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

Preach, brother.

I was never really obese, but I was overweight. It is worth knowing your actual body composition, not just total weight.

At 36 years of age, I had 24 per cent body fat. Nowadays, at 42, I have 17 per cent body fat. My weight is actually almost the same (+- 5 lbs).

But health and overall wellbeing is very different. Getting rid of high blood pressure and knee pain is a huge improvement.

Advice #1: You are what you do every day. Choose to be something good and do it every day. An organizing principle of time management is that all we have is our time here. What you do every day should rarely appear urgent and you may find it difficult, but if it is what you want to be, it sustains focus and peace of mind.

Advice #2: Associate with people of the highest aspirations who live lives of character and integrity according to strong moral and ethical standards that you can admire. Solitary virtue is often futile, and I wish I had given people less credit for being interesting.

Not too old yet, 45. But learned many things already because I did a lot of things. Hope to learn a lot more; let’s do this again in 10 years here. Anyway;

If you have enough money, stop trying to get more and live your life instead with your family and friends. Apparently it is really hard for people who gathered a few 100k/million (depending where you live) to just let it be and enjoy. Moreso (as I understand) in the US than in the EU. In the EU you hardly need money to begin with depending where you live and want to live; Where I live, all my neighbours live of around 500/mo. As a wfh software dev, 500 is literally a few hours work. And that would be me alone working from home; my wife does too... The always trying to get more and buy crap turns out, when you get older (and friends/family starting to die off/get ill) you understand it really does not matter at all. But then it might already be too late to correct it, even with all your cash. It is hilarious to me to read all these ‘time managed’, mostly Americans on here; every second of their day as efficiently managed as they can. And for what? Go outside, walk in a forest, talk to strangers; Running the same time managed wheel every day; that I find the real waste of time trapped in your own rat cage. I needed to grow older for this though to realise some of it; I never did the timemanagement thing (as I always believed it is sheer insanity; but I guess that is a matter of what you think counts as valuable; I enjoy walking in nature, I do not enjoy spending time in the gym efficiently and eating soylent to save a few hours in my day; those hours are valuably spent on thinking in the forest, chatting with friends in the sun on the square etc; then I use 4-5 hours to write code, which I already worked out in my head while walking; for backend and firmware coding, that is far more efficient than just ramming in as many chars as you can and then trying to run it; also something I learned as I got older; I am much faster in delivering than my young colleagues; not because I am smarter but experience and thinking shit through before just hammering it in and letting unittests tell it is wrong; I find that an actual utter waste of time) however I did miss important events I should not have missed because I was working for a few extra bucks. Events that will never repeat.

Ofcourse we are lucky to be able to work from home and people who do not want to move to a different/cheaper place obviously have less choices, but also that gets easier when getting older, at least in my experience. The city becomes less interesting; freedom and space more. With covid we saw here that indeed people are not that married to their cities and their cramped appartments: lot of houses sold that were empty for years; now suddenly they have almost no cost of living (even going to a restaurant for a complete meal and drinks costs 6 euros pp if you fancy that) and space to breath. So the money earned in the ratrace suddenly might get you well into retirement and then there are state pensions and hospitals are free anyway. Especially if you have a house or mortgage in the city, you can sell it and that’ll keep you good for 20-40 years if you don’t buy rubbish. Or you can rent it out and you are good basically forever. Not that I like that personally but I know many who did exactly that so they could retire at Physically; do fasting and weights; really helps energy levels and pushes back on loss of muscle mass which will happen when you get older. I notice that people who focus less on their wasteline and more on bulk make it far longer in a far more robust way. Skinny muscleless ex runners/cardios don’t do so well when going 80. Obviously do not get too fat, do not smoke/vape(although, ofcourse my entire village smokes 3-4 packs/day and the elderly are in their 80s/90s puffing away while sitting in the full sun for hours without sunscreen, but that is just, I guess, survivors bias), take care of your teeth and when you feel something weird anywhere, go to the doctor. People wait way too long, especially men.

Edit; a more depressing thing of getting older, for me, was seeing how incompetent, lazy and untrustworthy people are. We tolerate blatant lies from ceo’s, cto’s and our colleagues almost every day. From small ones (I will work this weekend for this one time and then ‘my computer was broken but miraculously works again on monday’) to potentially company breaking lies by sales from vendors ‘yes this feature is done and delivered’; 2 weeks before beta; ‘oh did he say it was? no that is done somewhere in 2021 but we do not know when yet). I see it everywhere now; it was always there but it starts to really annoy me now.

I've learned that "old" is just a sliding scale. When I was in my teens, I considered 30 old. When I was in my 20s, I considered 40 old. And so on. Don't get too hung up on the exact number.

Also, there's a physical age and a mental age. One definition of old is, when these numbers don't match up anymore. And yes, by this definition some young people are old and vice versa - that's the idea!

Saying, "I'll do that when I'm older or when I retire" just means that you'll never do it.

Getting older usually means acquiring more experiences. It doesn't mean that everyone is equally good at it, typically a healthy dose of self-reflection helps.

And lastly, memories tend to fade, which is a blessing, pr sometimes a curse. But mostly it helps to blur things in the past. Which explains why older people tend to idealise how things used to be (they only remember the good parts). But it also helps people get over things.

> The older I get the less it matters to me what other people think of me, which is liberating. When I was younger, people's impression of me was my problem. Now that I'm older, people's impression of me is their problem.

Same here. But to be fair, when I was younger, my future was uncertain. I wasn't sure what will happen 10 years later. Will I get a good job? Will I have a good relationship? Which skills will I gain, and which weaknesses will remain forever? With this much uncertainly, of course I was sensitive about other people's feedback -- even if in hindsight a lot of it was stupid.

Now... of course, anything can happen, and life can always change dramatically overnight... but I expect the following years to be mostly more of the same. And when people tell me what they think about me, I have more data about myself to judge whether their opinion makes sense. I also learned to recognize friends and avoid the rest of the world.

So it's not just me becoming wiser in this aspect; it's that my situation has actually changed to make this one aspect much easier.