Realizing how quiet life becomes. Friends get busy, parents grow older, and suddenly you’re dealing with everything alone, with a smile on your face so no one notices you’re breaking inside.
The loneliness that comes with being a man and having to rely on urself and have everyone rely on u for everything from finances, security, etc. not complaining just calling it how it is. I’ve been working on trying to embrace it and becoming more stoic but there are definitely some hard lonely times..
That even if you find love, you have to come to terms that they will out live you or you will out live them. And if you’re lucky your children will all out live you.
Sometimes people leave and never come back. I mean this in several ways. Death/relationships/friendships/etc. Never knew how lonely life can be sometimes. It isn’t always, but when it is it’s just a big bout of existential dread.
You and Most of the people you love will eventually just drift apart. No big falling out or fight, just suddenly you’ll wake up and realize it’s been years or even decades since you’ve seen them or talked to them.
Loneliness of being a man. Growing up we’re told of all the difficulties of being a woman which are valid. But no one tells you that being a man is basically repeatedly being told that your life is of no worth to anyone unless you’re a father or husband. And even then it’s worth less than your family. And no one cares if you’re sad. They’ll tell you to express your emotions….. but they won’t care when you do.
Edit: Case in point. Anytime a man complains about anything there will be replies that say “But women have it harder!” Women have it harder but men suffer in silence and guilt for feeling anything.
For those of us from dysfunctional families: the fact that your children won’t have a large family. Or the general knowledge that you’ll never have the traditional sense of family.
Nobody to go back home to for holidays, nobody to celebrate your small victories with, nobody that is guaranteed to accept and support you in your hardest moments, nobody to guide you through new challenges, nobody to advocate for you when you can’t advocate for yourself, nobody to reminisce on the fundamental formative years of your life with, no camaraderie.
Realizing that you’re the only surviving person who has those memories from your childhood vacations, that when you die it those memories will just no longer exist.
Watching your loved ones die while you’re focusing on building a life and working to save money. You just wake up one day, and you are on your own.
Rent is due regardless of your situation. If you can’t figure it out, you can be homeless with very little notice. A lot of people are hanging on by a thread.
The worst part is how you just simply drift away from your friends. No arguments, no falling out, you just one day stop talking. One day turns to two, then months, then years go by. You then wake up and realize you haven’t talked to your good friend in years.
Learning that at a certain point you become the driver of your life, and if you fail miserably only you can ultimately accept fault & also paired with the fact that so very few actually “make it”
More and more metaphorical doors closing for you every year…
When you’re in your late teens it feels like you have a world of possibilities open to you. As you get older, you have fewer opportunities that are still viable, for a number of reasons. It could be financial, it could be health, it could be family burdens, or just straight up aging out of qualifying for certain opportunities.
Eventually your options for how to move forward in life are severely limited.
Every year watching the people who helped build you, teach you, make you strong die off and you have to live with it.
Every year you feel parts of your body that were never injured nor a problem hurt more and more to the point you would do or take anything to make the pain stop.
And finally watching the things you were promised if you worked hard, played by the rules, and lived right just be a giant lie to keep you in line so that the ones who break every rule benefit from your (my) stupidity
You can’t go back. Some choices stay with you forever and your life is objectively worse for them.
Not saying there isn’t happiness and goodness to be had, but you only getting older, uglier, less witty, less motivated… after your 20s. It’s not like you can’t fight against it but you lose that natural excitement and drive, that natural lust for life you once had, because you’ve seen too much, nothing is terribly surprising.
I know for a fact I have accomplishments, excitement, and positive things to do and experience ahead of me. But the “best days are behind you” comes a lot more quickly than you think. And it’s not because you are miserable or can’t still achieve, it’s because you know too much, you’ve seen too much. You can’t go back to being innocent and excited by life in that way.
Most people are happy for you while you’re doing as good as they are and/if they are doing better than you. Once they feel like you’re doing better than them, shit hits the fan.
How much harder it is to build a support/friend structure later in life. It feels effortless to find and make friends at a young age with only marginal amounts of work but as you grow older if you have to find, make and keep new friends it requires some serious effort.
I wish there was some kind of warning label attached to “Build and maintain your social network early because it won’t always be this easy to replenish” because loneliness and feelings of isolation is a serious problem that, based on anecdotal evidence, is only growing worse in society.
