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What’s something you’ve noticed about getting older?
No minimum age requirement for the question. Getting older is relative to you, and you can answer for any age or period of life.
What have you noticed about getting older? Could be about yourself; about others; about the world.
At some point life went from being all about choosing the path I wanted to take to feeling like I was just stuck on the path happen to be on. The general anxiety of wondering "which door should I go through?" was replaced with a sort of wistfulness and wondering about all the doors I didn't go through. Those doors are shut now. For a long time this made me sad, that knowledge of paths that couldn't be traveled. The metaphorical sound of all those doors being latched just felt like a world of potential and possibility being closed in all around me. It felt confining.
But having a family has a way of eventually putting all that stuff out of mind. Every door leads to the family you have. The you that you are is the one that has this family. If you went through another door the children you have would be different children, so how could any of those other doors be better for you than the one you went through? Those other versions of you surely love those other kids the same way you love yours, but those are different versions of you, not you. You're the one who has this dog, this son, this spouse. You realize the friends and life you have are important because of the time you've cumulatively invested in them. They're not just fungible consumer products you could have ever traded in for a different, better one.
This realization has a way of leading to a radical form of acceptance of all the mistakes and misfortunes that have befallen you before.
Though I have less time (every moment of life brings you closer to its inevitable end) I have more patience for most things.
I worry about completely different things than I did when I was younger. Most of my worries are about other people - my aging parents and in-laws, my children, my siblings and niblings.
My body has become less reliable, though the parts that I exercised regularly still work because exercising is a cheat code to stay healthy. I knew that when I was young, but I understand that now.
There is a difference between knowing and understanding and it is a significant one. When I was younger, I did not know or understand that.
For sure this. Particularly there are many things that I used to see as platitudes that I now understand are repeated often because they are in fact true, and I can feel their truth.
Infuriatingly, one of those things is "you'll understand when you are older." Hah.
Thoughts in no particular order
Out of curiosity, how do you identify holistic personal growth in someone? What exactly distinguishes "people truly invested in learning/growing in all aspects of their life" from those who practice growth in only a "few dimensions"? Which dimensions do you find people overinvest in at the expense of the greater whole?
Reflecting on my past, I see periods of intense focus and momentum drifting through a cosmos of relative aimlessness. At some times I would be revolutionizing my ideals, routines, and long-term goals, and it very much seemed that improvement in one area coincided with and/or propelled improvement in another. On different occasions I would undergo long stretches of quieter existence; sometimes complacency, but also reflection, or maybe regression (adaptation?). I continued to mature either way—the differentiating factor was that the "fast" times represented material changes to my actions, knowledge, and skills, and the "slow" times represented interior evaluations of those newfound beliefs and habits after the fact.
It always appeared to me that I could only consciously focus on self-improvement in three or four areas of my life at the same time, because my brain physically couldn't process any more (nor did my schedule allow it). Whereas the only opportunity I had for technically all-encompassing growth was during those slower phases where I was mostly thinking and therefore not doing, or at least not doing much simultaneously.
I've not identified a way to reconcile my ability to conceive of a holistic set of self-improvements with my inability to tangibly realize them—which, as far as I am concerned, is what constitutes actual "improvement." In other words, even if I want to uplift my entire being, I can only ever prioritize part of me at a time. I fear that any particular choice to prioritize X over Y only reinforces the aspects of my life that I find too uncomfortable to address head-on, even if I really ought to do so, and makes me less likely to even consider them in the next "round." I would be interested to learn how to more consistently lean into enlightenment.
It's more about the willingness than it is whether they are actively experiencing growth. People often meet ideas which disagree with their world view with fear, anger, or distaste. The unwillingness to listen, especially on matters for which they've made up their mind, is what I'm referring to. I think this mostly comes from individuals who are not particularly empathetic - the ones who struggle more than others with putting themselves in the shoes of others. I think it also runs hand in hand with a general level of tolerance for things to be outside your control and a respect for diversity and autonomy.
There's a difference between being able to make up your mind about certain viewpoints and rejecting someone's experience before you've began to consider it. Sometimes it's hard to know the difference and you should, every once in awhile, reconsider what is true knowledge, wisdom and experience, and what has merely been internalized from the stories you've been exposed to. I've found most people are just deeply afraid of challenging beliefs on certain axes, such as that of behavior, thought processes, and core values or priorities. Closing themselves off to challenging these assumptions also closes them off from understanding.
