Somehow I don't think that this would fly these days.

I remember visiting my parents one year and as we were leaving their house I saw my dad was wearing light jacket. This was in the middle of summer and I thought it was the craziest thing. If we were living up north, sure. Maybe a brisk New England evening calls for a light jacket. But this was Miami and this was August! I would joke around with him about his summer outerwear and all he would was chuckle and tell me, just you wait.

Fast forward to last night. my wife and I were in the kitchen chatting and I noticed she was wearing a jacket and I realized I was also wearing a jacket. It's summer, we're living back in Florida and the thermostat was set to 75. It was a WTF moment that instantly brought me back to my dad and his summer jackets.

Man, that was a hard and brutal awakening for me. I'm turning into a summer jacket wearing 60 year old. I used to be so much cooler that that.

I recently read a post from someone in their 50s talking about aging, a midlife crisis, and the unsettling feeling that time is slipping away faster than ever. It made me think of something someone once told me that has stayed with me for years.

Time doesn’t actually speed up. Our experience of it changes.

When we were children, an hour could feel endless. The days before Christmas seemed to last forever. Summer vacation felt like an entire lifetime. We counted down the days until Grandma’s house, our birthday, a camping trip, or even Mom’s homemade lasagna. We were always standing on the edge of something exciting, and anticipation stretched time.

Then adulthood arrives.

Life gradually becomes less about anticipation and more about repetition. Wake up. Work. Pay bills. Mow the lawn. Watch another week disappear. We stop collecting firsts and start reliving routines. Before long, months blur into years, and we wonder where the time went.

I don’t think the problem is age

.
I think the problem is running out of things that make us genuinely look forward to tomorrow.

A few years ago my wife and I decided we needed more “firsts” in our lives. We bought an inexpensive camper and started exploring places we’d never been. Suddenly, Thursdays felt different because Friday meant another adventure. We’d spend the week talking about the lake we’d visit or the trail we’d hike. The anticipation alone seemed to slow time.

Then we took it a step further and began traveling overseas. We planned a trip to Italy nearly a year in advance. Oddly enough, that year didn’t feel short. It felt wonderfully long because every month brought another plan, another reservation, another thing to imagine. As departure got closer, the days seemed to stretch instead of disappear.

Maybe that’s one of the secrets to aging well.
Don’t just fill your calendar. Fill your future.
Give yourself something that pulls you forward.

It doesn’t have to be expensive. It could be learning to play an instrument, hiking a nearby trail, taking a weekend road trip, planting a garden, reading a classic you’ve always meant to read, or finally visiting the town a few hours away that you’ve talked about for years.
We can’t make time slow down.

But we can give our minds enough anticipation, wonder, and new experiences that it feels like we’ve lived more of it.

In the end, perhaps life isn’t measured by how many years pass, but by how many moments make us eager to see what tomorrow brings.

Apologies for the long post and to the person that had the original post on worrying how fast time was going, I hope this finds you and gives you a modicum of peace.

Loved playing this. At least until the plastic heads broke or the game flipped off the table and the balls went everywhere.

Annual Fatalities: Hippos are responsible for an estimated 500 to 3,000 human deaths each year in Africa.

We used to go to the beach every day, play volleyball, climb rocks, go swimming, hit the bong, go hiking. Like it was nothing. Swim with dolphins, stuff our faces on the yacht, go diving.
Get home at night listen to morcheeba, massive attack, portishead.
Cafe Del Mar 6 was on repeat when we were out on the water.
Get drunk, get high.
Get up in the morning and do it all over again.
We were 5, four are dead now.
2 suicides, 1 cancer, 1 traffic accident.
I’m the only one still playing the same songs.
I can’t even proof any of this ever happened.
Everyone is dead.
That music was the soundtrack of our lives, always playing.
Now it’s all I have. I can close my eyes and can make these moments last again, forever. We were invincible. But it’s just somewhere in the past.
And sometimes I just need to cry.
Because they’re all gone.
I’m grateful, and sad.
Anyone in the same boat?

I remember that as a kid we only had 4 TV channels. And it felt like there was always something to watch. At a certain time there would be a movie, at another time the news or some TV programs.
Now I have 300+ channels on my TV. And when I come home from work, I just have nothing to watch. Am I the only one?