Looking forward to doing the thing on your off day, doing the thing on your off day, than going back to work and realizing this is it. Work, off, work off, work, off.
Being alone and realizing any connection was purely because of growing up in the same house and that there’s genuinely no connection between anyone in the family
The realization that very few people actually care about your well-being. The fact that you can work hard with integrity and still end up with nothing. That if you move away or change jobs, nobody misses you because they enjoyed who you were as a person, they will miss what you were doing for them, and vice versa, moving to a new place, people aren’t excited about you as a person, they’re excited about what you can do for them.
Chris Rock has a bit where he states Only Children, Women and dogs are loved unconditionally. A man is only loved under the condition he provides something.
There is some element of truth to that. The transition from childhood to manhood is jarring.
I honestly think it’s why so many young men commit suicide.
I lost a lot of family pets growing up. But when you get your own a couple months old. Buy it food, Take it to the vet, It comes to the door to great YOU when you come home.
Then the day comes when it is best to put a loved pet down, so they no longer suffer.
Birthdays and Christmas are just stale, at least for me. You really have to work hard to have fun because as an adult everything is bleak.. you have to craft your happiness whereas a child, happiness is delivered through love and upbringing, it’s almost effortless.
Realizing that some friendships arent meant to last and that people you thought would be in your life forever slowly fade out or change. No one really prepares you for the quiet grief of outgrowing people even when theres no big fallout.
You can die young, and actually, you will die young. You never get to a certain age and feel 30 or 40 or 50 or 70 or 90. You always feel like some fairly fixed younger version of you, looking around for an adultier adult. I think mine is about 26.
Something that never got through to me is that people my age and my celebrities will start dying and songs that don’t feel that old to me are now oldies like late 70s music was to me. People I grew up with are as old as me. I don’t know. It sucks.
Staying alive for no reason other than the desire not to hurt anyone. Jesus was wrong when he said that no one has greater love than laying down their life for their friends. Try staying alive for your friends and family. I guarantee it’s harder
Having to figure it out on your own or it won’t happen I miss the handholding from when I was a kid (even though I thought that it was overrated at the time
Adulthood takes persistence, discipline and the courage to do something that you will have to live with the consequences of if you do it or not
Having to mediate family disputes that could be resolved by a little introspection on both sides, followed by conceding to the preferences of others once in a blue moon. I don’t mind stepping in to smooth things over because it helps the family function better. But god damn, when I run low on energy and I hear about preventable bullshit I just shake my head and wish the people I care about would just wake up and be adults.
That having kids would be the most fulfilling, wonderful feeling. But the anxiety that comes with the thought of losing your children, can be debilitating.
Having a growing concern about a potiential health problem that is getting worse as you get older, but you’re still too young for doctors or older friends and family members to take it seriously. So, you just kind of deal with it until other people start to notice cause maybe they’re right about you being a hypochondriac. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never overstated an illness in your life; if that many people are calling you crazy, then you probably are a little bit crazy.
Getting dumped. I’m sure there’s a part of our brain that sends an unreasonable amount of horrible feeling chemicals through us to make us refuse to easily let go of fucking awful people. Some bullshit to do with continuation of the species I presume.
Everyone else’s comments are serious, and the first thing that popped into my head sounds silly now. But, when you start your period and you get the quick sharp pains in your asshole. It’s like someone is striking you with lightning to your anus lol
Heartbreak. Not just from a significant other. But the heartbreak of not achieving what you thought you could. Of not being able to afford to own a house for example. Of watching loved ones get sick and die. Or the heartbreak of having to tell people you are sick and dying. Or worse. When you do and no one cares. 💔
for people with toxic parents, realizing you’ll never have “normal” parent moments you see in social media or at your friend’s life miliestones like parents making normal toasts/speeches at weddings, parents at baby showers, mother daughter spa days and brunches or girls days, fathers days or learning skills from present dads, etc. and struggling with the guilt of it all with deciding how much to help and what to do as their health declines too.
When I was younger I didn’t understand the phrase “you can never go home”. Now it hurts.
Everything changes, very little for the better, and nostalgia keeps breathing down my neck.
Comments
Seeing more and more people die.
That money doesn’t grow on trees.