I'm not sure I have great insight into how best to remain open to the possibilities in the world outside of two key traits. First, you simply need to decide that you want to do this. By centering the desire you can check yourself when you feel yourself resisting. Am I resisting because I'm scared? Because I'm angry? Because it would hurt if it were true? Because I'd be wrong if it were true? Recognizing the feeling slowing you down can help to push it aside in the moment so that you may listen and consider and address the feeling later. The second key trait is to be curious. Children present a great model for this - they approach the things they do not understand with curiosity because no one has taught them to fear or be disgusted by or angry at or any other emotion or notion. If someone just confronted you with words or an idea that might feel like an attack on your view it's easy to be upset, to defend yourself, to avoid or disengage, to deflect, or to get angry. But if you are curious instead- if you ask questions to understand why they confronted you, you might learn a bit about another's experience of the world.
With all that being said I think you're right to call out that there is a cap on what a human can accomplish. No matter how much I wish to read every book ever written, it simply is not possible. Similarly, just as you would have compassion for a friend who felt overextended or was treating themselves too harshly, you need compassion for yourself. If you can reflect upon your past and see that you were growing on multiple axes at multiple points in time, that's fantastic! Give yourself some credit, because that sounds like it could be rather exhausting. All humans need time to decompress, time to absorb, time to heal, time for fun, and time for many other reasons. It's okay to take a break, occasionally, if you feel it's needed. Honestly the fact that you're even reflecting upon this and asking these questions is fantastic, and more than most. I hope you never lose that sense of curiosity and desire to grow.
as a habitual word fumbler, this resonates with me. in the deeper sense as well, of course.. i.e being able to convey one’s thoughts clearly and meaningfully.
also, more often than not around hot-button issues with people that I find to have bad and/or ill-informed takes, I find that I’m unable to contribute in a way that doesn’t leave me sounding like a frustrated asshole because I myself am probably not as informed as I would wish to be.. but I am aware of what I don’t know.. or, more accurately, that there is a lot to know.. too much to know.. and, while I try to have the humility of someone who is aware of their own ignorance, it frustrates and saddens me that so many out there feel entitled to their opinions without having done any actual diligence, including self-reflection.. just a buncha rabble.
all this to say I wish I could better communicate with those mindsets. well, at least I’m usually able to deflect with humor.
Convincing others or even having a conversation with others on charged issues, especially those where the people participating in the conversation have differing viewpoints can be rather difficult. I think in person, with people who have some level of trust between each other, really helps this conversation happen and for people to actually listen to each other. Unfortunately in the online context, people are less engaged and less willing to assume good faith when engaging with each other. They're also more likely to exist in echo chambers where people voicing a differing voice do not receive as much positive reinforcement and attention.
With that being said, I think there's a number of skills which can help these conversations be more productive. One major conceptual idea I learned from the book how to win friends and influence people, is the very difficult to enact concept of never putting someone on the defensive. Unfortunately for charged issues, even simply asking questions can be viewed as an attack, and is a perceived attack that I've struggled with on this website perhaps more-so than others. That may be because many of the people I'm trying to understand better have already labeled me as some kinda leftist queer and written me off. I do find that this skill, and exercising this skill, is particularly useful in other contexts. I've had many people compliment me on my ability to communicate, and I've found it makes my life quite a bit easier across many axes. It's a skill I'm always looking for tips on, because humans are quite varied and different and even generally universal skills aren't going to be effective or useful for talking with everyone.
checks hands...
Man, I'm getting older.
That's a good way of putting it. I wonder if time feels like it passes by more frequently in part because we're always pulling out our 'greatest hits' movies from when we were younger and solidifying the time gap but once you're working a 9-5 there's less 'movies' worth re-visiting and things start to blur together more easily.
As @Thrabalen mentioned, there's definitely a factor of time dialation. When you're 8, a year is 1/8th of your entire life experience, about a slice-of-pizza size wedge of your pie chart. When you're 16, that year is half the size. When you're 32, that year is half again.
So pair that with what you mentioned... say with an office job where its entirely possible you're on autopilot for 8-10 hours for 5 days a week. You definitely have a recipie for heavily condensed memories and perception of time.
I never contemplated this before, aside from my own child. All the other people I'll never see as old folks. Thank you for giving a specific perspective to think about today!
I'm not sure if I agree with the "time only speeds up if you let it" because I don't think it's a function of age, it's a function of having lived longer. That may sound like the same thing, but hear me out.
