I've felt about 22 for decades. Probably until my mid forties, I felt I was only about 19.
That leads quite often to the situation where you are looking in shock at some elderly, bald person in the mirror while thinking "Who's that old bastard?".
Or the sudden realisation "My God! I'm only two and a bit years off 80!"
As the article says, there's a difference between the age you feel you are 'in your head' and the age you feel you are 'in your body'. This also is rather annoying as your 'head' feels you can knock over a job completely in an hour or two but when you start doing it, your 'body' lets you down and and you find yourself exhausted about four hours later and stop working, only about a quarter-way through the job.
In my lungs I still feel young
But my body won't play along
I'm thinking this must not be where we
Belong.
Alan Kay was talking somewhere, but I don't have the link, about how a lot of his success in his youth had to do with the research community around him, and I think he was asked a question about how that sort of thing changes as you grow older... He replied that the combination of growing older and not having that generous funding for whatever experiments they wanted to do and the dynamic research community, meant that he had to stop looking for validation at the "quality of my results" and instead had to feel pride at the "quality of my effort." Something I have kept in mind.
The other thing I will say is that I am getting to an age where a lot of people really get set in their ways, and I am noticing that I am not. Like on a recent project I was trying to get team buy-in to move from Java to Kotlin, and the people who were super excited about it were 5-10 years younger and the people who were like “but why” were my generation and carried the day. I told this struggle to my wife and she attributed it to neurodivergence, she thinks I might have a mild or high-functioning ADHD that essentially gives me perpetual mid-to-late 20s enthusiasm with sime mild drawbacks (difficulty “cleaning as I go” when cooking for example, not handling the taxes until April when it becomes urgent, that sort of thing).
In general (nothing against Kotlin) I think it probably has to do with the prospect of having to fiddle about and work late with new tech for the same outcome as what you would have gotten with the tried and true tech. At the end of the day, I want to spend my time with my friends and family and not burning the midnight hours on work tasks that could have been avoided.
Why is this being downvoted? :-) It's totally true. The actual kinetics of coding from a "typing" perspective is a tiny part of any software engineer's job...
This resonates but also essentially agrees w/the parent, the youth want to do what you just described for various reasons that benefit the youth, the older peeps didn’t, because of similar motivations.
Don't. I tried it, liked the language itself, but went back to Java.
Kotlin's syntax is nice, but it predates Java 8, so that syntax plays poorly with the stream API and lambdas. Iterop works as-promised, but again, Kotlin syntax doesn't work well with libraries that are Java-first (in my case, this was Hadoop). Finally, mainline Java keeps cherry-picking the best new language features while learning from their mistakes.
Don't forget pattern matching in Java is more fully fledged compared to Kotlin. Java is also getting string templates, and project Loom (virtual threads) make the entire suspend/await approach unnecessary.
>on a recent project I was trying to get team buy-in to move from Java to Kotlin, and the people who were super excited about it were 5-10 years younger and the people who were like “but why” were my generation
Older people are more likely to have managed to do that before (introducing cool new tech/tools) and seen the costs of doing so. There simply are always switching costs, integration costs, and maintenance costs as well as new dependencies involved which can make it better in the long-run to simply keep using the potentially sub-optimal tech that everyone is already familiar with and using all day every day.
One place where I've seen success with using different tech is in some batch-processing script-like thing that you can just deploy, set up a cron job, and then everyone can forget about it while it runs happily in the background for years. Of course, that'll mean another cost when it eventually does need to be changed, but if that's many years later, that may be negligible. Another is one-offs that you can run once, verify the results, and then throw away.
But for something that's going to need substantial development or ongoing routine changes, the benefit might not outweigh the costs.
Younger people might not have had that experience or be thinking in terms of that whole long-term lifecycle thing, while older people have already dealt with it.
> she thinks I might have a mild or high-functioning ADHD that essentially gives me perpetual mid-to-late 20s enthusiasm with sime mild drawbacks
That is interesting! I do have ADHD and I'm now in my low 40s. The enthusiasm never goes away. I met an old housemate, whom I had not seen in 20 years, and he said "You were eager, and unlike the other housemates you were much more open to things and not set in your ways."
I said mate, nothing has changed! It really is a pain when your peers don't want to try new things, but on the other hand, it's a good personality for leading a bunch of young guns with fire in their bellies!
Having ADHD, I definitely feel more like your older colleagues now compared to how I felt in my early 20s before I'd burnt myself out just trying to do regular tasks efficiently. I'm interested in learning anything novel under two conditions, which are that results are potentially better in some way, and that the study time is paid for. If a new project arbitrarily wanted me to learn Kotlin in my personal time out of enthusiasm for code, I'd probably tell the team lead they should find someone else. I just absolutely don't give the slightest fucking shit about the company I work for, don't consider the work I do to be necessarily broadly important (outside the scope of delivering customer value) and don't anticipate I ever will. Code is just code, it does what it does, and if the outcome doesn't produce anything different or feel better to use or give me more of my time back, there's no point. But hey, I've only been employed for like half my adult life so far, so companies have never really shown that they have my back.
Thanks for sharing, it is especially helpful for me to get a perspective from someone who actually has ADHD!
I definitely thought personally that Kotlin had some big advantages.
• The most common comment on a pull request was asking people to remember to “@NonNull all the things!” so Kotlin’s non-null by default aspects seemed wonderful.
• Maybe the second most common comment on a pull request was to replace “==” with Objects.equals(x, y), Kotlin just has a sane ==. Note that Objects.equals() is the correct choice because y.equals(x) is “safe” but unfortunately written Yoda-style whereas x.equals(y) causes null pointer exceptions (the x usually comes from a getter which is null-tolerant).
