You talk about things like property taxes and 401k contributions more often than you ever thought would be possible
You seriously weigh whether a drink is worth the bad sleep and headache it'll cause you
Your pop-culture references are lost on younger folks
You start referring to college-aged people as "kids"
You need reading glasses but you're in denial about it
Injuries take longer to heal
Those of your peers who haven't taken care of themselves are starting to have serious health issues
You care more about flossing, skincare, fiber, and hydration
You still rock bottom eyeliner like you did in high school
You've seen fashion from your high school years go out of style and then come back as "retro"
You see the utter confusion on your nephew's face when you explain that you used to keep a quarter in your bike pouch in case you needed to call someone, because he doesn't remember a time before cell phones and his generation isn't allowed to just roam around unsupervised on their bikes
You have strong opinions about things like laundry detergent brands
Birds become fascinating
You have no problem spending a few hundred dollars on a new kayak paddle, but the price of cold cuts these days is just unacceptable
Eyes, motivation, you can't drink all night and only sleep for three hours, and in general it's better to drink at home, it's better to lie on the couch, lack of interest in many things.... taking care of children's health is above your own etc.
I like the enshittification one. Old(er) people say how much better things were back in the day, but we just say that's rose tinted glasses because actually e.g. violent crime was much higher.
Then we tell the younger generation that the web used to be so much better and they are all "yes, grandpa, that's great grandpa".
Hmm, I think back to say the early 2000s, before digg and reddit but after static websites. I never got the opportunity to use Usenet but random forums all running on PHPBB and later, Invision Power Board, with some other software thrown in.
Ok, that might be rose tinted glasses, as that was the first experience of user-led content rather than static sites (unless you count geocities).
Digg, and later Reddit, was a sort of bringing together of these different forums into one platform. It was great at the time, but so was 1GB of free email when other free email providers were doing 5MB and we all know how that turned out...
Man, I'm feeling half nostalgic and half old talking about seeing the birth of Gmail and the first mainstream social media and the first iPhone. My kids hear my stories about the days before smart phones and the days before aeroplanes and think of them as the same kinda time frame.
Instagram is always the one that springs to mind for me. It was amazing in the early days before Facebook bought it and turned it into the monstrosity it is now. I was an early user of it. It was quirky, it was fun, the community was much smaller and people didn't care about how many likes they got. It was actual photography and was more personal. Not the ad-infested self-promoting shallow bullshit it is now.
Old Instagram > New Instagram is the absolute peak of enshittification for me. It's genuinely awful now.
You nailed it. I'm loving it, I'm more fit now than ever and do so much more in my 40s than in my 20s even. It's great. You're only as old as you want to be. Listen to new music, try out new things and complain about it all when you're 90+
Nope, you're describing not being young, that's nothing like being actually old. Growing old has a bunch of stages:
joint pain
can no longer dance all night
hangovers last all day
dentists start talking to you about your gums
But then you get to the phase of
skin losing elasticity
liking dinner parties
marijuana is now a medicine
developed distinct preferences about stuff like threadcount
And then after that the next phase is more like
a lot of time worrying about your parents
all body fat migrates to one or two of its favourite spots
seriously consider putting everything on lanyards
your favourite singers are all dead
And so on, you get the picture. That's as far as I've traveled but as far as I can see the phases after that involve things like bladder leakage and losing friends to alzheimers.