Realizing how quiet life becomes. Friends get busy, parents grow older, and suddenly you’re dealing with everything alone, with a smile on your face so no one notices you’re breaking inside.
What hurts is realizing it’s better than when you were a kid.
Watching so many people fall short of their potential.
First break up, paying tolls
The loneliness that comes with being a man and having to rely on urself and have everyone rely on u for everything from finances, security, etc. not complaining just calling it how it is. I’ve been working on trying to embrace it and becoming more stoic but there are definitely some hard lonely times..
Face punches
The fact that the bad guys win way more than the good guys.
That even if you find love, you have to come to terms that they will out live you or you will out live them. And if you’re lucky your children will all out live you.
Realizing that the world is mostly bad.
And people will screw you over no matter how good a person you are.
Losing good connections. I don’t know how to process them.
How many places you can’t return to
Sometimes people leave and never come back. I mean this in several ways. Death/relationships/friendships/etc. Never knew how lonely life can be sometimes. It isn’t always, but when it is it’s just a big bout of existential dread.
You and Most of the people you love will eventually just drift apart. No big falling out or fight, just suddenly you’ll wake up and realize it’s been years or even decades since you’ve seen them or talked to them.
To fade sucks
Loneliness of being a man. Growing up we’re told of all the difficulties of being a woman which are valid. But no one tells you that being a man is basically repeatedly being told that your life is of no worth to anyone unless you’re a father or husband. And even then it’s worth less than your family. And no one cares if you’re sad. They’ll tell you to express your emotions….. but they won’t care when you do.
Edit: Case in point. Anytime a man complains about anything there will be replies that say “But women have it harder!” Women have it harder but men suffer in silence and guilt for feeling anything.
Feeling hopeless. It’s supposed to be negative, but I don’t think it’s supposed to hurt.
At some point in your life your parents put you down and never picked you up again.
Working… For pretty much ever. Even with a nice career it’s just day after day, week after week, year after year.
So much of my life passed me by trapt in this place.
For those of us from dysfunctional families: the fact that your children won’t have a large family. Or the general knowledge that you’ll never have the traditional sense of family.
Nobody to go back home to for holidays, nobody to celebrate your small victories with, nobody that is guaranteed to accept and support you in your hardest moments, nobody to guide you through new challenges, nobody to advocate for you when you can’t advocate for yourself, nobody to reminisce on the fundamental formative years of your life with, no camaraderie.
Death of family and friends…
Best times are always in the past
Love
Planning, buying, cooking and eating at least 3 meals a day for the rest of my life. I’m sick.
Old injuries.
Being flooded by responsabilities and the conscience of your past carelessness
Dealing with your parents’ declining health. It’s hard to watch and a lot to sort out
Not everyone gets the fairytale you grew up being told you would. Not everyone finds love.
That more than half your life is gone and you’ve wasted a very good portion of it.
Nostalgia.
All I’m gonna say is have proper dental hygiene kids.
When your kids grow up so quickly, and turn from sweet little ones who love you to death into teens who hate when you breathe.
Watching your parents get old.
Losing long time friends
Not because you are fair and kind means that others will be fair and kind to you too.
Seeing the negative sides of the people I used to look up to and realizing just how oblivious I was to them as a kid.
Realizing that you’re the only surviving person who has those memories from your childhood vacations, that when you die it those memories will just no longer exist.
Watching your loved ones die while you’re focusing on building a life and working to save money. You just wake up one day, and you are on your own.
Fucking bills
One day you can just get hit by how uncaring and empty someone can be.
Machine men with machine minds.
Rent is due regardless of your situation. If you can’t figure it out, you can be homeless with very little notice. A lot of people are hanging on by a thread.
The worst part is how you just simply drift away from your friends. No arguments, no falling out, you just one day stop talking. One day turns to two, then months, then years go by. You then wake up and realize you haven’t talked to your good friend in years.
Losing people you love more than anything as you get older.
Learning that at a certain point you become the driver of your life, and if you fail miserably only you can ultimately accept fault & also paired with the fact that so very few actually “make it”
More and more metaphorical doors closing for you every year…
When you’re in your late teens it feels like you have a world of possibilities open to you. As you get older, you have fewer opportunities that are still viable, for a number of reasons. It could be financial, it could be health, it could be family burdens, or just straight up aging out of qualifying for certain opportunities.