• Kotlin had immutable records by default which made tests automatically more readable.
• The ability to mix declarations for functions and data structures etc in one file, allowed for much less jumping between files. Meanwhile, the lighter syntax meant that the code in those files took up a lot less visual space, so these files were not overwhelming...
So to your point it definitely “felt better to use and gave me more of my time back”, I felt, otherwise I would not have pushed for it.
And yes I agree the time to learn the language should all be accounted for in development hours, not some weekend homework project, and I would definitely validate your skepticism about the dangers about caring for the company more than it cares about you.
For the young guys the experience of learning a new thing and playing with it is likely more valuable than for the guys that already had that experience a dozen times or so. It's not that older guys don't like new experiences, it that some experiences aren't new for them anymore.
> [...] he had to stop looking for validation at the "quality of my results" and instead had to feel pride at the "quality of my effort." Something I have kept in mind.
Along the same lines, is the realisation that we tend to judge (?) others by the outcome of their efforts, but we judge ourselves by the outcome of our thoughts. I've read that somewhere, certainly more eloquently put, but it also stuck - esp. afrer having kids.
Unless it’s some other creative variation on the same theme, that sentiment is referring to what I learned in my college psych classes as the “Fundamental Attribution Error”. Simply put, the fundamental attribution error says that part of our nature leads us to attribute more of our own behavior to being the result of a nuanced blend of circumstances and external influences, while the behavior of others gets more associated with who they are and the internal choices they made with little or no consideration to forces beyond their control.
It intuitively makes sense that this is the case, and for some reason it really stuck with me (it’s been 16-years since that class). Committing to working against this nearly universal implicit bias led me to being a more empathetic person over time.
Once I started seriously considering retirement, admittedly a bit early-ish relative to the usual 65-70, the internal mental model of self has started to shift pretty dramatically, and the hypothetical "I have a lot of things i want to do" plans for the future now have the annotation "and a lot of them need to be done while I am still relatively young enough for them to be plausible."
That has honestly shifted the self-perception pretty dramatically. Or maybe I have the cause and effect reversed.
"I have a lot of things i want to do and a lot of them need to be done while I am still relatively young enough for them to be plausible."
Do those things that are 'on your list' as soon as possible. There is an old saying 'Life is what happens while you're making other plans'. I discovered that I had, in practice, a mere six (6!) years in retrospect where it was possible do do things that were 'on MY list. If you miss that window of opportunity, you'll never get to do your list at all.
You have to make to effort to fit them in while you can. One of my lifelong dreams was to spend a year or two in a small village in France. The first time it was a possibility was in 2003, but 'No, I have the responsibility to make us a living' meant that that chance was lost and so eight years went by - lost opportunity - until I finally made it to my village in France in 2011 but by then I could only spend time there in bits and pieces rather than as a single block of time.
My "window of opportunity" closed at the end of 2016, though I wasn't aware of that fact till about 3 years later.
Many times I have said to my wife, "If only we were 10 years younger, we could have ... bought an apartment in Paris ... or a house in Italy, or .......". Lost opportunities by the score.
That is true in theory, but if you really want to do something, you will find a way. (And strangely enough, for some reason, the Universe will assist you.)
I once was working only part-time but I made it a goal to get to "Paris in April". That was 29 years ago. I can't remember now how we managed it, but somehow or other, we achieved that 'Paris in April' as part of a six-week round-the-world trip.
About 3 years after that, some friends invited us to spend a few weeks in Spain in their time-share holiday. We didn't have the money. They said 'Put it on the card'. So we did. Several months later, I received a very rare Tax Refund which allowed us to pay the credit card off. Twelve months later, the tax man took all the refund and more, back off me. So I sometimes say "The Tax Department lent us the money to go to Spain. We'd never have been able to that, otherwise."
What does it mean to "feel about 22"? I don't feel like any particular age. I know what my age is, from subtracting my date of birth from the current date, and I don't see how it could be anything else.
Edit: I suppose I feel now much the same as when I was actually 22, but all that suggests is that there isn't any "age feeling".
About to turn 40 here, for context. In my early 20s I worked with a fellow who was 60 yo. Something I'll never forget was when he told me, while in a relatively introspective conversation during down time at work, that he doesn't recognize who he is when he looks in the mirror. Internally, as he said, he felt the same as he always did. Now, granted, this was a 4-times divorced, 5 times married ex-hippie and proud ex-80s coke-head fully bald man exhibiting light tremors, so there may have been other issues involved, but as I cross the threshold of another decade, can't help but think of what he said.
Much like you, I don't feel much of a change, but I also feel very lucky because of that. Not sure if I'm aging well or if I'm accepting aging well, but then again I'm only turning 40. If I'm lucky enough, there'll be a ton more to lament in the future.
I think it means to feel like you belong in that age range - consider the activities, the interests, the associations a 22 yr old is likely to have. Daily routines, accomplishments, responsibilities, goals, etc.
Categorising ideas as age specific makes sense. We think differently as we get older, our mind is slower, our ideas change. Categorising the body according to how 'old' it is or feels or looks also makes sense. Categorising consciousness in the same way makes no sense at all, consciousness feels the same from as soon as you are aware of it until the moment you are unaware of it (usually death). The confusion often arises in conflating consciousness with the body or the mind or both.
Hmm, my conciousness now feels significantly different from before. Not necessarily saying it is different, but I experience life differently from when I was 12.
