When I was in high school there was a young family a few doors down that had 2 little kids, like 3-5 yrs old. I never paid attention to them since we were all at very different points in our lives but I do remember them being fascinated with me and my buddies when we were hanging out on the street skateboarding or whatever. We’d let them butt-board around on our skateboards sometimes, which seemed like the best thing ever to them.
Anyway, I’m almost 40 now and was recently visiting my parents and saw both those kids out front who were also visiting…all grown up with their own families and their own little kids. Which obviously growing up is the outcome of time passing, but seeing them with kids the same age as they were in my last memory of them was a trip! Definitely made me feel like an old man
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I noticed that grocery stores have started playing good music instead of the shitty classic rock they used to play…and then I realized
Lot of young folk are awful at using a computer. I’ve had to teach multiple new hires how to create folders, using the "Save As" function, what a mapped network directory is…
It’s weird because that’s how the tech averse boomers were like 15-20 years ago.
Edit: oh yeah, related to this and the OP. It’s weirding me out how much I’m starting to genuinely think how things really used to be better "back in the day". Software, Music, TV, movies, all of it. Trying to fight that one, but it’s hard when every piece of computer programming and UI has been actual dog shit for the last 10 years or so.
Seeing anyone after a long amount of time. Last time I saw my cousin was when he was 10, I see that he has a Facebook and he’s having a kid and getting married, wtf how is he ahead of me now?
That will definitely do it.
Two of my nephews (my brother-in-law’s kids), whom I’ve known since they were each born, now have kids of their own.
It makes you feel old really quick.
Another mind blower for me is that our oldest son is now older than my wife and I were when we met.
Going on my 26th year of skateboarding and the fashion is tripping me out, both trends that are coming back and trends the used to be considered completely unacceptable.
I am seeing Jnco jeans coming back, but I am also seeing New Balance shoes and khaki pants becoming a trend. I have no idea whats going on, but its very fun to watch!
Seeing my parents and all their peers as senior citizens. My parents were extremely social growing up and they’d often drag me to get togethers and parties at their friends houses. I remember their friends being very lively and social.
I’m now 40 and many of those same people are in their mid-late 70’s – 80’s. Some have passed in recent years. Some aren’t expected to live much longer and are in and out of hospitals.
What trips me out is that I am now at the age that my parents were when they were dragging me to those parties and get togethers.
How casually they try to victimize themselves. Make every little thing bother them and turn it into drama.
Teaching high-school and constantly being around 16 year olds. I’ve been doing it for a couple years now and I’m realizing that I’ll always be surrounded by the culture of the adolescent as I grow older and older.
Similar. I remember my nephew’s first Christmas. He was tiny and not even crawling yet, we almost lost him in a pile of wrapping paper at one point.
He’s been accepted to UoT and he starts this year.
Realizing that when my kids listen to 90s music (30 years ago) it’s like me listening to 60s music (30 years ago) when I was a kid. The 60s seemed like ancient history when I was a kid and now that’s how today’s kids feel about the 90s.
Also when one of my kids asked what life was like in the late 1900s.
When I had to wait on a customer service manager at Walmart to approve a return at the counter and realized I had literally changed his diaper as an infant when he walked up. Helping my kids write history papers about events I lived through and the fact hits me that some of them happened two decades or more before they were even born. Being denied a loan by my son’s elementary school bully, who is somehow a loan officer at the bank now.
Got a call from the university I went to, it was an undergrad stuck w the job of soliciting for donations.
Talked to her for a bit, and found out that not only did my old dorm building not exist, but she had absolutely no idea what it was when I said the name.
It’s only been 10 years since I graduated, but 10 years is a long, long time
Trippy, but maybe not makes me feel old – How quick time moves in terms of history. WWII ending only 80 years ago just feels crazy to me. When you start to get older you begin to realize that it wasn’t long ago at all. Same idea with the formation of America.
When you’re a kid it’s all dinosaur talk. When you actually have a grasp of what 50 years looks like, your perspective changes quite a bit
Hearing/seeing people giving advice to young people saying "if you don’t do x, then you’ll quickly be y age and regret it". Well I’m y age now.
My 21 year old manager at work is pregnant. If I had a kid at 21 it would be a senior in high school. I don’t have a kid, nor do I have an expectation of getting one at this point.
When Gen Z-ers will complain about ads, but they have absolutely no idea how to install a browser plug-in to block all of them.
You tell them to use UBlock Origin, and they just go quiet as if you asked them to do some complicated math, or some kind of computer programming or something.
In about five weeks, Kurt Loder will turn 80.
(nothing makes me feel old or "like an old man" but this is still kind of weird somehow.)