When you're 5 years old, everything seem to take forever... I can't wait to go home, I can't wait until the weekend, I can't wait until my birthday. Everything seems so far away. Meanwhile, here I am at 49 and entire days seems to blur by. My theory is that we measure everything relative to how much we've already experienced. The reason that time seems faster when we age, I believe, is because a day is 10 times shorter when we're 50 than when we're 5, relative to how much time we've already experienced.
That said, recalibrating the mental clock is absolutely the way to fight it... for the same reason. We force a new perspective into the same situation. It's no longer "how many days have I lived", it's "look how much can happen in those days."
This is a good theory, and I'm not saying my other theory is right-- but I read a book called A Geography of Time and it essentially boils down to memory being a survival mechanism. Your brain will remember something until it decides it's not worth remembering because it didn't threaten your survival. As you get older in a scheduled environment, your brain decides the things you've seen before are not worth recording because they aren't a threat, so if you are doing the same thing over and over again the days will absolutely blur by. The options are to either do new things and new experiences or, barring that (as that's usually expensive), practice mindfulness.
Your brain recording things for survival is also why time appears to slow down when you are in a life-threatening situation like a car crash or an intense powder keg about to go off-- your mind is recording everything trying to make a record of what it can do in the future to not be in this situation again.
I always wondered if there was a cap to this. Like, if someone was immortal and had lived for 10,000 years, would a decade feel like a week to them? Would they occasionally be like "Wait... it's the 2020s? I feel like the 90s were yesterday!"
Would they constantly forget what year it is like I forget what the date is?
Ever watched a vampire movie, and the 500 year old vampire is dressed like it's still the 1800s?
Recently discovered a phrase I like:
The days are long, the years are short.
No individual day or week seems short. But the months seem to fly by. I never noticed it so much until I became a parent and you see a child grow every day. Even > 4 years in, if I look at photos from > 3 months ago I'll handily exclaim "omg they were so much younger".
I've started realizing the finiteness of my life and the real need to be proactive in doing the things you want to do.
Snowboarding for example. I learned when I was a young teen, didn't do much of it for years, and then tried again a few years ago at the age of 30 or so, fell back in love with it and want to make it a regular part of my life.
Snowboarding is something you can only do for a few months out of the year, and in those few months you need to plan ahead since any hill is going to be at least a few hours out of the way. Maybe I can keep doing it until I'm 65 or so, so that leaves me with 32 seasons I can go snowboarding, that's it. Every year I don't go out for that is one year I can't get back to go do it, it's over. Eventually the time will run out and my knees and legs won't be good enough to be able to do it anymore, and it's over, no more chances.
Realizing that put a lot more pressure on me to be proactive in making plans to do it. Every hill is at least a couple hours out of the way, so I need to plan ahead and lock in times and manage transportation (book a bus, rent a car, etc.), block off a weekend, make a concerted effort, and go out and do it. If I don't make it happen it's not going to happen and eventually there won't be any more chances to make it happen.
The same goes for anything in life. I only get maybe 50 more christmasses in me before I die, that's it. My nephews will only have so many birthdays before I die, my parents will have even fewer before they die. You have to savour the moments while they're here, because there's a finite supply of them. Once they're gone, they're gone, can't get more.
There’s always biking!
I'm slower. I'm more relaxed about getting to places quickly. I remember being that young man whose foot was heavy on the accelerator pedal, changing lanes, zipping in and out of traffic, because everyone drove so slowly. Now, I'm content to just putter along, getting there in my own sweet time, without the stress.
Time goes more quickly. I don't know if that's a function of me being older, or having a more boring life. My weeks go by as quickly as days used to. Before they happen, and as they're happening, each day is just as long as it always was. However, in retrospect, in my memory, the weeks are just zipping by.
I'm becoming more aware of the passage of time on a personal level. When I can look at something that happened 40 years ago, which is a long time ago, and - hey, I remember that - it makes me aware that someone's life can be long. My father was alive during World War II (if only just). That's a historical event, but my own father (who is still alive and still in control of his mental faculties) was born during that event. At work, we were discussing how computers have changed the way people work, and I mentioned my very first office job, back in the mid-1980s, where I had to use an actual paper ledger-book for recording accounting transactions; that's historical now.
I'm living in the future! As a teenager who used to read a lot of old science-fiction, I got to read a lot of 1940s/50s/60s ideas about what the future would be like. I distinctly remember reading one idea of a future breakfast, where the man (of course) sat at the breakfast table with a screen in front of him, scrolling through news articles to read. People would make video calls to each other. We could read books on slates that would display whatever book you asked for. You could talk to your house and it would switch on appliances you needed. People would carry communications devices in their pocket. Cars would drive themselves. And so on. I am in the future. That's mind-blowing.
