IMO if there are any discussions of Zompist's Aging post, they should have their own thread

[Raphael]

The post is here:

https://zompist.wordpress.com/2020/02/21/on-aging/

I plan to post some thoughts of my own a bit later.

[Raphael]

Ok, this is only tangentially related to the post, but still - it feels pretty silly to me now that I'm about to turn 38, but I first started to feel old at 24. That was probably one of the main causes of my first serious period of depression. I really believed at the time that only young people can be happy, and that attitude can get pretty unpleasant when combined with the growing realization that you yourself are gradually moving away from being young and towards being middle-aged. I still think there's some logic to starting to feel old in your mid-twenties, though - at 20, you're still basically a teenager, and at 21 and 22, you're still basically a rounding error away from being 20. 23 is a bit trickier, and by 24, you realize that "the youth of today" now consist of other people than you and your peers.

One thing I've noticed in recent years - this might be somewhat related to Zompist's point about not enjoying silly humor as much anymore - is that I've gotten a lot more aware of just how dumb and embarrassing many things I did when I was younger were. My brain now has a habit of starting with a thought, jumping to a tangentially related thought, jumping to yet another tangentially related thought, and eventually ending at the memory of something dumb and embarrassing I did when I was younger, and then I cringe inwardly.

Physically, in my early 30s I realized that I could no longer take of my shoes while standing by bending over, and that came as quite a shock.

The parts about seeing older relatives grow more and more frail and seeing them die did hit home, though - so far, not yet because of experiences with my parents, but because of experiences with my grandparents.

[alice]

Aging... I could post a lot about how I'm now past 50 - which must make me among the oldest few ZBBers still active - and I sometimes wonder if I'll ever be able to work again, thanks to this illness which means that "exercise" and "keeping fit" are not realistic options for me. I could post a lot about how seeing older relatives getting decrepit and cranky makes me feel uncomfortably mortal. But it would be really depressing and might adversely affect the membership numbers of this board, so I probably shouldn't.

[chris_notts]

I have strong memories of realising my own mortality emotionally in childhood. Of course you learn intellectually early on that people die, but I remember sitting in the gym at school as a child of about 10, thinking that 1/7 or 1/8th of my life was already gone, and feeling a wrenching sense of horror. And that strong sense of my own mortality has never really gone away since then. It's something I struggle to keep down every day because if I let myself feel it I couldn't function. I don't know whether all children feel it at about the same age, or whether everyone struggles with it so frequently, because it was never something we talked about seriously growing up.

The next thing that hits you is the stream of funerals. The first ones I remember were my great-grandparents (general old age) and my aunt (kidney and other organ failure due to diabetes combined with not taking care of herself very well), but I was too young for those to really feel it. My aunt in particular went badly, I remember: at the end she didn't want to accept the inevitable and was resuscitated a couple of times before dying. I think she never really thought things would end that way until it was too late. And resuscitation is more brutal than most people realise - you see what it does to people even if you don't seem them doing it. When my great grandmother died, the thing I remember most is I got to keep a carved wooden head she'd brought back from a holiday in Africa that I'd always coveted, which just goes to show you how shallow and selfish small children are.

But the later funerals... my father's parents died a few years ago, my grandmother from a stroke and my grandfather from the stress and sadness of them being separated. I was asked to give a reading at one of the funerals, and I cried while I did it, but I realised at the time that it wasn't just sadness that was torturing me but fear. Funerals are a terrible reminder that we'll keep losing others until we lose ourselves.

And as Raphael says, things don't feel the same earlier than you think. I'm in my mid thirties and I do get aches and pains, and rhinitis I didn't really suffer from in my twenties, oh and acid reflux with some quite strong side effects. I had an endoscopy because of that last year (trust me, having someone stick a camera down your throat isn't fun), and also ended up visiting a German hospital while abroad for work because I had such severe chest pain I didn't think it could be just reflux. But EEGs and blood tests were negative, so guess I was wrong. I've tried to manage it via diet, but it's still bad sometimes.

And one last thing, if you have children of your own. A couple of months ago, my son, who is five, turned to me and said "Daddy, how do you not die?". I asked what he meant , and he was asking how to avoid dying ever. And I didn't want to scare him so young so I said something vague along the lines of "I'm not sure, but when you find out you tell me", to which he responded "I don't think you can, I think one day you just die". And I felt really bad then, because it felt like the beginning of the end of his childhood innocence. Death isn't just an abstract concept to him anymore, it's something he wants not to happen but knows he can't avoid. I just hope that it's a long time before that intellectual knowledge becomes real fear.