The dog ran away from me last year and chased sheep. I didn’t run after him because I’ve seen people my age (59) fall over. For some reason, we don’t put our hands out to cushion the fall and just face plant.
Nah, fuck that, I realised I was a crusty old bastard pretty quick.
Myself when I look in the mirror. Who is that old dude looking back at me?
Flakiness. My old person trait is that I believe if you say you’re going to a thing, you should show up regardless of your spoons.
All the fully grown people running around that were born after 9/11.
I process medical files. The first time I saw a birth journal where the mother’s age started with a twenty, I was disgusted with the world wondering who’d done that to a kid!
Then I realized y2k was 23 years ago and that was a perfectly normal age to have a kid.
Felt positively ancient.
My baby sister is 9 years younger than me. I changed her diapers. Her oldest boy is now a junior in high school and the younger one is a sophomore.
My coworkers. I look at them and am amazed at how young they are only to have the realization that I was the same age or younger when I started.
when im in a 7-11 type store and see "wont sell to minors or people born before this day, 2007" (18 is legal age here to buy cigarettes)
Definitely the aging of children in my life. My cousin has a 13 and 9 year old now but I remember them when they were a few days old. The 13 year old in particular has been wild seeing her go from baby to little kid to now a mildly surly teenager.
People not understanding what I assume are widely recognizable references on reddit and other social media. I have to remind myself that a ton of users are in their early 20s or teens and have almost no frame of reference for culture the same way I did at that age. And it’s because they didn’t grow up channel surfing while bored as hell and being exposed to old or random media that way.
I recently saw a gif from Clueless where Cher, Alicia Silverstone’s character, was trying to seduce her boyfriend, who is heavily implied to be gay. Maybe one person out of 100 replies on X actually knew the context. Sure, many of them are probably bots, but Gen Z widely hasn’t seen that movie and most people of that generation don’t know who Alicia Silverstone is. It’s like learning how they were only exposed to the show Friends recently when it was on Netflix.
I take knowing about certain huge pop culture phenomenon from the 70s-00s for granted and forget that many younger people have never been exposed to it and don’t care to be. The entire pop culture zeitgeist is different now.
i work in IT. my younger coworkers no longer take time to sit down and figure out problems, they ask chatGPT. and they paste me the responses. sure, it’s helpful – but more often than not, it’s reiterating things i know already. i keep seeing this everywhere, and i wonder how will that affect their skills and quality of our solutions.
i’ve also been a victim to comfort – relying on certain technologies makes you forget the basics. sometimes those turn out to be critical skills. this is why i am so wary of it.
another situation: i used to have a friend, whom i’ve helped out a few times. he was from a blue collar family, and i’ve recently seen the kid, he ended up as an alcoholic, barely recognized me and begged me for a few coins for a beer. disheveled, barely aware of where he was, really neglected appearance. i felt sorry for him, i still remembered the kid he was when we were both teenagers and i saw that person gone.
third: i am past the age my parents were, when i was born.
fourth: i barely see younger people who are able to pass the time without phone in their hands. but when i do, they’re very interesting to talk to.
my niece, whose baptism i attended, is now 19.
getting out of touch with the language of younger people.
When I started working on systems the ‘default’ date to use when running reports was 01/01/1970 because you knew that would look at all the records. I’ve only changed in the last 2ish years to using 01/01/2000.
My nephew lives nearby and is 6 months older than my oldest. Seeing nephew walk into the school to vote, wasnt it just last week that he was attending that primary school? Wait, my kid can vote next election? when did this happen?
Visiting a country where smoking is still common. Just sitting in a restaurant and someone at the next table lights up, and I think it’s the added sense of smell that really reminds me, this is how it used to be everywhere, how it was almost more common to smoke than not, how non-smokers were basically the vegans when I was growing up.
This reminds me of my wrestling days. Grew up wrestling. Sometimes after high school practice I would stick around and help out the kids class. There was one kid i would work with a lot. Tough as shit little 7/8 year old.
One day I’m Ubering home from a wedding, and the driver greets me by my nick name excitedly. I had no clue who he was but he told me I look exactly the same. Dude was in his early 20s and really excited to run into me
Saw a girl that I dated when we were way younger. We were together for about a year, had a bad breakup and basically hadn’t seen eachother since then, around 2012. Seeing her now that we’re in our early 30’s was kind of devastating. Not because I miss her but because the time when we loved eachother is ancient, mundane history. And she looks old. She doesn’t look bad, she actually looks really great. But so much older.
It used to be hiring employees born after I graduated high school.
Now it’s hiring employees who have parents younger than me.
Watching professional sports and seeing players that look like kids.
https://preview.redd.it/qmub3pf5igre1.jpeg?width=680&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8d596d46a8c98be49dbe643502b955a739292039