In your experience, what is it like to be or grow old (whatever your definition of old is) from the physical health aspect and the general frailty of the aging human body?
What are the health related struggles that have come into your life or have gotten worse because of increased age and how have you dealt with them?
With your experience and knowledge, what would you advise younger people (or even your own younger self of decades past, if you could)?
My boss is younger than I am and is absolutely sure he knows more about my job than I do, even though I've been doing it since before he was born and he never did it at all.
People on TV keep trying to sell me stuff like Metamucil, some new kind of cane or similar silly gadget, or a scam investment, none of which I want.
My grandkids can't understand why I can't read things they're holding right in front of my face until I've spent twenty minutes finding, then cleaning, my glasses.
My wife has heard all of my jokes and all of my excuses. She now criticizes the former and laughs at the latter, instead of the other way around.
My friends sound like cranky old sticks-in-the-mud who wish they could turn back the clock to a time that wasn't nearly as wonderful as they claim to remember it was.
A trip to the supermarket now tires me out and instead of going out with (surviving) friends, I really look forward to taking a nap on the couch. Really.
The celebrities I recognize are senile and/or decrepit. The ones who are currently popular are appalling.
I don't have enough money to retire but dream of it every day (See the above comment about my boss).
Life is fantastic, except when it's not. Whichever it is now, pretty soon, it will be the other one.
My advice: Pay attention.
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.
I always thought getting out-of-touch would be embarrassing, but it doesn't bother me at all. Pop culture is toxic.
I'm less interested in impressing people.
TV is marketed to a different demographic and appeals to me less and less as I age, which has freed up an enormous amount of wasted time.
I'm more and more suspicious of new products, not excited by them.
The older I get the more I value self-sufficiency and the less I believe in "we're all in it together".
Even though I try to stay tolerant, as I get older, the "woke overton window" moves faster than I can change my biases and prejudices. I can't keep up.
The thing that scares me the most about old age is that my health is going to hit a brick wall, and that I'm not taking good enough care of my body.
I'm most anxious/nervous about retirement: I think every day about retiring and exactly what I need to do and save to get there, and I wish thought about it that seriously in my 20s and 30s.
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.
>I don't have enough money to retire but dream of it every day (See the above comment about my boss).
Software development (assuming you are are a developer) is a very well paid profession, and has been for many decades. This is the only profession where people who are 4 years out of school are often given 'senior', 'staff' titles, even at the most prestigious companies.
Have you been underpaid for a few decades or have you had some bad financial investments etc? Not sure if this is too personal but I was just curious.
Also I would consider a bare six figure salary well paid.
Outside of a few hotspots like Silicon Valley, programming salaries tend to ramp up quickly in the first few years then hit a plateau. Other professionals like lawyers, accountants, doctors start more slowly but their plateaus are much, much higher. This is why 25-year-old programmers think that they're rich. They haven't hit that plateau just yet, but most will, and sooner than they think. And not long after that they will have their first encounter with ageism. A lawyer or a doctor will never experience that, because his profession values experience. That is the hardest part of staying in this industry for decades, you get to see all your hard-won knowledge become worthless, for no reason other than fashions change.
The vast, vast majority of programmers aren't in tech firms, they are writing internal software for companies in other industries for whom software is a cost, not a profit centre. Those programmers are paid the same as any other mid-level office workers. These programmers are barely represented on sites like HN however so they are almost invisible.
With every abstraction away from the core computing libraries, you take a bigger risk and enter into a bigger gamble with your time.
I certainly know I am keeping miles away from node and webassembly (although the latter is interesting), simply because I was under a guy who has focussed his efforts not on acquiring fancy knowledge, but rather using simple techniques to achieve complex results.
Soon the very simple things I learned to appreciate, ended up being things I now use every single day to do stuff way more complicated than a person of my intellect should be able to accomplish.
Anyways, this got kind of sidetracked on the way, but I have to work with colleagues who have cemented years of knowledge in archaic tech, that while current at the time, ended up fading away over the years. They still have knowledge and skills, but they let their experience shackle their thinking, and oftentimes come up with extremely complicated solutions for very simple problems.
I think this is also the point in their lives where they got comfortable enough to think they don't need additional training, where I was very much taught that there is no limit to knowledge that can be acquired.
IF remote jobs and wfh culture will rise, I would bet those salaries are gonna plummet down in the medium term
That's because you're not very old yet.