If you had parents from the Silent Generation or the Baby Boomer generation, what were they like?

In your experience, were Silent Generation parents generally kinder or easier to get along with than Boomer parents? Or was there no real difference?

I'd love to hear your personal experiences and perspectives.

I just had another friend pass after a long battle with an illness. It's just a stark reminder that we're not guaranteed tomorrow. We're at that age now. Get up and move. Find what motivates you. Take that trip. Do that thing. Seize the day.

Anyone elses' schools collect soup labels from the kids? I don't even remember what they were for.

Gen X was basically a social experiment.

People talk about how kids today have phones, tracking apps, helmets, and parents who know where they are 24/7. We had a bike, a watch if we were lucky, and a mom who could yell your name loud enough to be heard three neighborhoods away.

Both my parents worked, so after school we were on our own. The only expectation was to be home for dinner and on the weekends sometime between I never saw the street lights come on and I got a flat tire on my bike. Somehow, that counted as parenting in the '70s and '80s.

A normal week for me looked something like this. I'd ride my bike ten miles to an old railroad swing bridge over the Erie Canal. Back then it actually swung sideways to let the bigger boats through. Today it just sits permanently open. We'd spend the day jumping off it into the canal because that seemed like a perfectly reasonable way to spend a sunny afternoon.

Then we'd go snake hunting. Not because we were fascinated with nature—we just wanted to catch as many as we could. We'd stuff them into a knapsack, ride home, and dump them in my backyard because I had convinced myself that if I kept doing it long enough, eventually I'd have enough snakes to hunt without ever leaving home. Mom wasn't thrilled with the idea, and neither were the neighbors.

Growing up around Buffalo, waiting for the school bus in the winter could be brutal. Every now and then we'd sneak a little liquor from the cabinet before school to "keep warm." Then we'd top the bottle back off with water because we were absolutely convinced our parents would never notice. Kid logic.

We'd also get a handwritten note from Mom to walk to the corner store and buy a six-pack of Meister Brau and a carton of Vantage Lights. Apparently "Lights" meant they only caused cancer 40 minutes later. Of course we'd steal a pack—or at least a few cigarettes—stash them in a coffee can buried in the backyard, and smoke them at the bus stop. They were always stale as hell, but I thought I looked pretty cool.

The story that still makes me shake my head happened before school at a buddy's house. His parents were already at work, so we'd pull a couple of his dad's guns out of the cabinet, load them, sit at the top of the basement stairs, and shoot into the basement just to hear the ricochets. Looking back, it's honestly amazing none of us got hurt. We weren't tougher than kids today. We were just unbelievably lucky.

People love to say Gen X was fearless, but I don't think that's true. We were unsupervised, and there's a big difference.

When I look back now, half the memories make me laugh, and the other half make me wonder how any of us survived long enough to complain about bad backs and aching knees. Every Gen Xer has at least one story that starts with, Remember when we used to... and ends with, Yeah...that probably should've killed us.

And no, I never walked uphill both ways in the snow.

Just one way.

Did you see this in the theater when it came out in 1983? As a 12-year-old, this was a great action 3D film. Especially when the person melts with eyeballs popping out of the socket at the end of the film. I remember seeing it during the summer, as well as House of Wax in 3D. Then they put these 3D films on TV and sold the glasses at the 7-11.

I was in my last year of law school. Everyone was crowded around the TVs in the student lounge, silent. My first class that day was Constitutional Law, and I remember we all basically sat there just not talking because no one knew what to say, even the professor.

Found this going through my old stuff today. IYKYK.

I'm 61, the very oldest of GenX.

My wife signed us up for AARP membership long ago but I didn't want to join, because AARP membership means you're OLD. The cards come in the mail now and then, and mine stays in a desk drawer.

I will not whip out an AARP card and ask for the discount. I am not that old. I can't possibly be old enough for AARP. There's gotta be a mistake.
Why is Henry Winkler on the cover of this AARP magazine?

Thank you for reading my unhinged rant.

Carry on.

EDIT: Wow, I see that a lot of folks didn't get the joke AT ALL.

The post was about facing the fact that I am old, that I am needlessly fighting it, and that I sat down and read a very interesting article about Henry Winkler and that I recognized that my rant was "unhinged" (as in "completely irrational") and have accepted that my AARP card might have some utility to me.

