: some tool for trimming nose hair. My brother and I made fun of him mercilessly, calling it a “nose picker.” Dad took it all in stride, but he must have been thinking “someday, suckers, you’re gonna need one of these!”

I think about that Christmas morn every couple of weeks, as I’m trimming my nose hair.

It wasn’t really unexpected, because I’d started noticing in way back in grade school…but it is weird how, the older you get, the faster time goes by. For a kid, a week is a damn long time. For a college student, it’s significant, but much less. For an old fart like me, it feels pretty darn short indeed!

Yeah, time flies… away, and nothing gets done. And you lose friends and don’t make new ones. And I get tired more easily and forget that I forget things. I have not discovered a new band or a new singer for ages. And my eyes are bad but actually better than I feared. But none of that was unexpected, it is turning out just as I thought: bad enough.

Early this morning I was reminded that, now that I’m on the far side of 50, I too often have to get out of my warm comfy bed to go pee before I would otherwise want to.

Friends are lost but enemies accumulate, as a wise man once said.

Kitty Carlisle said that her mother once told her, “After you pass 50, every 15 minutes it’s breakfast.”

You can go two weeks? The flower of youth is yet upon you, it appears. It’s every day now.

The most unexpected thing about aging?

Grey pubes.

…no one said there were going to be grey pubes.

That’s going to be a mighty awkward place to end this thread if nobody else comes along :wink:

It wasn’t a surprise, but I’m not happy that my once superlative memory for names seems to have been running away from me. I usually do remember, but it’s often hours or a day or two later. :cry:

And no one said the grey pubes would be so sparse and thin. Gives pattern baldness a whole new definition.

Actually, I found it kinda reassuring.

The mental decline. I look at some of the stuff I’d written 5+ years ago and I don’t think I could be that coherent now. I lose track of what I’m thinking about a lot more often now.

On the plus side, you learn more about what works to deal with your problems and learn more about your actual wants/needs as you age which is nice.

Me at 30: “Hm. I’ve got a stomach ache.”
Me at 70: “So this is how it ends.”

Actually, Bill Cosby did. A long time ago when he used to be funny.

I’m 68, and the only ill effect I notice is having to pee more during the night. I did have a prostate problem but it got fixed in one session with no side effects. A disk got swollen and then fixed itself. Nothing as serious
as Afib that started about 15 years ago.
Sex drive is doing fine also. And I walk 45 minutes most days without getting tired out or winded.

It helps that a lot of the people I hang out with are older than I am.

Yep, it can go from lush tallgrass prairie to “honey, the lawn died!”. Of course, with younger generations clear-cutting the flora they probably won’t even notice.

Yeah, I forgot about the ear hair thing. Little tufts of perfectly white downy tumbleweeds, not only sticking out of your ear hole but growing like mutated ivy along the back of the lobe too. I’m not a meticulous groomer by any stretch (I’ve shaved three times this year, I haven’t had a haircut in two years) but I got me a little nose hair/ear hair trimmer and I burn through two or three double-A’s a month.

Childhood: Don’t know anyone who dies of old age (“Who the **** was Franco?”)
Adulthood: Know them all, mostly don’t care–busy, **** happens.
Middle age: Know them all, are horrified (“David Bowie! Eddie Van Halen!”)
Old age: Don’t have a hot clue who that youngster who just died is.

And a quote I heard a couple of months ago, forget who:
“I’m now old enough that I can no longer tell if someone is beautiful, or just 20.”