[chris_notts]

The saddest descent into old age in my family was a great-uncle of mine who was a moderately famous local painter. Painting was his life... and old age took it away from him. From his late fifties onwards he suffered from increasingly crippling arthritis that made painting painful. Even so, he persevered for a long time, producing fewer and fewer paintings but determined not to stop completely. And then one day he did stop, and the great hobby of his life was over. Of course, losing yourself to a stroke or dementia is also terrible, but I think his case was a unique torture because he was aware but unable to do what he wanted with his life

[Pabappa]

I remember sitting in the gym at school as a child of about 10, thinking that 1/7 or 1/8th of my life was already gone, and feeling a wrenching sense of horror. And that strong sense of my own mortality has never really gone away since then. It's something I struggle to keep down every day because if I let myself feel it I couldn't function. I don't know whether all children feel it at about the same age,

Well I can at least say that that is definitely not my life experience. I think Im familiar with the exact feeling youre describing, but I first experienced it when I was about 34 years old or so. After an afternoon nap, I woke up and realized the sun had set, and that the house was completely dark and quiet because both of my parents were out of state attending my grandmother's funeral. (I was never close to her, so I wasnt really expected to attend.) We lived in a woodsy area then, so there were no streetlights, etc.... the house was dark as a womb and quiet as a tomb.

My branch of the family is very small, so I will almost certainly not see another funeral until the first of my parents dies, and that may well be quite a ways off. By then I'll consider myself old, even if Im only in my 40s, because I'll be past my prime years and will be focused on planning out how I'm going to live my life when both of them are gone.

Ive had health problems since my early 20s so Im used to that. I had just as many mysterious things going on back then, which mostly resolved with no explanation, as I do now.

I like your response to your son. Ive heard conflicting answers on whether children instinctively understand what death is or not .... I dont remember ever *not* knowing that people eventually all die, but there are a lot of questions that I just never bothered to think about when I was young .... e.g. I dont remember ever questioning the existence of Santa, or asking where babies come from, ... I probably learned those things at a time when I wasnt interested enough to even consider them useful knowledge.

[Travis B.]

To me the big thing is that I am already 35, and it feels like I have not actually done much that is useful with my life up until recently aside from having worked and been a parent. I have only in the past few years actually created much software like I have wanted to, rather than just for a job, whereas in times past I essentially had been unable to get myself to go and write code for myself much of the time. I had been doing some conlanging over the years, and I never was able to get the satisfaction of writing code and having it just work out of it, even though I do keep on trying my hand at it every once in a while. Probably the biggest reason for this is my having rediscovered Forth - which I had played around with as a teenager - and not just learning to use it as a target language but rather learning to create Forth implementations of my own - there is something deeply satisfying with having a language environment that you created yourself completely to one's liking. But this leads me back to the thought of what if I had been doing this at 20 rather than at 35, where would I be now?

[Ares Land]

I'm 36, so not quite qualified to comment yet
I'm actually kind of looking forward to getting older myself in a pervese way. My own teenage years and my twenties were kind of frustrating. You're not particularly competent, a bit naive, easily impressed by unimportant stuff. I'm kind of glad this is over and having a bit more of experience and maturity is fairly comfortable, really.

Weighing in on on having children.. well, it's a mess, really. I think I resent authority and established wisdom more, actually. (Spending a few years cleaning butts does change your perspective on things. On the other hand, I should add that the cleaning is actually made much harder than it should be because while cleaning butts, you're subjected to a heavy bombardment of well-meaning advice on how best to clean butt by people who haven't cleaned another person's butt in decade.)
Also, plutocracy is much more tolerable when you don't have kids, I think. With a noticeably lowered standard of living and having to plan for the little things' future, you tend to take a dimmer view of rich folks taking off with the money.

If anything, I think I'm a lot more conservative and a lot more liberal than I was in my twenties.

I kind of which I'd written more fiction and done more conworlding/conlanging when I was younger and had more time... but then again I think I really needed the extra years and experience to do quality work. So, on average, it's not so bad.

[chris_notts]

Weighing in on on having children.. well, it's a mess, really. I think I resent authority and established wisdom more, actually. (Spending a few years cleaning butts does change your perspective on things. On the other hand, I should add that the cleaning is actually made much harder than it should be because while cleaning butts, you're subjected to a heavy bombardment of well-meaning advice on how best to clean butt by people who haven't cleaned another person's butt in decade.)