Eventually your options for how to move forward in life are severely limited.
Thinking of what to eat everyday
Losing your friends. Losing connections. And people you grew up with, passing away. Losing family.
Realizing that, sure, it’s gotten bad some times, BUT IT CAN ALWAYS GET WORSE
Grief. I didn’t realize it could gut you and make you take years to recover, and who knows how much longer to actually get over it
Every year watching the people who helped build you, teach you, make you strong die off and you have to live with it.
Every year you feel parts of your body that were never injured nor a problem hurt more and more to the point you would do or take anything to make the pain stop.
And finally watching the things you were promised if you worked hard, played by the rules, and lived right just be a giant lie to keep you in line so that the ones who break every rule benefit from your (my) stupidity
You can’t go back. Some choices stay with you forever and your life is objectively worse for them.
Not saying there isn’t happiness and goodness to be had, but you only getting older, uglier, less witty, less motivated… after your 20s. It’s not like you can’t fight against it but you lose that natural excitement and drive, that natural lust for life you once had, because you’ve seen too much, nothing is terribly surprising.
I know for a fact I have accomplishments, excitement, and positive things to do and experience ahead of me. But the “best days are behind you” comes a lot more quickly than you think. And it’s not because you are miserable or can’t still achieve, it’s because you know too much, you’ve seen too much. You can’t go back to being innocent and excited by life in that way.
Regret from all the things you didn’t do, or couldn’t do.
Most people are happy for you while you’re doing as good as they are and/if they are doing better than you. Once they feel like you’re doing better than them, shit hits the fan.
How much harder it is to build a support/friend structure later in life. It feels effortless to find and make friends at a young age with only marginal amounts of work but as you grow older if you have to find, make and keep new friends it requires some serious effort.
I wish there was some kind of warning label attached to “Build and maintain your social network early because it won’t always be this easy to replenish” because loneliness and feelings of isolation is a serious problem that, based on anecdotal evidence, is only growing worse in society.
Watching others grow old.
As you grow up your parents grow old
Not finding friends as easily as you once did. Adult life can be isolating.
Looking forward to doing the thing on your off day, doing the thing on your off day, than going back to work and realizing this is it. Work, off, work off, work, off.
Your pets will die and it will hurt every time. You will forget this and keep doing it over and over again only to be reminded each time.
One day you notice you haven’t spoken in months to someone who once knew everything about you.
Being alone and realizing any connection was purely because of growing up in the same house and that there’s genuinely no connection between anyone in the family
The actual monotony of life. Birth, school, work, death.
Taxes.
As a people’s pleaser it’s hard to satisfy everyone even my own parents
One day you wake up and realize your feet look like horrible lizard talons
Missing your family when you move out. I still miss them often even though they’re 20 minutes away from my house.
The realization that very few people actually care about your well-being. The fact that you can work hard with integrity and still end up with nothing. That if you move away or change jobs, nobody misses you because they enjoyed who you were as a person, they will miss what you were doing for them, and vice versa, moving to a new place, people aren’t excited about you as a person, they’re excited about what you can do for them.
Is this all there is?
Work to keep a roof over your head?
Just the mind numbing monotony of it all.
Chris Rock has a bit where he states Only Children, Women and dogs are loved unconditionally. A man is only loved under the condition he provides something.
There is some element of truth to that. The transition from childhood to manhood is jarring.
I honestly think it’s why so many young men commit suicide.
Putting your own pet down.
I lost a lot of family pets growing up. But when you get your own a couple months old. Buy it food, Take it to the vet, It comes to the door to great YOU when you come home.
Then the day comes when it is best to put a loved pet down, so they no longer suffer.
That hurts.
Birthdays and Christmas are just stale, at least for me. You really have to work hard to have fun because as an adult everything is bleak.. you have to craft your happiness whereas a child, happiness is delivered through love and upbringing, it’s almost effortless.
Losing a beloved parent is fucking earth shattering. The only thing worse was losing a kid
Getting priced out of your hometown and any chance of your kids growing up there
Unlike horror games or horror movies. The scariest parts of life need to get done and can’t be avoided.
Witness your love ones passed
Heartbreak
Realizing that some friendships arent meant to last and that people you thought would be in your life forever slowly fade out or change. No one really prepares you for the quiet grief of outgrowing people even when theres no big fallout.