I still feel like the upstart who barely knows what he is doing.
The only difference is the people around me. I used to be surrounded by people I looked up to, who seemed to know everything.
But now everyone around me has become mysteriously less and less competent and they're acting like I am the established authority, which just shows how little they must know!
Yes, I don't feel any smarter but I see others missing what I think are obvious observations and actions much more frequently.
I'm also OK being the same fraud I've felt like since my 20's. Starting to be comfortable in my skin, I just wish it wasn't so wrinkly now that I can enjoy it.
> But now everyone around me has become mysteriously less and less competent
I feel as we gain experience we learn that most of the things can be learned! It kinda removes a lot of magic from the world but also is weirdly freeing. I dread if there's the other end of the bell curve somewhere out there where we start to think that learning is not possible or practical anymore.
Younger coworkers are inevitably much better than I was at their age. How could they not be? Everything is better, and enlightenment is always just a few clicks away.
But the internet can’t teach you everything. Like when to give up and try a different strategy. Or that there might be different strategies to even try!
I’m a CEO now. An employee who’s older than me looks up to me as knowing more, more about Xmx tuning, coredumps, AWS dogfighting, SQL data models and so on. This is so wrong. My job is mostly HR, presales and lawyers now, so by the sheer time he spends on tech, he’s much better than me, and I don’t know what I’m doing with my strategy orientations.
We all feel like that image of a dog in front of a computer with the subtitle “I haz no idea what I’m doing.” Some of us manage JVMs, some others are CEOs, no-one know what they’re doing, but we have a world to govern.
Some of us have countries and nuclear weapons to govern…
I wonder if others here found their mental age aging more rapidly after certain life events?
The wake of aging parents transitioning (death, stroke/care home) has without doubt accelerated my mental age, which in turn has changed what I'd call my horizon. When younger and prior to said events, the horizon was far away; time enough for everything/anything. Not so much anymore, much greater sense of uncertainty.
Feels so for me. I'm nearing 46, and all through my 30s I felt (and was told) that I seemed younger. My wife passed from cancer when I was 39 and I feel like all that time caught up to me in the next year or so. Now I feel (and I think, look) age-appropriate, have begun to definitely feel the aging. However, I've also made more serious efforts towards good nutrition and exercise and am feeling much healthier than other periods of my life. But mentally, I'm incredibly presently aware of every day and how uncertain any future days with anyone, let alone myself, actually are.
Same for my dad when my grandfather died. He was 50 then but he overnight started feeling like 50+ instead of having the mid-30s energy to his soul even if certain parts of his body (joints mainly) were no longer cooperating.
I agree. I felt like a "kid" throughout college and the first few years after, but then I moved away from my college friends and felt like a 20-something.
I felt like a 20-something until my late 30s when I had children. When my third kid came, I felt like I skipped my 30s and turned 40... right before my 40th birthday.
Yes, absolutely. I've felt 22-ish for most of my adult life, until midlife happened. That was a couple years ago, and I'm in the tail end of my midlife "crisis". Right now, at 47, I feel my age. Also, I'm totally okay with it.
Midlife crisis definitely happened for me, and might actually have been my internal age adjusting to my external one.
Makes me wonder if I'll feel 47 for the rest of my life...
I found depression to be a two-edged sword in the aging department.
Mentally, I felt older, "an old soul". But physically, not having the energy to do anything, sleeping almost in excess, not going outside, not laughing or smiling . . . they all seem to have kept my body younger.
Yes. My father's death and my mother going in a nursing home has affected my view (late 40s) of myself a lot. I mostly ignore my age and refuse to "be old", but that's getting harder and harder.
After I turned 50 I mentioned to my Mom that I still felt like I was in my early 20s. She said she felt the exact same way, despite being in her 70s. That was the first time I realized that the discrepancy between how old you are and how old you think you are might be universal.
It also made me wonder if this might be why surveys show that in general men prefer women who are in their early 20s. Perhaps men are basing it off of how old they feel (so they are the same age as the women they are seeking) rather than how old they are. Of course, the same surveys show that in general women prefer men near their own actual age. Perhaps women base it off of how old they are rather than how old the think they are. I have no idea if the above has any basis in reality. It’s just a “I wonder…”
Someone should invent an Oscar Wilde quote generator like they did for Deepak Chopra. I’ve been guilty of using OW’s quotes but does the format have to be so predictable?
“The <$5 word for an emotion> with/of <noun> is not that it <does a banal thing> but that <slightly offbeat insight>”.
1. The surprising thing about rain is not that it falls during your parade but that it never does when you have to attend someone else’s.
2. Some people read books to educate themselves, others to subjugate others.
3. I have nothing to declare but I’m too much of a genius to just “No” when asked.
Not really. There's just as many opportunities in every age, it's just that you've been burned enough times to realize that the majority of opportunities are nothing of the sort.
I think the better example is that when you're young, the world hasn't sorted you into a bucket yet. Education, university, and your first jobs are largely that process: figuring out in which bucket you'll fit in society.
When you're older, if you want to change buckets, there is no easy mechanism. Even going back to university is clunky. It's by no means impossible, but I do wonder if we're missing out as a society for not having a very formalized process for adults who want to change buckets later in life.
The other problem is for lengthy training periods. Giving up 10 years for education and training when you're 20 is acceptable. When you're in your 30s or 40s, why that's a substantial amount of the time you have left before society decides you are old and must retire.
As the exception to that rule, I changed careers completely in my 60s, and picked up yet another at 66. You are welcome to remain in a bucket, I'm way too busy.