Yes, it's too personal a question. Also, your assumptions are overbroad.
What time is it? Now Where are you? Here
Man that book was epic when I discovered it all those years ago. Especially since I had a habit of visiting gas stations at odd hours of the night too.
I found a dentist recommendation. Visited him, he looked at my teeth and said while it all met “the standard of care”, some of the old work would eventually need to be replaced, and the crown fit could be improved, and the other crown I needed could be replaced with an alternate procedure.
I got a good feeling from him. I spent the next 3 months having him re-do everything in my mouth. i was terrified and uncomfortable but I just went into it headlong. I was a bit flu$h, but it didn’t actually cost a lot.
It made all the difference in the world. My bite felt better. My teeth felt good. The tooth sensitivity to temperature vanished. I never think about My teeth anymore. They work, they are comfortable.
I think of myself as someone who is scared of dental visits. He cured me of that. I plan and attend each visit diligently.
I have a new dentist now.. I moved. I found someone I like. Understanding that my dental dissatisfaction was rooted in work that “met the standard of care” but which wasn’t satisfactory with each bite and sip I took was transformational.
I also floss diligently.
She said it absolutely came down to past experiences. Apparently there are some really shitty dentists out there, in the sense of causing unpleasant experiences.
If you didn't get one of those as a child, you have no problem with visiting the dentist. If you did, dentists terrify you.
I never really thought about it that way before.
I don't care about the facilities themselves... but when looking for a dentist now I've put it out directly that I have a past fear of dentistry, and I've been assigned a hygienist who has a more careful bedside manner than others. It says right on my chart that I'm anxious about dentistry. The newest doc I've had to switch to was diligent about noting it and talking me through, acknowledging where I was coming from. Metal on teeth is also a thing for me.
I'm pretty much over the hump now, but it was an effort to work through it. A few good offices who where explicit in their response to my feelings did wonders, too.
I’m older and I realise myself that I need advice, I’m not in need of giving it.
be mindful.
Well, then, have I got a global pandemic (and societal consequences thereof) for you!
Second, it's ok to let things slide for a while, but the longer you let them slide, the tougher they are to fix (and if you wait too long, some things can't be fixed). See plenty of other comments about teeth, back, RSI, diet. If you decide to let something go for a while, pick a time to follow up on it, and reevaluate.
Third, problems get bigger, stakes get higher. But you'll learn more tricks for coping with those problems. Sorta grim, but suicide rates by age climb till 50ish. around then you'll have (sorta) seen it all, there's not much that the world can throw at you that'll put you in a complete tailspin.
I can't tell you how to live your life. I'd suggest, be true to yourself, be true to your ethics. If you don't know what those are yet, try to figure out who you are. When you're stuck in a stressful situation, at the end do you want to feel vindicated? do you want to have a great outcome for everyone? do you want to just leave it all behind? Do you want to just grit your teeth and get through it? Those all point to different values, and can help you figure out who you are.
Some people age gracefully and some don't. some people get to make choices about that, and some don't. It's going to be ok. Everybody gets through their life one way or another.
This. You will forget the people who hurt you. But you will remember the people you hurt. You will accept the things you tried and failed. But you will regret not trying. Going against your ethics will leave scars on your soul, and the reasons for doing so will seem so stupid in hindsight.
But it takes some time to find your true ethics, and separate it from merely what other people say you should do.
This. It's not the first time I hear this advice, and even though I'm only 24 years old, I try to live by that.
Maya Angelou said this very well once:
> I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
I find this to be true and I also (try to) use it as a motivation to treat people better.
Could you elaborate on this? It seems like the exact opposite to me, I would more likely remember someone who hurt me than someone I've hurt, which in most cases I wouldn't even know I hurt them.
Simply said, if someone hurts me, it means the person is an asshole. If I hurt someone, it means I am an asshole. The latter fact is more important to me, because a) I care about myself more than about other people, and b) I will have to live with myself for every day of my life, while other people will come and go.
Once I hurt a random bystander, because I wanted to fit with a group of cool kids, and they decided they didn't like his face. Yep. I am not the kind of person who does this often, and I would want so much to say that I am the kind of person who would never do it... but I lost the right to say those words since that day, irrevocably, forever.