My mother-in-law, who lives in a different country to us normally, moved in for about six months after our son was born, and she had to have the last word about everything and be involved in everything. She even snatched up our baby in the hospital before I even got a chance to hold him, and not long after my wife did. By the end I wad so enraged by her presence and inability to just let us be a family without her being the centre of attention that we had a massive row, she booked a last minute ticket and flew out, and we can still barely stand each other. If she hadn't left, there might well have been a homicide, I'm just not sure who would've gotten the other first.

[krinnen]

Hi! I'm not really back-back, but I guess I'm back at least for this post. I don't know if I'm remembered... I once won a best map award

I'm 38 now, living with who was my gf back when I was a regular here (Or rather, at the zbb hosted @ spinnoff) and our two boys.

I guess I score high on the psycopathy test, but death's something I take as a natural fact of life. I don't have grandparents anymore, my dad's 72 and my mom's 69, and my mother in law is like 77, and she's the closest I've been lately to how fragile and at the same time how resilient we humans are.
One month before our oldest son was born, she fainted and fell from the... how do you say it? Terrace? From the second floor to the first, breaking her humerus and elbow. During surgery, it was discovered she had osteoporosis, the bone broke while putting in the prosthetics, so they had to be taken out. Now she has a shorter left arm. The last August, she fell (regular height, not from the second floor) and broke her hips, same side as the broken arm. She decided not to proceed with surgery, instead resting for 3 months, and now the femur attaches at a different angle, so shorter arm, shorter leg. But she's a beast, like a 35 kg and 77 years beast. For reference, her father lived to 105 years.

I yet have to live through a long illness of a loved one, and I hope I never do, and I think that would be the worst, the slow and abnormal dilution of self, abnormal compared to the "normal" loss of strengh, weight, agility, and cognitive capacity. I hope I never have to.

The other thing I take really well is my own aging and deterioration. I've dealt with broncospasms all my life (since age 2), then psoriasis (since age 7), then persistent urticaria (since age 25), then arthritis in both ankles (since age 31, due to repeated soccer injuries), plus back issues caused by 15 years of industrial work. I have to live with all of that every day, and somehow I've always accepted it. I guess it's a temperament thing, but my point is not "I don't complain so neither should you"; there's not point, really. I'm trully empathetic of people feeling pain, and I completely understand people who can't get themselves to workout, for example.

I'm almost 40 now, and my life feels like a new begining. Shortly after Simón, my first, was born, I quit my profession in the automotive industry and pursued a career as a cook. It's been 4 years now of new experiences, and I feel younger than the prior 5 years. More in pain in the mornings, but younger. Sometimes I feel like in ASAF, how people change careers after 50 or 100 years, only in XXI century humans lifespans.

So, in other news, I still conlang and conworld, mostly applied to my main conworld from back when I frequented the zbb, Adnen, and to my roleplaying game design.

It's great to see familiar names! Many hugs to all of you!! <3 <3

[Ares Land]

Hi! I'm not really back-back, but I guess I'm back at least for this post. I don't know if I'm remembered... I once won a best map award

Oh, I think I do remember that truly awesome map

I guess I score high on the psycopathy test, but death's something I take as a natural fact of life.

I sure hope it's not a sign of psychopathy, because I'm pretty much the same. Though I do wish people were more aware of their own mortality. (How about a nice memento mori in meeting rooms? Or a vanitas? That would sure cut some boring discussions short...)

[Kuchigakatai]

Just a comment about sciatica:

But the other is: after a certain point, 40 or 45 or 50, you lose your immortality. Even a sedentary nerd can go through their 20s more or less ignoring their body, except for food and sex. After that, you start to get unwanted pains, not obviously tied to anything you’re doing. Your back may spasm for a week. Kneeling and getting up from the floor are no longer effortless. Going up a couple flights of stairs with groceries starts to be hard work. You may get sciatica. If you don’t exercise, you can, well, kind of feel lousy all the time.

Sciatica is, except when you have it, pretty interesting. It’s a sensor malfunction. You feel like you have a burning pain going down your leg– only it’s not something in your leg at all; it’s an inflamed nerve in your back. It’s being pressed by your spine or something, and since it’s not a normal pain, no change in position, nothing you can do to your leg, will help. The cure turns out to be exercise. You gotta get better abdominal muscles to help hold yourself up.

