**(Originally posted by Saint Zero)
I’m 32.
But… I felt older when I was under more stress. Now that everything is managable and I’m married with two kids, I feel younger…**
Saint Zero, I think you’re onto something there. I have been feeling super-stressed for a couple of years now, and I think the key to feeling younger again is dealing with the stressors and eliminating them from my life. Something to work on.
(Originally posted by Shirley Ujest)
…I am the tail end of a baby boomer family, so I am technically a boomer, but not really. I am too old to be a GenX’r and frankly, I would never want to be labeled that. I want a label, dammit, and it looks like the only one I am going to get is Soccer Mom. Crap…
Shirley Ujest, that label thing bugs me too. I was also born in 1966, right at the tail end of the boomers, but I don’t have anything in common with boomers. I also have nothing in common with GenX’rs and hate being painted with the same brush as the “slacker” generation - there is nothing “slacker” about myself or people I know around my age. We’re more like the “Forgotten Generation”. Or maybe “The Worker Drone Generation” - we worked our way through a “Recession” that rivalled the one our parents/grandparents went through, we work hard, we pay our taxes, we don’t cause any trouble, we roll with one government punch after the next, but we somehow haven’t completely lost faith yet.
I’ll be 47 next month (hi, TVeb!), but I feel about 12 years younger.
Part of it’s not having had kids yet, I’m sure: it’s hard to feel too old when you haven’t had to help raise the next generation - at least, until your body starts giving out, I suppose.
Another thing that has helped keep me young in attitude, I think, is the 15 years I spent teaching college kids as G.T.A., instructor, and professor. I never got to the point (which I know happens to some profs) where their world is on the other side of some impenetrable generational wall.
Now I’ve got co-workers who are about the age of my fairly recent former students. And I still really don’t feel much of an age gap.
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Physically, I feel like I have felt for the last 25 years. On the whole, that’s not bad and I figure that if I continue to feel this way, then growing old will not be bad. However, when the arthritis flairs, when I wake up and my body aches to roll over, when I can’t walk a stright line to the bathroom, then I fear that my body won’t keep the ravages of aging at bay and I wonder what I’ll be like in another 40 years. Eating and sleeping well helps to reduce those difficult times.
Mentally, I found something curious happened to me. My parents were older than my cohorts’ parents and I was the youngest of my sibs. I think because of my family’s influence, I felt older when I was younger than I do now. For the last, maybe 10 years, however, I haven’t felt that disparity. Like RTFirefly, I interact with college students quite a bit and that connection colors a younger perspective on life.
Good luck, LouisB.
i was born an extremely crotchety 60 year old man. only 23 years til i catch up.