You can die young, and actually, you will die young. You never get to a certain age and feel 30 or 40 or 50 or 70 or 90. You always feel like some fairly fixed younger version of you, looking around for an adultier adult. I think mine is about 26.
Realizing just how broken the system is. Justice is bought and paid for. Being hard working doesn’t guarantee success. Things like that.
That parts of your life end and will never come back. Like when you leave a place you love and know you’ll never return
Chronic illness can come out of nowhere! I’m 23 and feel like an 80 year old lady now.
Something that never got through to me is that people my age and my celebrities will start dying and songs that don’t feel that old to me are now oldies like late 70s music was to me. People I grew up with are as old as me. I don’t know. It sucks.
Growing up
Mondays
Staying alive for no reason other than the desire not to hurt anyone. Jesus was wrong when he said that no one has greater love than laying down their life for their friends. Try staying alive for your friends and family. I guarantee it’s harder
Having to figure it out on your own or it won’t happen I miss the handholding from when I was a kid (even though I thought that it was overrated at the time
Adulthood takes persistence, discipline and the courage to do something that you will have to live with the consequences of if you do it or not
-Also, taxes
That everyone in your life will die at some point
Having to mediate family disputes that could be resolved by a little introspection on both sides, followed by conceding to the preferences of others once in a blue moon. I don’t mind stepping in to smooth things over because it helps the family function better. But god damn, when I run low on energy and I hear about preventable bullshit I just shake my head and wish the people I care about would just wake up and be adults.
That having kids would be the most fulfilling, wonderful feeling. But the anxiety that comes with the thought of losing your children, can be debilitating.
That things that hurt your kids hurt you way more than them.
Loneliness
Having a growing concern about a potiential health problem that is getting worse as you get older, but you’re still too young for doctors or older friends and family members to take it seriously. So, you just kind of deal with it until other people start to notice cause maybe they’re right about you being a hypochondriac. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never overstated an illness in your life; if that many people are calling you crazy, then you probably are a little bit crazy.
Getting dumped. I’m sure there’s a part of our brain that sends an unreasonable amount of horrible feeling chemicals through us to make us refuse to easily let go of fucking awful people. Some bullshit to do with continuation of the species I presume.
Everyone else’s comments are serious, and the first thing that popped into my head sounds silly now. But, when you start your period and you get the quick sharp pains in your asshole. It’s like someone is striking you with lightning to your anus lol
Caring for elderly parents with dementia. It’s a special kind of hell.
The realization that you don’t matter to people as much and some not at all.
Your friends will repeat what they hear on the news and be angry endlessly over politics that barely affect their lives.
Childhood trauma is for life.
That there isn’t enough time.
You just don’t realise how much time has passed until it hits you one day. The people you love won’t be around forever.
Having to be the one to make the call that it’s time to say goodbye to our dog.
Parents and grandparents dying. It changes the family dynamic so much.
5/8 grind – just a soul crashing experience
falling in love with an e girl
Heartbreak. Not just from a significant other. But the heartbreak of not achieving what you thought you could. Of not being able to afford to own a house for example. Of watching loved ones get sick and die. Or the heartbreak of having to tell people you are sick and dying. Or worse. When you do and no one cares. 💔
Being married
Betrayal
Watching your young kids cry after the family dog, who was older than them, die.
for people with toxic parents, realizing you’ll never have “normal” parent moments you see in social media or at your friend’s life miliestones like parents making normal toasts/speeches at weddings, parents at baby showers, mother daughter spa days and brunches or girls days, fathers days or learning skills from present dads, etc. and struggling with the guilt of it all with deciding how much to help and what to do as their health declines too.
That even as an adult, at times you’ll feel left out and excluded. It sucks. I guess I figured that this only happened to young kids.
sorting through childhood trauma
My mother died when I was 13, and, all my grandparents were dead by my late 20’s. My dad died when I was 46. I had to grow up well before my peers.
When I was younger I didn’t understand the phrase “you can never go home”. Now it hurts.
Everything changes, very little for the better, and nostalgia keeps breathing down my neck.
Not being a perfect parent. My kids are so amazing, they just blow me away, and they deserve the best parents. I’m just ok.
Losing my mom…not just losing her, but having to watch her suffer from a horrible disease and die before she even reached her mid 60s