And what did I gain in return? Pretty much nothing. It didn't win me a group of cool friends, mostly because those kids soon stopped being friends with each other, and some even turned into bitter enemies. Using the wisdom of hindsight, many of them were a lousy friend material in the first place. A few years later, life took us in different directions, and I haven't seen them since. These days, finding and contacting them using social networks would be trivial, but I just don't care anymore.
If I could turn back time and use the wisdom of hindsight, I wouldn't give a fuck about the cool kids, and would say "hello" to the stranger instead. And, who knows, there is a chance I would have found a good friend. -- But now, whenever I notice I betrayed my ideals again, I remember that day as the symbolic moment when I wandered off the path of righteousness.
Compared to this, situations when other people hurt me seem less important, often didn't have long-lasting consequences, and sometimes even turned into something good! For example, a girlfriend cheated on me with my friend, and a few other mutual friends knew about this, but no one said a word to me. Then I got some evidence, and after connecting the dots I realized they all have been making fun of me for quite some time, making hints to each other I didn't understand. That hurt!
So I broke contact with all of them, and drowned my sorrow in workaholism. A few years later, I had more money than most of my former friends combined. Then I burned out, so I decided to slow down and enjoy life again, made new friends (much better ones), and new girlfriends, and lived happily ever after. :) One day, I met my former friends, we had a beer in a pub, I watched them and listened to their stories, and realized they were a bunch of losers, and they unknowingly did me a great favor by preventing me from becoming one of them. Never met them again; don't care.
Which of these stories was better, speaking from a completely selfish perspective? The one where I hurt someone, or the one where I got hurt? And this is the lesson about ethics that young people sometimes don't get. Ethics is not merely another bullshit that adults tell you as a part of their neverending attempts to manipulate you. Strong internal ethics is the thing that allows you to navigate through hard times, and then look in the mirror and feel good about yourself (and have a story where you are the good guy). Lack of ethics makes you weak, and tempts you to sacrifice parts of your soul for things that will feel worthless much sooner than you can imagine at the moment.
My ethical role model was my younger brother, who is one of the best people I know, and is someone who always seemed to have a good sense of "you shouldn't do that" or "this is the right thing to do, even if it's hard".
I committed to evaluating my decisions based on "what would my brother think of this" and I'm very proud to say that now, in my early 30s, I consider myself to be a very ethical person who does the right thing most of the time, even when it's inconvenient, and even when it's hard. I definitely could not have said that about myself a decade ago.
No idea if that will work for others, but it definitely worked for me!
Do you mean "how to I choose an ethical system to follow" or "how do I develop the strength of character to make hard choices"?
A good thing is that I mostly no longer care much about changing other people's opinions on things. I certainly enjoy talking and expressing myself but if someone listens to me then that is sufficient - they don't have to agree with me. It works the other way also: even if I disagree with someone, I can enjoy hearing what they say.
I retired 1 1/2 years ago and have been enjoying having lots of time to read, write books, spend time with friends and family, and hiking. That said, just yesterday I verbally agreed to a job offer for work that was just too interesting to pass up. Assuming that the employment contract looks good, then I am all-in.
My advice is to not worry about getting old, just make sure that you enjoy your life as much as possible. There are sayings about living life one day at a time, but that seems too coarse grained. I would suggest enjoying every minute of your life, and if you are not happy right now, this instant, then file a bug report with yourself. You can't do good work if you are not totally into the moment of what you are doing. You can't enjoy listening to someone if you are inside your own head and not giving that person your full attention. Play time and family/friend time are wasted if you are thinking about wanting to be doing something else.
Thanks for posing a good question.
What kind of books did you write?
These 2 things can make a huge quality of life difference once you are past 40. I would also add your eyes, but there is not a lot you can do about that one! Almost everyone needs reading glasses by 40. Glasses suck, but you get used to it.
Psychologically, the best I can say is to forgive yourself for any stupid things you did when you were young. Try to be as kind to yourself as you would be to others. I think of this as the "inverse golden rule." Really important as you get older, because regrets and self-doubt pile up otherwise.
How loud is too loud? A rule of thumb is that if you walk around with earbuds and can clearly hear a podcast while standing next to a busy street, it is loud enough to damage your hearing.
Hearing loss is a risk factor for dementia. As people lose their hearing it becomes harder to engage with their friends and family which speeds cognitive decline.