60s is a great time to jump buckets. Kids grown up. No debt if you're lucky and possibly some decent passive income.
30-50 is hard, primarily due to obligations you can't just walk away from. Your mortgage drains $Xk/month and the kids need braces is a bad time to try and find yourself ;)
When we're young, the world is full of dreams and aspirations. Over the years we discover that many of those dreams aren't realistic or possible. Sometimes we actually accomplish those dreams and we find it isn't as great as we thought. Or maybe we're happy with the result and are now content and stop dreaming.
If we talk about how I feel, I think I'll be forever 30; that was around the time in my life when I had the most friends, experienced the most, traveled the most and had the most fun.
But then, last year I turned 50, and the realization that I have a lot more behind me than ahead is a thought that lives rent free in my mind now.
"the realization that I have a lot more behind me than ahead is a thought that lives rent free in my head now"
That's a limitation you placed on yourself. At 55 I divorced a lead weight and started investigating opportunities. At 67 I am doing more and accomplishing more of my own dreams than I ever have. Don't ever underestimate yourself or your options, no matter what your age.
And for me, the rent ahead is not so "free!" Making money was ego and self-discovery when young. It's all-too-practical now with a degree of urgency I'd not ever felt before.
Actually turning 80 caused a mental shift. I'd be doing something and think, wait, should an 80-year-old be doing this? Something about the number made my mental age repeatedly try to re-align with the physical. The effect lasted a few days then faded.
It's a lot of fun. I'm back to my old interest - small systems programming on the bare metal. I did Nand2Tetris several years ago, and now I'm following the work of people like Tunney and DeVault as they bootstrap de novo. 100rabbits is also fascinating.
I'm working on an electronics program for the local makerspace - some combination of ham radio topics, microcontrollers and sensors - trying to figure out some good projects that can pull those fields together and get the younger crowd to realize they are carrying four microwave radios and a supercomputer in their pockets and that they ought to be interested in rf electronics.
Trying to get the makerspace off of Google Docs, Photoshop, Twitter, and other proprietary software and onto FOSS hardware and software is really an uphill battle. It's so convenient.
Thank you for the response. I really like the idea that in older years I can keep coding and be on HN. Of course we all can once we think about it. Why not.
Your comment also illustrates something I already feel, that software and systems knowledge can be lost over time and that wisdom from long experience can be valuable to younger generations as we get older.
It’s too bad FOSS is such a battle. One odd Linux desktop adoption tip I’ve found. I setup people on Ubuntu mate instead of regular Ubuntu desktop, the fast streamlined, lightweight, more old school desktop environment seems to draw them in more than MacOS and Win11 imitation desktops.
I'm thinking that if I show them the Alpine installer script, they can get a feel for (and even participate in) the system construction without going all the way down to Linux from Scratch.
That’s nice though. Until I was like 30 years of age I felt like a child compared to all the ‘adults’ around me, but now I just feel like everyone from 30-100 is more or less the same, just at different stages of life.
There is an asymmetry here, because, for the most part, you can’t know what it feels like to be an age until you’ve been it. So it will be more common to feel your age or younger because that's what you've experienced.
If you feel worn out when you are 25, you just think that’s what being 25 feels like.
I think the article gives us a very shallow take on a problem. The first question should be "what is an age perception". The article even calls this perception a bizarre thing (and I agree), but then it throws the question out of the window.
Why people think it is a good idea to learn how to guess age? I think, it is because we need to guess age of others to fine tune our communication skills. If it is so, then probably we apply this very guessing abilities to ourselves and get the wrong answer. Which is not very surprising: we see ourselves differently, we see ourselves from the inside, so skills learned for measuring others do not do a great job.
So there are some traits, that can be measured based on our appearance and behavior, that are used to predict age, but they looks completely different from the inside. What are they?
I am 33 yet feel mentally like an 80 year old dementia patient. Physically I'm fine, I can do kip ups all day long, but I feel like I have forgotten more than I can ever hope to relearn.
I feel like this is because it’s the first time any signs of age start to show.
I’m 35 and my body just doesn’t like the things I did with it even 10 years ago. Half of my beard is gray. I feel like this is something that should happen to other ‘older’ people.
35 was when I first started needing naps after the lunch at work. That's when I realized I need to save enough money by 50 to retire from my programming job, and I did.
Near 50 and the exact opposite. Mentally I'm sharper than ever (low bar) but physically starting to feel old. I still have some fairly aggressive physical ambitions but wondering if I've got what it takes to accomplish them.
30's through mid 40's was the best physical segment of my life.
This does not feel surprising to me. I think you mentally lock into the age where you really bloomed into your adult self. For many, that is their early 20s. For me, it is around 30 (I am in my 50s).
And then that perceived age very slowly drifts up, but still with considerable lag to “real” age.
I wonder how much this schism exists in people who were near death in a “younger” age. I’ve had a couple of reminders of my mortality from my 20s to early 30s now and it’s firmly grounded a “now or never” mindset to getting things done, because nothing is guaranteed. In the same vein, I’m very continually aware of my age and am mindful of the statistically likely years I have left.
Interestingly, I’ve experienced exactly the same thing, but the outcome is that I care very little about what people think would be an “age appropriate” approach to life and just optimise for maximum fulfilment right now, whatever form that takes.
Until 5 years ago every moment was spent on some sort of hobby or interest. I could not begin to comprehend those people who would finish their day aNd then conk out in front of tv.
Now... It's a special night if we have enough energy for tv once kids are in bed :->
I miss having hobbies. Any side project I embark upon has an immediate cost to my marriage. As in my partner gets mad at me because I should be helping deal with the little ones.
