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.