Irritation from cold wind and water exposure causes the bone surrounding the ear canal to develop lumps of new bony growth which constrict the ear canal. Where the ear canal is actually blocked by this condition, water and wax can become trapped and give rise to infection
Not if these eye drops can help it!
http://fdaaa.trialstracker.net/trial/NCT03809611/
He told me not to wear my glasses unless I had a headache. He said that your eye has muscles and they need workouts like the rest of your body. So I basically never wore them.
I was just on the cusp of needing a prescription back then. He gave me glasses because insurance covered it so why not he said. But then gave me the advice above.
I’m 43 now and can see just fine without glasses. My prescription has been stable for 20 years.
If I let my eye muscles work, my vision would actively deteriorate.
Identical to my non prism glasses.
My advice, if your head hurts, there is a reason for it. And it probably matters.
I think it's more like 45 than 40.
You feel exactly the same, only with less time left. You're still you. You still feel the same. You still want to experience all the same things and achieve. But now with less time, you have to start triaging some goals and face reality.
I remember thinking I have all the time in the world. Now I don't. So I guess that's the main difference.
Also, I used to hold the illusion that I'd always have my family and parents to talk to. But that's not true either.
This. I used to think that way, then I lost my dad from cancer on my 20's. That's when you reflect on all the things you'll never be able to experience together.
Although I'm only 24 and still young, my piece of advice would be to enjoy your family to the fullest, because no one knows what tomorrow will bring.
Just the realization that life is not limitless
How to do this is of course hard. Meditation helps me. Relationships. Balancing my consumption of news. Staying away from histrionic people that drive that anxiety (read Twitter). Taking a break from that which bothers me (developing hobbies and other interests).
Even as I get older I increasingly have a sense that all attempts to control will be resisted by others. Even when you have their best interests at heart. People willfully, sometimes ignorantly make their own big mistakes to resist being controlled. Sometimes though we’re not as smart as we think we are. This applies to so many situations, including work, politics, and parenting!
In work situations I am conscious more and more of wanting to lead by following, stepping back, let other people be in charge and get the glory. It’s really the most sustainable path for a sane life. Instead of doing, teach. Instead of teach, listen to other people’s wisdom. Paradoxically by being silent and non-action can sometimes have the biggest impact.
The impact may not always be positive. In some cases you are uniquely situated to lead, and by turning the opportunity down you create a vacuum for a less savory character to take place and inflict pain onto others.
Eventually too I read a lot of History about divisive times, and it showed me a lot of tragedy, much worse than what we're experiencing now. But also bounce back from that tragedy. You learn through life (and History) that Politics is relentlessly cyclical. Those that attempt control, even well intentioned, are ultimately resisted and replaced by the next regime that tries to take control, on and on...
That's not to say I don't vote. And I think you could meaningfully participate in the Political process out of a sense of duty or service. Like actually volunteering for a cause, etc you believe in. But don't waste your precious time on Twitter on Cable News outrage cycles that’ll just make you mad with zero impact on anything
I wrote an article on this: https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2020/08/06/political-twitter-o...
You sound like a crazy person. Have you been diagnosed with NPD?
If you spend your youth having fun and enjoying your youth, then when you get to middle age you'll have wished you worked harder and saved more so you could be wealthy and comfortable.
If you work your butt off in your youth and have lots of money and successful career, you'll wish you spent more time relaxing and having fun in your youth.
The key is finding a good balance between working hard and playing hard. Your career won't suffer if you take a week long vacation. Your health will be fine if you sometimes volunteer to do a weekend shift. Do both and you can be successful and happy about how you spent your youth.
Move to Europe, and you can take a month long vaction like everyone else.
I'm not quite old yet (everyone would say that, right? I'm 35), and I don't regret my younger self at all: during the past 12 years I worked cumulatively 9 years and had 3 years off inbetween jobs. I managed to save up some money, as well as travel and have time for myself.
Ever since I had kids, being forced to work for a living has been a massive weight on my life. Inherited wealth would be a great help.
Luckily, the fact that I don’t expect to inherit much of anything gets me out of the moral implications of wishing anyone’s death (which is actually the second biggest worry, at the back of my mind).
The problem with these kinds of hypotheticals is that had it been that way, you would not be the you that feels this way.
Aged as I am now, a windfall like an inheritance or a lottery win would probably be invested sensibly towards my retirement. But would a much younger me have blown it all on bitcoin speculation or something equally dumb that seemed like a good idea at the time?
There will always be choices that I would have made that my future self will deem wrong.