Home improvement catch 22 - damned if the drywall goes unpatched, damned if I spend an hour driving to the hardware store and fixing it, away from the kids.
Ha! I have a rather large property, and I thoroughly enjoy putting on my headphones and hopping on the riding mower for three hours on a Saturday afternoon.
I bought a steam deck. It's not a joke that I can tweak settings on it all day, but within 10 seconds of launching a game I want to play, my wife shouts my name, the baby starts crying, or the 4 year old trips and falls. At least my favorite technical achievement of the deck is its reliable suspend button.
Actually, Steam Deck is a real life-saver. The ability to play games 3 minutes at a time, anywhere, cannot be overstated (or explained to those living a more predictable, free life :). And games like e.g. "Steamworld Dig 2" or "Jack Moves" can similarly be picked up without needing 15 minutes to "get into the groove" or "drive to next mission" etc.
(I've also enjoyed Outer Wilds more on SteamDeck than any other device, for whatever reason; similarly, I can't make myself play Cyberpunk 2077 on 8" screen with fan redlining, even though apparently many do!:)
I just finished playing completely through L.A. Noire for the first time. It was great on the deck.
My wife broke her leg and our existence has been more miserable than typical. To keep my sanity this weekend, I've been working on getting a reliable stream setup from my desktop. One day I'll start playing through Red Dead Redemption 2.
Steam Remote Play works fine when the deck is the server, but it seems rather buggy as the client. "Hardware decoding" freezes up, and "software decoding" has messed up color on the preview release. Software decoding works on stable, but even then it's choppy and has lots of artifacts.
Yesterday I set up sunshine on my desktop, and today I got moonlight set up on the deck. Out of the box it seems to work very well. It looks better than Remote Play, and it seems to be better latency too. The only problem I've encountered is an inability to unlock my screen from the steam deck over moonlight; I type in the password, but my desktop rejects it for some reason, then after a few tries locks me out for 10 minutes. Thanks Arch Linux!
Since I'm incoherently rambling, I also tried to launch linux-native Tomb Raider yesterday, as I have successfully for several years. It didn't work because that would bring me too much joy. I switched to proton and it worked, but didn't have my progress saved. Okay, I am a software engineer with multiple computer science degrees. Missing libssl.so.1.0.0. An hour later, 10 minutes of compiling half a dozen random libraries, and a 200 character LD_LIBRARY_PATH override spanning four directories, it works again. How did it ever work?! According to the internet this problem happened to everyone else in 2017. Also a joke that's not a joke, windows has become linux's most stable ABI.
I have no kids and I feel very weird about my age. I am about to turn 40 and feel 30 and 60 at the same time. I think of myself as 30, but really feel like 60. I have little energy left after a day at work or even on the weekends. I cannot consistently put energy behind any effort. I used to hack on my side projects before and after work. Now it's a great success if I do it 2-3 hours/month. I feel my mental state declining and worry that I won't be able to get another job ever again. When I say "mental state" I mean capability, energy and maybe even sanity. I think too much about unknowable things like sentients, nature of reality, purpose of life and sometimes wonder if reality is real and it demotivates me. Life feels on rails, like a movie playing in front of me, more than anything I can interact with. I feel like a passenger. Maybe it's just a result of depression and not old age.
As some who deals with depressive episodes, this sounds familiar. You might want to look into seeing someone. I’d go with therapy before trying medication.
There are so many possible sources for depression, so I can’t possibly give any specific, actionable advice. Just remember, you don’t need to settle for how things are now.
Only upon reading your comment a second time did I realize you said “no kids”. What you wrote after sounds exactly what life can feel like for an ambitious hacker (side projects!) confronted with the massive quantity of household work that young children bring about. Passenger is a word I use a lot - my mind hasn’t changed from before kids, but at times it feels like I’m just on the sidelines watching everyone else do stuff, while I change diapers and wash dishes.
I’m not anyone to be giving out psychological advice - but given my high “overhead of life” I’ve found it a convenient time to focus on physical health. I just need 30 minutes a day for exercise, and then it’s just a matter of eating healthy. Kids may take my time but they can’t force junk food down my throat!
My time will free up down the road - and I think your “muse” will also return with time. Which is why I figure now is a great time to instead focus on health (low opportunity cost wrt side projects). You may as well start with that, and if we believe a lot of what’s written these days, it’s entirely possible that improved diet and exercise might clear and focus your mind too (that would be house money if so). But at least when your drive returns, hopefully the new healthy habits you’ve gained will stick.
Last thought - if you can’t think of anything else interesting to work on, I’d recommend blogging about a subject matter you find interesting. Just my 2 cents.
There's also the reverse effect, with aging childless observing their parenting age-peers go through a "third person youth experience" they don't have themselves.
That's odd, when I became a father 18 years ago I did not feel any older nor do I feel so now. I'd even go so far as to state that having children - 2 daughters, the youngest is 11 now - put me back in a younger mood since I have been exposed to so much youthful discovery and experimentation again and in some ways still are. If and when one of them gets children themselves I more or less expect the same to happen, another round of exposure to everything being new and in need of discovery. Children don't make you older, they keep you young.
