Does anyone ever feel older in their head than their body after their 20s?
Kids really aged me. I'm in my 40s but I feel like I am so ready to hang it up and retire. Sit on the front porch with a iPad and a pipe.
There are so many possible sources for depression, so I can’t possibly give any specific, actionable advice. Just remember, you don’t need to settle for how things are now.
Good luck, hope things turn around. :)
I’m not anyone to be giving out psychological advice - but given my high “overhead of life” I’ve found it a convenient time to focus on physical health. I just need 30 minutes a day for exercise, and then it’s just a matter of eating healthy. Kids may take my time but they can’t force junk food down my throat! My time will free up down the road - and I think your “muse” will also return with time. Which is why I figure now is a great time to instead focus on health (low opportunity cost wrt side projects). You may as well start with that, and if we believe a lot of what’s written these days, it’s entirely possible that improved diet and exercise might clear and focus your mind too (that would be house money if so). But at least when your drive returns, hopefully the new healthy habits you’ve gained will stick.
Last thought - if you can’t think of anything else interesting to work on, I’d recommend blogging about a subject matter you find interesting. Just my 2 cents.
Maybe it helps that I don't live in a city but out in the woods on a farm? Discovery here entails tramping through the woods, digging up things, building stuff. Get a bunch of branches and build a "stone-age home", why not? A swing on a rope between two trees or hang up a hammock there and see how high you can make it swing (answer: very). As long as my body plays along - and it better do so or I'll get mighty angry with it - I expect to feel more or less ageless, neither young nor old. If it starts to fail me I'll probably change my mind but for now I simply don't bother with the concept of 'age' - going so far as to have to think about how old I actually am, something which trips up my children every time age is mentioned. It is just a number, something like those vague values seen in a S.M.A.R.T. report telling you about the health of a drive:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 116 099 006
Until 5 years ago every moment was spent on some sort of hobby or interest. I could not begin to comprehend those people who would finish their day aNd then conk out in front of tv.
Now... It's a special night if we have enough energy for tv once kids are in bed :->
(I've also enjoyed Outer Wilds more on SteamDeck than any other device, for whatever reason; similarly, I can't make myself play Cyberpunk 2077 on 8" screen with fan redlining, even though apparently many do!:)
My wife broke her leg and our existence has been more miserable than typical. To keep my sanity this weekend, I've been working on getting a reliable stream setup from my desktop. One day I'll start playing through Red Dead Redemption 2.
Steam Remote Play works fine when the deck is the server, but it seems rather buggy as the client. "Hardware decoding" freezes up, and "software decoding" has messed up color on the preview release. Software decoding works on stable, but even then it's choppy and has lots of artifacts.
Yesterday I set up sunshine on my desktop, and today I got moonlight set up on the deck. Out of the box it seems to work very well. It looks better than Remote Play, and it seems to be better latency too. The only problem I've encountered is an inability to unlock my screen from the steam deck over moonlight; I type in the password, but my desktop rejects it for some reason, then after a few tries locks me out for 10 minutes. Thanks Arch Linux!
Since I'm incoherently rambling, I also tried to launch linux-native Tomb Raider yesterday, as I have successfully for several years. It didn't work because that would bring me too much joy. I switched to proton and it worked, but didn't have my progress saved. Okay, I am a software engineer with multiple computer science degrees. Missing libssl.so.1.0.0. An hour later, 10 minutes of compiling half a dozen random libraries, and a 200 character LD_LIBRARY_PATH override spanning four directories, it works again. How did it ever work?! According to the internet this problem happened to everyone else in 2017. Also a joke that's not a joke, windows has become linux's most stable ABI.
One of the silver linings of losing parents so young is getting a genuine interest to not have that happen to you, so I've made my health a pretty important part of my life - enough so that I won't die in my 50's unless a freak accident happens. My body could be misplaced for a 30 year old, even if my face looks 40.
My mind and body feel like I’m in my fifties and I’m in my mid thirties. It feels like I have more life experience than most of the people my age.
On the other hand, a friend and I were walking along a frozen river throwing snowballs just to hear them splat on the ice. Neither of us will ever grow out of that. We have no shame in taking joy in simple things. We’re responsible, mature adults where we need to be. :)
I was going to add 3) How long it takes to find something on my computer, but that might be a function of adding more stuff and never getting rid of anything. I don't think I was more organized as a kid, just there was less stuff to organize.
In terms of things like social attitudes, having kids go through high school and college age was a big "reset" button, because I kind of observed the world through their eyes and listened to their arguments. They're the ones who have to live with this ** after all.
I used to go out every Friday night and carry on into the long hours of the night. Nowadays by the time Friday comes around I'm completely exhausted.
I've noticed it with sleep as well - these days if I stay up later than usual or I have a poor night of sleep I really feel it at work the next day.
Lastly my metabolism has changed I've never really struggled with my weight but last 2 years or so I have begun putting on weight and for the first time in my life I am starting to develop a gut. I suspect some of it was due to pandemic and being less active than usual during that time but I really started to notice it towards the end of last year.
Yeah, I know, it's just an temporary thing, but while it lasted it really did shift my perception of my age.
(yes I feel older and yes in my case it is a symptom of ptsd)
It's nice to finally say "Oh I don't know if I have it in me to do that today." and have people actually accept your answer. I don't miss youth because I never experienced it. Would have killed myself long ago but I never worked up the willpower to even achieve that (also no guns or high cliffs in my country - when you start researching it you find it's surprisingly hard to reliably end a life without suffering). I'm finally finding life slightly enjoyable for once being an old fart.
I tutor a handful of teenage Gen Z kids and it's unnerving how much I can relate to them. Neither of us expect to have much of a future - for me it was my medical issues and suicidal thoughts, but for them it's the outside world they're going into. Two of my brightest students have said they don't expect to make it to 40 and if they do life will be much much harder. They're healthy, happy, mentally well - but with both political and literal climate going the way they are they can't see humanity realistically making it that far without some kind of mass war, famine, genocide, not to even mention untold horrors AI will usher in.