How do I deal with this? Is the key to happiness when older is to just lose all memories?
Weigh yourself at least once a week in a consistent fashion (say, in the morning after peeing and pooping). If you notice your weight drifting up (> 1 lb over long-term baseline) for two weeks, do a quick audit of your diet, cut on excess sugar, carbs etc. until it's back to the baseline.
It's relatively trivial to lose 1-2lbs over a few weeks. But doing it once you are 50 lbs overweight will be one of the hardest things you will do, coz you will feel like shit on most days.
Also, if you have not generally been athletic in your youth, beware of doing extreme bulk-cut cycles to gain muscle in your 30s and later. It's easy to gain fat, hard to gain muscle, and you are much more likely to end up just fat while convincing yourself you are 'bulking'.
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!
Be grateful, - at least it actually wakes you!
Not sure if it's just age, or other factors but I've certainly seen people who don't always wake up in time.
Your first point also resonated with me and reminded me of this:
"One of the lessons we can learn from history is that people always move on. Sometimes after just a little while, sometimes after years of love and affection. Sometimes unexpectedly, But always.
I paraphrase: "Learn to classify people into three categories: givers, sharers, and takers. Surround yourself with givers. Sharers are also acceptable. Cut out the takers as quickly as you can."
A verbatim follow-on quote: "Takers make a beeline for givers. The needy are always anxious to drain the emotions and finances of those who are givers, before somehow or other they move on to sponge elsewhere, leaving givers to wonder at their own foolishness."
(Edit: apparently people don't want advice from older people to younger people if it's not the older person giving it. I can only apologise. It's the primary piece of concrete actionable life advice I remember that was given to me by anyone more than three times my age.)
I was having trouble with this once and a wiser friend told me it's perfectly acceptable to say "I've decided x".
So I tried it out, and it seems to work. Some people are much more talented at the right level of response.
Oh, and also: https://xkcd.com/2346/
1) Be a sharer, but prefer givers as friends
OR
2) Be a taker.
Do take care of your health. Really, do. Even though genetic makeup of our bodies obviously plays a role, at my age the gap between people who care and people who don't starts resembling a chasm. You have slender and vital fortysomethings that still hike in the mountains and you have 400lb T2 diabetes sufferers who have hard time tying their shoelaces. Don't strive to be the second type. Imprisoning yourself in sick body is not cool.
Some substances like tobacco, alcohol and sugar are emphatically bad for you, especially in quantities that we tend to consume. Our modern society is all about overconsumption, so buyer, beware. Having a piece of cake every few weeks is OK, but you will be driven into making it a daily habit, unless you resist the pressure. Resist it.
There is one more reason to keep yourself healthy. There are absolutely fantastic treatments in the research pipeline. Stem cell regeneration, genetic modifications etc. Some of those will fizzle out in the testing phase, but some will not, and those that prove themselves will change what "aging" even means. In 2050, heart attacks, atherosclerosis and cancers may be as rare as scurvy is today. Today's middle aged and young people will probably have much better silver years than anyone before.
But you really need to survive the next decade(s) to make use of those developments.
Another third is not yet as far gone, but still lead very sedentary lives, home to car to office to car to home.
Only the last third are people who could summit a 5000ft mountain without totally finishing themselves off.
I was easily one of the less fit members of my peer group. Almost everyone I know goes running often, some doing ultras (I can't run due to knee problems). One of the least fit of my uni friends now does at least one full ironman(woman) a year.
I find there is a real fitness culture around me, probably due to fear of aging. Along with diet/meditation it's the only positive way to safeguard your future aside from reproducing.
From people I know in Europe or North America I'm also getting the same vibe. I wonder what's so different with the people you're aware of? I'm guessing either too much work or it just doesn't seem like a priority or even worse, they think it's too late!
Four of us were normal weight, including one very fit guy who is sorta Czech Indiana Jones (archeologist working around the world, very cool job). Four were overweight, but still somewhat active (e.g. at least going around on a bicycle). Five were seriously obese, with massive bellies.
So yeah, the principle of thirds seemed to apply. TBH this has grown worse in the last 30 years. Around 1990, even here in Czechia where a lot of beer is consumed, average adult person was fitter.
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’m only just beginning to recognise this. I checked myself out from hospital early this year to join a standup meeting, to make sure the project was on schedule. Thinking about that now makes me angry. It was pointless.