Maybe it helps that I don't live in a city but out in the woods on a farm? Discovery here entails tramping through the woods, digging up things, building stuff. Get a bunch of branches and build a "stone-age home", why not? A swing on a rope between two trees or hang up a hammock there and see how high you can make it swing (answer: very). As long as my body plays along - and it better do so or I'll get mighty angry with it - I expect to feel more or less ageless, neither young nor old. If it starts to fail me I'll probably change my mind but for now I simply don't bother with the concept of 'age' - going so far as to have to think about how old I actually am, something which trips up my children every time age is mentioned. It is just a number, something like those vague values seen in a S.M.A.R.T. report telling you about the health of a drive:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 116 099 006
Does it matter that the Raw_Read_Error_Rate is not 'perfect' as long as it does not go below the threshold? What does 099 mean here? Just as much as 57 means when talking about my age...
I lost my parents at age 20, and instantly felt 30 for the next 10 years-
and the next 10 years after that.
One of the silver linings of losing parents so young is getting a genuine interest to not have that happen to you, so I've made my health a pretty important part of my life - enough so that I won't die in my 50's unless a freak accident happens. My body could be misplaced for a 30 year old, even if my face looks 40.
I feel way older than I actually am, but I spend much of my life being manic. Mania has a way of accelerating life. Once I got diagnosed and treated, everything slowed down.
My mind and body feel like I’m in my fifties and I’m in my mid thirties. It feels like I have more life experience than most of the people my age.
On the other hand, a friend and I were walking along a frozen river throwing snowballs just to hear them splat on the ice. Neither of us will ever grow out of that. We have no shame in taking joy in simple things. We’re responsible, mature adults where we need to be. :)
I'm 59, and I've noticed cognitive changes as I've gotten older. Perhaps the biggest ones are: 1) How much distraction and interruption I can tolerate before I lose my flow. 2) How long it takes to get back into flow when picking up something I worked on months or years ago.
I was going to add 3) How long it takes to find something on my computer, but that might be a function of adding more stuff and never getting rid of anything. I don't think I was more organized as a kid, just there was less stuff to organize.
In terms of things like social attitudes, having kids go through high school and college age was a big "reset" button, because I kind of observed the world through their eyes and listened to their arguments. They're the ones who have to live with this ** after all.
I'm 38 I'd say I began to feel I was getting older in the last 5 years or so.
I used to go out every Friday night and carry on into the long hours of the night. Nowadays by the time Friday comes around I'm completely exhausted.
I've noticed it with sleep as well - these days if I stay up later than usual or I have a poor night of sleep I really feel it at work the next day.
Lastly my metabolism has changed I've never really struggled with my weight but last 2 years or so I have begun putting on weight and for the first time in my life I am starting to develop a gut. I suspect some of it was due to pandemic and being less active than usual during that time but I really started to notice it towards the end of last year.
I felt I had my first life crisis at 27. I felt older and that I should be doing less silly things.
That led me to doing what I wanted as I couldn’t bare a life like that.
P.s 46 now and coming into my 2nd adolescence
Yes. I've long felt time pressure. It wasn't until I was thirty and finally working in the career I'd wanted to work in since I was about 10 or so that I felt just 30. And my mid 20s were a time when my body was in the best shape of my life; but I still felt as if time was passing too swiftly.
I was 55, and I felt maybe 30 or 40. Then I pulled a hamstring. I felt about 80 for the next few weeks, because walking was so much slower and more painful.
Yeah, I know, it's just an temporary thing, but while it lasted it really did shift my perception of my age.
Way older. I can't imagine saying I feel 22. I am still in good shape pushing 50 but not like at 22. On the mental side though I was utterly clueless at 22. Pretty clueless at 40 even.
I've felt 45 since I was 15. I'm 39. No kids, still living the single college (but without college) life. A little chronic physical illness and a lot of mental illness.
It's nice to finally say "Oh I don't know if I have it in me to do that today." and have people actually accept your answer. I don't miss youth because I never experienced it. Would have killed myself long ago but I never worked up the willpower to even achieve that (also no guns or high cliffs in my country - when you start researching it you find it's surprisingly hard to reliably end a life without suffering). I'm finally finding life slightly enjoyable for once being an old fart.
I tutor a handful of teenage Gen Z kids and it's unnerving how much I can relate to them. Neither of us expect to have much of a future - for me it was my medical issues and suicidal thoughts, but for them it's the outside world they're going into. Two of my brightest students have said they don't expect to make it to 40 and if they do life will be much much harder. They're healthy, happy, mentally well - but with both political and literal climate going the way they are they can't see humanity realistically making it that far without some kind of mass war, famine, genocide, not to even mention untold horrors AI will usher in.
Yeah for a few years I thought I was actually +2 older than I was. This started to happen after some major life events that threw everything I knew into question. Since that happened I've found it difficult (or boring) to relate to people who are younger than me. Most of my friends are older.
Curious how old other formerly closeted queer folks feel (particularly those who came out as adults). I have felt 30 since I hit puberty. I imagine it's from being hyper vigilant about policing my own behavior and body language.
As someone who came out at 18 (technically an adult), both:
- younger—I had a vastly accelerated "social puberty" bc I started so much later than most folks.
- older—for the reason you mentioned.
- but now younger again—I don't feel the same pressure to have biokids, and thus not beholden to the "biological clock" that forces birthing parents to start families in their 30s. I'm 32 and just went back to school, because why not! Plus, the pressure of the white gay dating scene forces me to take better care of myself (sleep, diet, exercise), which also make me feel younger.
Think I've generally been 19 since the age of 19. Mostly to do with energy and uncertainty about life direction that has nothing to do with sexuality, but most friends my age have kids...
In my earlier teens I might have been able to sound like a young adult talking about something like politics, but if anything I was all the more early teenager in terms of uncertainty over sexuality and how people would react.