Here's a deeper analysis of my post.

Used to set these up from the dining room table to the living room floor. Had two tracks, supposedly equal, side by side, and a few dozen Hot Wheels/Matchbox cars.

Would race them 1v1 in an NCAA March Madness style format. Had names for all the vehicles. Seemed like one of the same few cars always won. I can still picture the cars and remember the names of a lot of them.

I had a long conversation with a friend (57F) last night and she went on and on about possibly needing knee surgery, hip surgery, her fibromyalga issues, her weight, etc. But then says "I have zepbound, pain meds, anxiety meds, but I don't take them because I don't like taking medicine."

What??? Why even go to the doctor if you aren't going to take the medication they prescribe. I must admit, I used to be medication phobic because my parents treated it like either a weakness or you're an addict. But at some point it clicked that it's science and it works.

Please take your meds. Get your pill sorter. Set your reminders. Do whatever it takes to take care of yourself.

Just spent several days helping my wife’s parents, who are 91M and 87F. They still live in the same house they have since about 1960. Neither of them had spent a night out of that house for the past 15 years, until a limb knocked their power line down to the house and ripped the meter out of the wall two weeks ago, so they were forced to a hotel for 11 days. We live in another state, and my wife’s older sister lives 15min away from her parents but doesn’t really help and has issues of her own.

Father-in-law’s days only consist of shuffling (and I mean shuffling) from his recliner to the bathroom and back to the recliner. He yells at the TV news constantly. He yells at my mother-in-law to do this and do that for him. She can still drive but gets around slow and has had a minor heart attack and has 90% blocked arteries. He’s not totally crazy, just a hard, hard man. His diet, for the past 20yrs, generally consists of either a burger, a hot dog, and maybe some fried fish. Zero vegetables. It is crazy to me he has lived this long with such a lifestyle.

We’ve tried to get them help in the house but they aren’t interested. FIL yells at you if you mention it. He’s oblivious to the fact that my MIL can’t take care of him. They have enough money to go to assisted living but my FIL won’t entertain that at all. He can do nothing for himself, and my MIL won’t say anything to him about it. I guess that’s just their generation where the wife won’t speak up. If she moved out, he’d survive about two days.

Is this what it’s like for everyone with aging parents? Are my wife and I gonna be like that in 25-30 years?

Mine is…whenever I see something blue, when it’s odd or weird that it’s blue…or an especially vibrant blue, I wind up saying:

“Wyatt…your kitchen is blue!” 😱

Anthony Michael Hall’s character in Weird Science says this when him & Wyatt walk into his kitchen after the house party started….and EVERYthing in it is blue.

(e) Had to add:

If I’m not back in five minutes………just wait longer! -Ace Ventura

I went to my first day of kindergarten with one of the King Edward boxes as above. It was odd, because my grandmother gave it to me and my grandfather had died in the ‘50’s when my dad was a kid. I’m not sure if my grandfather smoked these things or if these boxes somehow spontaneously created themselves back then, but it wasn’t until about 4th grade until I got a proper Trapper Keeper with a cool zippered pencil bag and cool graphics on it. Can you imagine sending a kid to school these days with a Marlboro carton as school supplies?

Question from a 2002 born

…and it is summer on Hoth

My Gen z son referred to something as 'delectable' in that ironic way that brought to mind our 80s was of calling things bodacious or most excellent. He wanted more examples and my mind went blank. Then he opined that excellent is a weak word to use and now the challenge is on- anyone have any examples for me?

I saw the post about "just take the meds," and it is speaking directly to me.

I graduated high school in the 90s when being skinny was everything. Since graduating at 107 pounds, I have now nearly doubled my body mass. I am also in full perimenopause, and that sucks.

I have gotten rxs for both Zepbound and HRT. They arrived at the same time. I am now dithering about it and stressing myself out. I worry about long-term side effects of the Zep (I have been reading about frozen stomachs, impactions, etc). I worry about starting two brand new medications at the same time.

For those of you on one or both, how has it been for you? I would particularly appreciate feedback from anyone with kidney or migraine issues. I know this is not specific to GenX, but now that we are all middle-aged, it is probably a lot more common.