Same experience here. I can't blame the companies though.
I was essentially a workaholic for decades. I wanted to believe I had a noble mission to fulfill, aka "true believer" or "clueless" àla Gervais Principle. It took me a long time to realize this attitude was incredibly damaging and wasteful. It's tantamount to smoking or other major self-destructive behavior.
Time does start passing quicker. Perhaps the brain slows down and you capture fewer frames per second, but the end result is you start to learn how important it is to prioritize to avoid having spent your precious time on trivial things instead of meaningful things.
Time is infinitely valuable compared to money. Do the math. You can always earn more money, but you will run out of time. Does that contradict my first statement? No. When you're older you'll want enough money to be able to spend your time as you wish.
The vast majority of things you think are of the utmost priority now will seem trivial looking back on them ten years later. If you can learn this early it makes it far easier to remain rational about your decisions and how much things are worth.
Your body will start getting in the way of things you want to accomplish. You'll get tired sooner, you'll have health problems that interrupt your momentum or require long periods of recovery, it will be frustrating to struggle at things that were once easy. Don't wait too late to do the things you are truly passionate about. Retirement might be too late.
The second is to find some new, significant challenge in each decade of life. Learning new things keeps us humble and alive. In my twenties I focused on teaching and long-distance bicycle travel. In my thirties I moved to Alaska and began doing mountain rescue work. In my forties I wrote a book, changed careers, and learned to drive a boat on the ocean. Each of these new experiences made me feel like I was 20 again, taking me far outside my comfort zone. In future decades I hope to learn a musical instrument well, and travel internationally. I'd also like to take another long bicycle trip and live without a motor for an extended period again.
There is great joy in growing old; it's much better than the alternative. :)
Three in the morning and a kid with 105 who has been throwing up for a day and you have to decide what to do. A crappy apartment but making a morgage would be a real stretch, no fun for years, and you need to work it out. A job you want but in a place far away from family and friends. These things and many more will be between you and them.
Finding somebody you like, and admire, and who you like to get sexy with, and who has something of the same idea about money as you do, and who wants many of the same things in life, is tough.
Second, try to understand the power of compound interests as soon as you can. Life is long enough to invest and see the returns. Invest in yourself and in projects with long-term value, don't be seduced by shortcuts and don't be a slave.
Last thing, there is a lot of blind and seemingly unjust randomness in life, it is better to embrace it.
Waking up at a regular time and restricting my sleep below what's comfortable has helped very quickly. I'm considering sleeping more, but feeling slightly groggy after sleeping 6.5 hours is way better than spending 10 hours in bed, 3 of them suffering.
Good point wrt unjust randomness, I'm terrible at embracing it. Any tips?
Typical things that are hard to control: the law of physics, the weather, 99.99% of human beings.
Not reading the news might help.
In my case I'm pretty sure it was the consequence of sleeping comfortably long in the morning and waking up at irregular times.
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade
You will blink your eyes and be on the other side of the interview table in due time and be thinking the same thing my friend.
Second, learn the business and big picture of what you are doing. A lot of engineers are inclined to go deeper and deeper technically, and indeed there is a path to riches here if you are exceptionally good and also have a bit of luck with your choice and circumstance of specialization. That said if you are lucky enough to navigate this, you will have the golden hand-cuffs as only very few companies can properly compensate and utilize such experts. Far more reliable is general purpose business knowledge, specific domain knowledge, and/or collaboration skills. Combining these things with programming skills is a super power that will give you a lot of flexibility later in life.
I didn't get the necessary practice and discipline to do independent work unless I did it for fun. This had to be learned the hard way when I grew older.
Please don't praise kids for being "smart", teach them that putting real effort into something will pay off.
It works only sometimes, and the kids will curse you for their empty, wasted in third, life.
2, time goes by way faster than you think, blink and you'll quite literally miss decades of your life
advice? don't ever put off until tomorrow what you can do today, the old you is depending on the you now to look out for him/her.
Inside, I’m still twenty, Stance. Only if I pass a mirror, or if my body won’t do what I want, do I realize that I’m an old man. I don’t see the potbelly and the varicose veins and the grey hair where I’ve got any left. She has to live with it.”
“Every time I see a mirror I’m amazed. I end up wondering who’s taken over the outside of me. A disgusting old goat, from the look of him. The kind I used to snicker at when I was twenty. He scares me, Stance. He looks like a dying man. I’m trapped inside him, and I’m not ready to go.”