I'm becoming more aware of my own mortality. Death used to be so far away. Now my death is closer to me than my birth.
Every time I make a red BMW wail on their horn for 10 seconds because I'm driving 35 in a 35 residential area, it fills a void in my soul.
I used to be that kind of impatient as well, but for me that switch flipped when I realized that driving like that was maybe saving me 10 minutes or less a day and was trippling the risk of death for myself and those around me.
I take pride now in doing 25 in 25 zones, and puttering along on the right on highways at the speed limit.
To be honest, I've had that since I was a kid.
Whoa -- is this actually a thing?
I never had to trim my eyebrows before, but starting in maybe the past two years I'll get rogue hairs that will stealth grow super long within the eyebrow, only to then pop out and somehow be like, two inches long. Also I've noticed something similar with my beard. I keep it pretty short and trim it pretty regularly, but occasionally a hair will pop out that's three times the length of the rest of the beard.
Yea, totally a thing, at least for me. Also, wait till you discover the same thing happening to your earlobes! Seemingly overnight... poof. I'm not hairy at all, in general. But suddenly there in the mirror one day....
Once you get to a certain age, your barber will start asking if you want your eyebrows trimmed.
Take them up on it. It means other people can see the crazy-long hairs, not just you.
This was also a thing for me. I had never trimmed my eyebrows in my life until I was 42, and never needed to; when we started dating, my wife asked me what my eyebrow regime was. Then I started getting wizard eyebrow hairs; not all of them, just 1-3 at a time. It sucks.
I'm 17 but I wanted to answer so I suppose I'll talk about how I've changed since when I was a child lol.
In general I feel more aware of and more concerned with what happens around me. By default this is good but for me specifically it's a double-edged sword because I'm way more self-conscious than I was. When the other people in this thread talk about going back to not giving a damn I honestly end up assuming that people who have this kind of faith in their own decency and value must have it be backed up by something/someone else :p
I care more/am more concerned about people than I used to be. A large part of this is the previous item but it often also feels like it was really puberty that actually gave me the wake-up call :p
I've been diagnosed autistic since I was like 3 but I only really started caring about it and realizing why this thing I have shapes me so much about a year ago.
I often consumed/consume fairly/very cynical content and used to believe that people were actually that cynical/wantonly self-deprecating IRL. Noticing/Realizing most of my classmates live decent day-to-day lives and are actually reasonably happy people (though anyone my age or not has something they'd like to work on) is simultaneously distressing and hope-inducing.
Crazy to think you've been on this site since you were 13/14 years old. I hadn't seen you around much lately so was worried we might have lost you, but I'm glad to see you're still hanging around and hanging in there, kuro. :)
As a man with long, somewhat curly hair, I long presumed this was mostly a byproduct of not wanting to deal with all the extra work that goes into having long hair, regardless of age. I presume someone with an authritic elbow would just nope right out of prolonged brushing.
It doesn't hurt as bad as I expected, and that's after wrecking my shoulder in a bicycle crash, damaging a joint in my foot, and quite some time being overweight and under-fit. As my life progresses I also have less reason to have to exercise, especially starting my career.
You value the moments far more than before and consequently let the moments cook in your thoughts a second or more before acting
While I'm still holding out hope that I can live hundreds of years and keep observing this world, I can now imagine, at least, that someday, sometime, there will come a time when I realize that this is it, accepting the end of my self and whatever I did with my life and letting go of everything.
A few people have commented and speculated on how "time flies" as you get older, so I'd like to share a fun demonstration and insight from Veritasium: Why Life Seems to Speed Up as We Age (YouTube)
As a 23 year old my main experience is that it keeps getting harder and harder to enjoy things, hardly anything just gives that "rush" that you experience when you experience stuff for the first time during your high school years. Like, so much music and games just blew me away years ago, but now almost everything is just kinda "meh", "okay", "decent", "fine", "pretty good" and only very seldom actually great or better.
Aside from that, it's rather weird hearing some people call me "sir" when I still feel like a kid inside. A while ago a teen couple approached me and asked me for directions, and they addressed me with "sir" which took me off guard, as I genuinely still kinda felt like I wasn't that much older than them or anything. It's kinda odd.
I become more aware of my immaturity.
..or, is it the rate of my maturity not keeping up with my aging?
Something like that, at least.
honesty also seems a bit easier, now.
Young @lou had a lot of energy and caused a lot of grief just to burn some of it.
The vast majority of heated arguments are not worth anyone's time. In most cases, I'd rather be at peace than "win".