I think you're on to something with the expanded self-consciousness that comes with always monitoring your own behavior/body language at the onset of puberty. I think there are other situations where a young person would also develop this kind of hyper vigilance. For me it's always made me feel older than my peers like you say.
Once beautiful, stretchy creatures that probably now resemble a curmudgeon being asked to be nice to a neighbor.
Been playing soccer with my soccer mad 8 yr old. I too was that guy. Brings me back and I am so much better at technique now but boy oh boy does my hip and lower back hurt the next day!!!
One of my favourite stories is "A piece of Steak" by Jack London. It is about an old boxer who must win against a younger boxer to feed himself and his family but eventually loses because "Youth will be served" - https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/PieSte.sht...
Some quotes:
It was to be expected. It was the way of Youth, expending its splendor and excellence in wild insurgence and furious onslaught, overwhelming opposition with its own unlimited glory of strength and desire.
And Tom King patiently endured. He knew his business, and he knew Youth now that Youth was no longer his. There was nothing to do till the other lost some of his steam, was his thought,
Sandel must foam the froth of Youth away before discreet Age could dare to retaliate.
He grinned with a certain wistful pathos in his ring-battered countenance, and went on cherishing his strength with the jealousy of which only Age is capable. Sandel was Youth, and he threw his strength away with the munificent abandon of Youth.
But that was the trouble. Sandel would never become a world champion. He lacked the wisdom, and the only way for him to get it was to buy it with Youth; and when wisdom was his, Youth would have been spent in buying it.
Yet he looked upon the fight as his. It was impossible that a man so punished could rise. Only Youth could rise, and Sandel rose.
Back MRIs are weird. You'll get people with herniated discs with no symptoms and people with clean MRIs in pain. And of course, people experiencing pain that the MRI finds the cause of. It's also possible to have two sources of pain. It could be DOMS plus a herniated disc.
I'm mostly pointing this out because "back pain" has scary connotations, any sort of pain gets them worried, even if it's just DOMS.
It seems to me that in constructing an answer to that question, we are weighing our social and developmental progress against the ages we generally associate to social and developmental milestones.
It's a bit like asking someone how far they have walked today. They aren't going to go back and count the steps. Instead, they will consider what landmarks they passed, and what events they encountered, try to add them all together, and compare that sum against other distances traveled that they do have explicit measurements for.
The length of a journey is most often described, not as an accounting of unit measure, but from weighing the complexity of the story one would tell about it.
This kind of narrative measurement is already present in most of our conversations about age. What age do people learn to read, to swim, or to ride a bicycle? How old is a grandparent? Are you too late in life to start a family? When should a person begin retirement? All of those narratives set a rubric of expectations: a domain and scale for age itself.
When we ask someone how old they "feel", we are intentionally vague. We are asking for the "age" that isn't defined by time. So a person constructs a new definition or of the narratives that are familiar to them, and tells us where they see themselves in that collection of narratives.
I was moderately precocious in my programming and in my career, though probably not terribly so by the standards of this crowd. I got started in C when I was 9 or 10, and ran Linux on the desktop from 6th grade onward, hacked on device drivers and the like in my middle and high school years, that kind of stuff. I had a relatively "meteoric" early career before going out on my own, going through 6 jobs between age 18 and 22, in some cases doubling my income as I went. I was the chief sysadmin of a small local ISP at 19 (which says more about the ISP), and I was holding fairly serious senior titles at more serious companies in the big city by age 21 or so, making more than my dad at the time, who was a professor. (The consequences of being this young and stupid with this much money are a grim topic for another day.)
Anyway, the main age-related shift I've experienced is that the socio-professional aura of my skills and experience went from "holy crap, he's 20 year-old wunderkind" to just kind of table stakes. Nobody's really shocked that mid-30s me is pretty good at what I do and have a lot of experience doing it, and it hasn't been a shock in quite a while.
Sure, I'm a lot more credible now as a self-employed consultant than I was at, say, 23, but younger me was a bit of a primadonna and had a big head because I front-loaded so much of the career development and climbing the ladder, at least as engineering per se goes. In these settings, lots of older people resent you (for reasons I find very justifiable in hindsight), but plenty of people pat you on the head along the way, too. I'm not praise-dependent in any extraordinary way, I'd like to think, but anyone can be habituated to something pleasant and can it be a bit of a jolt to feel the tide going out. In addition to undergoing the normal humbling that comes with getting older and realising you're not as brilliant as everyone around you leads you to believe, people also stop telling you you're brilliant to begin with. :-)
I think a lot of it has to do with the quite heavy expectations that historically came with age and the demand to conform in a certain way.
For example you see a lot of people today who grew up on the internet and are now into their 40s say "I'm too old for this, I shouldn't enjoy this as much" etc. The expectation to behave a certain way and what people really want creates a sort of mismatch.
And really it's kind of silly because when someone is 50 and says they feel like they're 35 that's probably because there's really not that much of a difference. Their brain just works all the same. The reverse is true as well I think. A lot of kids 'feel older' in their head than they are and that's probably just because they're not as different as we treat them. That we treat older and younger people like different species sometimes has always been weird to me.
One "interesting" thing about aging as a guy is that male pattern baldness starts at the back of the head where it's really difficult to see on yourself.
I didn't really realize how much hair I'd lost until I saw a random photo of a crowd of people with me in it with my back to the camera. That was quite a surprise.
I think this is just the aftermath (and also, ongoing) of boomer culture. Before that generation, you generally had kids in your late 20s and grandkids in your 50s. If you were 80, you were a great grandparent. All these titles conveyed an age. By the time you were those ages, you acted that age.