This is powerful. Thank you.
Do the hard things first. Hard things get easier with practice but practice takes time. The easy things remain easy regardless of practice and just rob you of the time required by the hard things.
It becomes survivorship bias when I become more specific and speak to what works versus what does not, particularly in contrast to common faulty social expectations.
Be kind. Really try to be kind. As young person, I am sure you already can recollect a few instances you have been kind; increase the frequency and amplitude of it.
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.
Feeling hopeless at 40 sucked more than feeling hopeless at 20. Feeling hopeful at 45 is more amazing than feeling hopeful at 25. So I guess I appreciate the good and the bad more now than I used to.
Unless you earn tons of money and can retire by 40, all debts paid.
This has affected my work as I used to just be able to sit and code for hours in Vim as I'd have all the function signatures memorized, but now I spend a lot more time in the docs and have to use a proper IDE. I now write more helpful comments, so I can remember why I did something. Also, I find myself having to take notes to come back to later. I wish it was a skill I'd picked up when I was younger, rather than having to learn now.
I rely on notes too. I'm not sure it's entirely due to my memory getting worse with age. It's also that as you progress to more senior or leadership roles over the course of your career, the rate at which you become interrupted by questions or meetings increases, and the number of different issues you need to juggle also increases. I use my notes as a non-volatile memory to save my current mental state so I can resume after these interrupts.
If I'm coding uninterrupted and in a state of "flow", I can still remember details of my code from years ago.
Cartoon about interrupting a programmer: https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt...
Maybe now I can’t remember things because I’m not experiencing them as thoroughly because I’m always thinking about something else. Or maybe I just realize a lot of details don’t matter. Or maybe it’s just age and my brain doesn’t work as well. Or maybe it’s accumulated damage of twenty years of occasional consumption of alcohol.
One other phenomena I've noticed is that I've begun misspelling words a lot. Not like poor spelling, but using their/there/theyre incorrectly, homophones like fill/feel, or plural is vs plural are, etc. I know these things, it's like my brain goes into autopilot. Probably payback for always correcting people when I was a smartass of a younger person.
Some skills never go out of fashion.
[0] Personally, I found learning C harder than falling off bicycles.
With or without the helmet? Because the opinions are divided.
I will not be at all surprised if firmware stays in C until Rust has been practical for use in firmware for several years as well. I don't doubt it'll happen, I haven't written a line of assembly for my firmware in a decade either, but consider how many hundreds of thousands of lines of C there are in the libraries for just one target architecture.
It sounds cool and useful and I'm looking forward to it, but every time I start asking around if Rust is worth the effort the answer from people who use Rust a lot is "not really" because my projects aren't big complex firmware beasts. I am not surprised that a firmware developer with expertise in C can easily find work.
Given time, you'll see.
Certain disorders are so subtle and poorly understood that they may go undiagnosed for years -- and those years may later be recalled as having held very little fun for you. Examples: autoimmune, food intolerance.
People matter. Learn how to interact well with them. Yes, it matters that you be yourself, and that you hold to what is true, but don't use either of those as an excuse to be clumsy (or worse, brutal) with people.
Even things like clothes matter, because they're part of how we interact with people.
Physical exercise becomes more important to fight against aging. Especially core exercises to take care of your back.
Watch your diet and eat well because it's so much harder to lose weight when you are older. Not to mention your innards are deteriorating fast if you abuse them.
Contact sports or extreme sports has super high cost when you are older. Imagine breaking your wrist playing snowboard and you have to be out of work for multiple months, unable to make a living by typing, etc.
I could still type, mostly, and was back at work (at EA) within a few days. The cast came off at 6 weeks, but it took years before I could do pushups without pain. I finally got the full range of motion back after several years.
Hope your injury heals fully.
The advice I'd give is to assume that any activity you might ever want to do will be harder next year.
The internet and medical community is full of misinformed people who will fill your head about how a pinched nerve or a slipped disc can cause you immense pain and some doctor may even put you under the knife. But at least read about TMS before you do something drastic.
See tmswiki.org (not my site) for hundreds and thousands of people who have recovered from decades of back pain after spending hundreds and thousands of dollars but never realized it could be simple TMS which doesn't cost a dime to fix.
