Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

(Old guy story ahead)

The interesting thing is how subtly middle-age and old-age catches up on you. I remember watching some kid ask a 90-year-old what it felt like to be old. He said, "It feels just like it damned always has. I'm only old on the outside"

I didn't understand that at the time.

I used to joke about TV shows as part of helping people out with learning programming and technology management. One day I'm in a room teaching something and I say "That's about as likely as Gilligan and the rest of them actually making it off that island"

Total silence. Nobody in the room knew what "Gilligan's Island" was.

That happening more and more over a few years' time, and finally I decided that I don't tell jokes based on TV shows anymore. For one, most of my frame of reference is in the 80s. For another, I don't waste my time with that much network TV. I don't think it has the cultural significance it used to have.

But there was never a bright line when it happened. I don't wake up one day and somehow realized I'm a middle-aged person. Life feels just like it damned always has.

We all grew up with older people making references from earlier decades that we didn't understand.

That's how we learn pop cultural history. I wasn't alive when Wolfman Jack or Alan Freed were famous DJs, but I know about them because older people talked about them. I wasn't around for Jack Benny, or Jack Paar, or Milton Berle, or Henny Youngman, but I get it when people use them as references because I heard their names, and I asked who they were.

Don't be afraid to make references that people don't get. That's how people find things out, and that's how generations connect. As David Mitchell says, "I first came across Proust via Monty Python, and Wagner via Bugs Bunny."

Go ahead and say things people don't get. It'll give them something fun to look up.

I'm 35. Until I was about 33/34 I felt like I was in my early-twenties.

I know to some that's still young, to others that's over a decade away, but over the course of this year I think I have crossed over a bright white line as you put it (although not the middle aged one I hope).

That's not to say I feel worse, just different. Where I once felt invincible, I now feel experienced or where I once had endless energy to throw at something I now have the nous to work out a way of doing it with less energy.

I'm slightly younger than you. I think there's a certain point in adulthood when you realize that you are just like all those old people who came before you.

You realize that your parents, perhaps in late middle age and hopefully in good health, still just think of themselves as adult people, not that much different than you probably think of themselves. But, they're "old", you think. And then your brain finally makes the leap and realizes you're getting old -- because everyone is getting old -- and that in a few decades, you'll be old and eventually dead too.

It's not a bad thing really -- certainly it makes it easier to put aside many of the trivial hangups and foolishness of youth, but I think it brings with it a certain sense of urgency.

I'm 43, single, no kids and did feel young until last December when both parents in their 70s became sick. Mom diagnosed as diabetic Dad with IPF (incurable lung disease, among other blue collar stuff).

Now I feel old. Nothing makes you feel old like realizing there is a definite point in time when your way of life will change, significantly.

I'm in the forever alone club but thought one day I'd meet a girl, no luck yet. I wanted to have kids and have my parents be grandparents since I never knew my Dad's father since he died at age 56. At most my parents have maybe ten years but their health is rapidly declining which is a shock.

Anyway at some point there will be some event that makes you go from feeling like 20 to feeling like 50.

It makes you give up Red Bull, stop eating crap and exercise but that's nothing like being healthy all your life, a last minute rush just won't do it.

Well I can relate. I really don't want to, because I am only 25.

But it is properly also related to the issue that there is no longer a big unifying cultural narative. There is no one mister news (i.e Walter Cronkite), you can get your news from a dozen or so places (and not one of them is fair or balanced) and your tv (if you haven't cut your cable yet) is likely to have 200+ channels.

In other words, there is going to be a lot of cult shows but unlikely to be that many shows with a massively broad appeal (like Seinfeld, which some say is one of the last shows watched by everybody).

LOL.. My last name is "Bunch".. I have six kids, three girls and three boys..

I doubt most of this crowd would know what show I'm alluding to.. I gave up years ago making the reference in younger crowds!

Wasn't some famous gun legislation named after that family? And a followup question: does wife Carol have a sister?

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