Ask HN: What is it like to be old? What advice would you give to younger people?

The alternative is worse.

Your body just won't work like it used to, even if you do all the right things to keep it up. When I was in my 20s I could spend all day working the yard, cutting, raking, digging, sweeping. I would stretch afterwards and be find the next day. Now, despite having an even greater level of day-to-day physical activity and more exercise, it will take me a few days to recover.

Once you hit 40 you start feeling random pains in places. Sometimes pretty intense pain. Your doctor will have no idea what caused it and tell you it's normal, but let them know if it happens again. And after a while you'll just stop telling them, because it's just a thing that happens now.

I'm 56, so not that old, but age is increasingly a concern. Confirming what others have said - I am very much in touch with the teenage me and everything between. The days are long and the decades are short, indeed.

Health - for me, health it isn't about living a long time, it is living with self sufficiency and minimizing pain. I am not afraid of death, but I am afraid of the years of infirmity which often precedes it. I'm afraid of living the end of my life without my wife, but even more afraid of leaving her to finish life alone.

Regrets - I wasted too many years missing opportunities for fear of disappointing my parents or (later) risking appearing foolish. I assume HN has a higher than normal mix of introverts, so maybe you can relate.

Urgency - turning 30, 40, even 50 didn't phase me; I felt young and time seemed endless. But in the past five years the switch has flipped. In 14 years I'll be 70. The mortality curve is tilting up dramatically; friends and family will have died (perhaps me too). Many of the things that I always wanted to do will not be possible, so I had better attend to them now. There are far too many such desires, so triaging what is most important takes up more of time.

Work/life - I'll do my job competently and I'll leave it to the younger folks to be the hero at work. I think back on the deadline death marches and jumping on grenades to get projects back on schedule ... and every one of those deadlines was a sham. The products I sacrificed so much for were in the discount bin a year later.

I had this same question after being surprised when I needed reading glasses and when single strands of mutant hair sprouted from various places (eyebrows, neck, etc). My parents passed when I was a young adult so I didn't have many older people around to ask about these kinds of topics.

You focused specifically on physical health. Others have given good advice (teeth, hearing, etc). I'd add several other points:

-- At around 50, your chances of getting cancer hit an inflection point on the "hockey stick" growth curve [1], so you need to get regular (annual) screenings. A good health plan is helpful; when I was on Kaiser HMO they were really good about following up on this. [1] https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-...

-- Exercise doesn't have to be intensive to work well. I rarely go to a gym now; when I was younger, the overhead of going to the gym made me think I had to workout for an hour or more, but in my case it backfired, bc it led to a gut reaction of "ugh" whenever I thought of the gym. I'm pretty committed to hiking, so now I walk outdoors (mineral sunscreen, of course) for an hour per day and that's enough. If you can choose to live somewhere where you can do this year-round then do it. That alone is transformative. When I first started hiking, my knees would hurt, especially going downhill, but after a few painful hikes, it eased up and now many years later my knees never bother me.

-- Highly-suggested weight training books (e.g. Starting Strength) insist on free weights, barbells. I find that 30 min of body weight circuits (and dumbbells) 3x/wk is plenty. Just get into the habit. The benefits accrue over time, whereas you'll see peers your age or younger neglect this and that neglect also accrues over time. Most people don't add 25 lbs of belly fat in one year, it's more like 2-5 lbs per year over decades.

-- Most my friends are younger than me and alcohol is still a big part of socializing, but as I get older I dislike the effects more. Not that I drank much in the first place, but now I've cut back even more. On average not even once per month, and never more than 2 drinks per occasion.

-- Diet is obviously important. Michael Pollan's advice: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." I still eat too much meat but include greens in every meal. My advice is to cook. As I got older I started cooking at home more. Over the course of a decade I eventually worked up to cooking every meal at home. It helps to establish the habit if you have someone (spouse, family) to cook for, but now I have the habit, it's easy to cook for myself. When you cook, you can eliminate added sugar. All processed food has sugar in it, so I cook everything from scratch. It sounds like a pain, and when I was younger I would never have imagined myself doing it, but when you practice it, you can do it quickly. I eliminated sugar on weekdays. If you follow David Sinclair's longevity advice, you'd cut out sugar entirely, but I still partake on weekends.

-- So far I've been super lucky and have no major health issues/struggles. I'm "old", but not elderly. I still do long distance treks. People I meet are always surprised at my age and energy level. The biggest tell is white hair, or dry scraggly hair. I used to think I'd be interested to hear health issues from people in the 70-90 age range, but I suspect it's so different for everyone that it wouldn't be that useful. I believe there's enough longevity advice out there that if you pay attention to the right sources then you can see what's coming up and what you should be doing.

1. Find good friends; keep good friends. You'll probably only find a handful of these throughout your life. Good friends help validate your existence and make life worth living. They will surprise you. They may turn out to be a lot older than you, or a lot younger. They may be people you grow up with, or only meet online. You may go for years without meeting/talking to them, but as soon as you're together again everything just becomes 'right' again. Good friends: they really are the meaning of life!

2. Anyone who tells you they know what they're doing - they're lying. There's no instruction manual to life. There's no Grand Design or plan or destiny or whatever. Everybody around you is making it up - somehow making life work - as they go through each hour of the day, each day of the year. What works for someone else might work for you. Or it might not. It's your adventure: go live it!

3. In spite of (2) above, learn to listen. Really listen. Open your ears, then open them again. It's how you learn stuff. Taker time to listen to people who you wouldn't normally listen to - like people you take for granted. A lot of the stuff you get to learn will be really useful - often in very unexpected ways. A lot of it will be of no use to you whatsoever, but the act of being listened to may have a profound effect on the person you're listening to. You never know - that person might just turn into your next Good Friend.

4. Growing old - it hurts. A lot. It hurts your confidence; it hurts your self-image. It hurts your bones and muscles in ways you never imagined it could hurt. I think there's a lesson in this, but I haven't managed to learn it yet. I particularly hate my bladder when it wakes me up at Stupid O'Clock because I forgot the lesson about not drinking hot beverages too close to bedtime.

5. Power naps, on the other hand - they're cool!