The good news is that you can exercise and get fit. This is true at any age, in fact– I read a book on exercise that referenced studies of people over 90. You can get muscles even then. At my age, though, it’s the difference between feeling pretty good (also known as “how you always felt physically when you were 25”) and feeling worn-out.

The nerve inflammation that causes sciatica can happen for a variety of reasons, some of which can perfectly affect young people. I would know: I had a horrible episode of sciatica myself, at the age of 26! It wasn't thankfully a hernia, but something on the way there when, after years of bad posture while sitting and hardly doing any exercise, something happened while I was taking a nap that was the straw that broke the camel's back. I literally woke up from a nap in the late afternoon, and to my surprise I couldn't stand or walk upright anymore from the sudden new, unfamiliar pain. My nerve was bulging too much, and the spine would not really let me sit or stand or walk for long due to the pain as it pressed on the bulge.

Having some nerve bulging which may end up getting pressed by the spine is very common among young people, by the way. At the time, while doing some reading about it, I came across a study (which I'm not going to bother to find again) where a sample of random, healthy American college students aged 19-23 were examined in an MRI for nerve bulges in the lower spine, and they found that about 45% had some bulging even though they didn't feel any symptoms from it at all.

I eventually recovered after a month of physiotherapy, with significant improvement after just one week (being young helps), but anyway, yeah guys, fix your bad posture and do some damn exercise. You'll thank yourself later...

[chris_notts]

Following on from the story about my son from before, we were putting him to bed tonight and my wife was singing an abridged version of Bohemian Rhapsody to him. And when she got to the the death related bits he burst into tears and wouldn't stop crying because... he doesn't want to die some day. He's only five and he's rapidly developing a level of existential angst it took me almost twice as long to hit. He takes everything so seriously and so hard, I wish he could be oblivious for a bit longer.

[So Haleza Grise]

I can distinctly remember having conversations with my parents about how I was going to die someday - I can't remember how old I was exactly, but I couldn't have been much older than 8. They wanted to change the subject. I don't think I could have appreciated how hard that conversation would be for them until I became a parent myself.

[chris_notts]

Yes, when you imagine being a parent, you don't normally imagine having to console your five year old about the finiteness of their existence.

[Travis B.]

When I was like five or so I was told by one of my uncles that the Earth would be engulfed by the sun in N billion years, and became absolutely inconsolable on the spot...

[linguistcat]

Young kids are going to ask about all sorts of odd things or comment on things they "aren't supposed to". They don't have all their social programming yet and a lot of holes in their knowledge they want to fill, so it's best to expect the unexpected. I'm not saying this as a parent, but as someone who was the kid who liked morbid topics and would say awkward things because I had no idea I shouldn't.

[Kuchigakatai]

Following on from the story about my son from before, we were putting him to bed tonight and my wife was singing an abridged version of Bohemian Rhapsody to him. And when she got to the the death related bits he burst into tears and wouldn't stop crying because... he doesn't want to die some day. He's only five and he's rapidly developing a level of existential angst it took me almost twice as long to hit. He takes everything so seriously and so hard, I wish he could be oblivious for a bit longer.

And then there's me, who didn't really viscerally process the existential problem of death due to old age until I was 19 years old or so, when for the first time I felt the kind of angst or panic that your son is currently feeling at the age of 5. Although I think it was in good part because most talk about death I had heard around me up until that point had been about homicides by gangsters. Also, my grandpa died when I was 6 years old, and after that pretty much no one in my extended family died until one of my two grandmas did when I was 26. There was a classmate of mine in high school who died very quickly after developing cancer, but then he was a teenager, it wasn't death from old age, so I ascribed his death as disease and bad luck.

[Raphael]

Also, my grandpa died when I was 6 years old, and after that pretty much no one in my extended family died until one of my two grandmas did when I was 26.

Very similar for me, though the mother of a friend of the family died when I was 13.

[So Haleza Grise]

Young kids are going to ask about all sorts of odd things or comment on things they "aren't supposed to". They don't have all their social programming yet and a lot of holes in their knowledge they want to fill, so it's best to expect the unexpected. I'm not saying this as a parent, but as someone who was the kid who liked morbid topics and would say awkward things because I had no idea I shouldn't.

Of course you're right: to me part of the experience of being a parent (and I don't have very much of it!) is knowing, in some abstract way, that a particular thing is coming or will be something you face, then still feeling quite unprepared when it happens.