Boomers I think invented the 40 is the new 30 and 70 is the new 50 nonsense, so of course they are confused about what age they are. It's easy to "feel 20" when you haven't taken on the appropriate responsibility.
I am an example of that. I am 41, only married 3 years, to a younger woman and we have a baby and a toddler. Just bought a house etc. Very easy to feel young with all that, but the reality is I am more like "late to the party" - this all should have happened 10-14 years ago. I'd feel "older" if my kid was going into highschool rather than pre-school right now.
Just so you know, "haven't taken on the appropriate responsibility" really sounds like you are judging people whose life choices differ from yours. Nobody has a responsibility to procreate.
I am talking about responsibility as in being responsible for people (spouse, kids, grandkids in this case.) It's easier to "feel young" when you don't have that.
It's the "appropriate" that gives it the negative connotation. Maybe you meant "the responsibilities necessary to feel an age", but it came off as "the responsibilities you should have at an age".
I meant the former definition but they are intertwined for me so it makes sense that it came out ambiguously.
To elaborate:
As I grow up, I see in myself and others a deeper life satisfaction from being parents/grandparents at "the appropriate age." This was not obvious to me when I was 20-30.
So I don't mean for "appropriate" to suggest you owe it to anybody to reproduce, but I do believe that it's a path most likely to yield the most satisfaction for a typical person.
(As an analogy, I can say the "appropriate" weight for a 6 ft tall man like me is 170-180LBs. That doesn't mean that I am obligated to lose 20LBs, just that my life would be better if I did)
In my book it's fine to have an opinion of what can be good for others, as long as I am clear that it's ultimately their life, their choice, and I don't have all the context anyway.
So I try to be honest about the patterns I see and opinions that I have (ie, "what would I do if that were me?") while being super open to being wrong.
I am in my late 30s. I feel like after the pandemic I started visually aging. Part of the problem was that I lost a lot of weight at the same time, so I do actually look a bit different. People tell me I am crazy. I feel like my hair is receding though nobody notices it and in photos it really looks the same for the past 10 years. I feel like there is me at my age, there is some illusion of me at my age, and me at the age I feel.
I feel young. On average, I feel about 25 mentally and maybe 30 physically, but sometimes I feel like I am stuck as a precocious 15 year old. I have a silly sense of humor. I feel like as my numerical age increases, the more I am expected to be boring and not be myself anymore. Quite frankly, it's led me into a depression.
This year I've turned 38 and for some reason this number stopped being funny. I know a lot people make a fuss about turning 40, but for me the transition happened to be 38.
What would be the evolutionary conditions that would lead us to mentally think we are older as we age? For much of evolutionary history we were expected to produce offspring then kick the bucket. No advantage to feeling older, not even expected to get that much older than what most people feel.
If we solved the problem of aging this wouldn’t be a puzzle at all and it would immediately make perfect sense. The age we feel we are would correspond roughly to the age we were fully developed (mid 20s) and the age our body would stay at without aging.
It's almost certainly a mistake to think that every feature of a system subject to selection pressure is a result of that selection pressure. Most real world selection leaves plenty of room for features to emerge (or disappear) that don't change selection fitness.
Interesting that this article popped up not too long after the discussion about the TikTok "teen" filter, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34918735. The top comment on that post is "As a GenX who played with that filter yesterday, I don't understand why anyone's reaction would be to cry." Well, this is certainly one reason why.
you can't know how it feels to be older than you are, you can only know how it looks. from that you're free to guess how it feels, but you're probably wrong.
me, i've felt 9 since i was 9. it's actually kind of weird, i remember waking up on the morning of my ninth birthday, and that's where my episodic memory begins. i have earlier memories, but they're outside of time.
It’s not uncommon for me to be in a conversation with someone in their 30’s or 40’s and they think I’m younger than them. I still get hit on by 18, 19, and 20 year olds. I’m not interested but it’s flattering. Perspective and attitude go a long way.
Same here. I think it's negatively affected my career prospects too, not that I care too much about that.
Never thought it would be advantageous to be a schlubby balding guy, but I saw someone start the same day as me get way more respect immediately despite me being pretty clearly more technically competent than him. Maybe he was schmoozing behind the scenes, I don't know.
Actually, I'm a trans-age (you know, years are biological and ages are social). There is always a mismatch between my biological years and the age of my soul. So I identified myself as a guy whoes age is 20.
I figured this was going to be more about the Zoomers in their twenties who act like perpetual high school students. Did not expect to see the discrepancy between people with and without kids.
I am in the interesting position of being close to 40 and only just in the past year becoming able to grow a proper beard. So, I consider myself a slightly cleaner-living 18 year old.
Something I've found useful is the idea that you are as old as your spine feels. Seems quite true, at least to me, as both diagnostic and prescription. :)
People take for granted the cardiac muscle dutifully pumping away oxygen and nutrients to each extremity. A weak heart makes it difficult to move, difficult to think. Once your heart deteriorates everything else quickly follows.
That leads quite often to the situation where you are looking in shock at some elderly, bald person in the mirror while thinking "Who's that old bastard?".
Or the sudden realisation "My God! I'm only two and a bit years off 80!"
As the article says, there's a difference between the age you feel you are 'in your head' and the age you feel you are 'in your body'. This also is rather annoying as your 'head' feels you can knock over a job completely in an hour or two but when you start doing it, your 'body' lets you down and and you find yourself exhausted about four hours later and stop working, only about a quarter-way through the job.