I'm amongst one of these people and after nearly suffering for many many years did someone on hacker news posted about it and that comment changed my life literally. Pain is all I could think about back then and it interfered with my work, relationships, life. Just reading Sarnos book got me halfway there. Then daily exercises and watching hundreds of testimonials on YouTube made by common people helped me more.
(1) https://www.tmswiki.org/ppd/An_Introduction_to_Tension_Myosi...
I personally think its quack science, but it seems to work for some people, so that is what matters.
For those interested, check out The Complete Guide to Intermittent Fasting by the Canadian nephrologist (Jason?) Fung.
I follow a lot of literature and social media around fitness. I think the rise of social media has made fitness seem out of reach for most people. Seeing these fitness personalities usually being in the top percentile in terms of genetics for body weight, muscle definition and just looking amazing makes the rest of us feel like it's not something we can do easily. Having most of these people spout their pseudo science also doesn't help. It's hard for any sane person to understand what to do, whether its diet (keto, low-carb, water fasting, carnivore diet, etc.) since there is so many possibilities.
As I've grown older I've realized that staying fit has so many benefits that it might as well be the best anti-aging change we can make for ourselves.
If you're over 25% or more body fat, it's worth figuring out how to bring that down to 20% or less. See how far you can go. Not all of us can get to 12% and maintain it without feeling like we're starving ourselves but I think the higher range is doable.
I've realized for diet and exercise there is no one answer for anyone. The wisdom of eat less, exercise more seems to be the ultimate truth.
What that looks like for each person is unique. Personally for me I've tried all of it. I've done the 7 day water fast, intermittent fasting, low-carb eating, etc. At the end, as long as I'm eating within my maintenance calories relatively good clean food it doesn't matter for me which one I do.
For exercise, I've settled on three total body weightlifting sessions with half an hour cardio session on the non-weightlifting days.
So, the best thing you can do as you getting older is figure out what works for you. There is so many ways of eating and exercising and sometimes it takes a while to understand what works for your body.
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.
(My sample size is kind of small, and for all I know they had a different lifestyle or were out in the sun more)
2. Regret is almost always about what you didn't do, and rarely about what you chose freely or decided yourself.
3. Understand the effect of compounding in every endeavour.
4. There is no 4.
If you're lucky, you'll stare into it sooner than later and become better for it. (When you're old, it's hard to do anything about it.)
Once you get it, you will know how to live your life to fullest while not leaving a debt and cleanup to others.
Advice: some lessons come only with age. People often don't learn not to care what other people think (because they're not thinking of them at all) until their 30's. It was only recently that I really learned that if you don't have expectations, you can't be disappointed.
$12/hr is $24k/year. The summer after high school and the full year that follows is 1.25 years. That's now $30k. Working nights and weekends (2 part-time jobs) doubles it to $60k. After taxes, there's roughly $48k left. $40k would roughly double (in the original year's currency) every 10 years if the S&P 500 kept growing at the historical average 7% over inflation. That's $640k at 59 and $1.28MM at 69.
Meet all RDAs with just a variety of quality whole foods, 1:1:1 calcium:phosphorus:magnesium, and ensure sufficient quality sleep. Sustained-release melatonin eventually. ZMA may work well enough for younger males.
Keep big hormones at pubertal levels as long as you can. Naturally (just foods, vitamins, and minerals; not excess protein or other tricks) raise IGF-1 as much as you can. Match levels of progesterone/melatonin, hGH, and DHEA present at the age IGF-1 represents.
At most 5-10% of romantic pairings can be minimally mutually satisfying once the dust settles. Not 5-10% of relationships entered by a person. Rather, 5-10 out of 100 randomly selected males and 5-10 out of 100 randomly selected women. Such a reality does not mute love, lust, the initial high/spark that can last months up to even 2.5 years, or pregnancy.
Many can go a long time without realizing compatibility once paired is uncommon. Worse, as 20% or 50% of women encountered (by MSW) are a mutual match. Overlap (many matching with the same 20%), aesthetic misalignments, etc all reduce likelihood of progression.
The typical ages at which men and women get married are 29 and 28. 50% between those 26-35 end in divorce within 10 years. 2/3rds of second marriages end within 10 years. 75% of third.
80% of people over 40 have been married at least once. 80% of women over 40 have had at least 1 child.
25-30 are peak years for saving. And f*cking. Avoid (relationships,) marriage and definitely kids until after. Wait until you can think clearly.
Why buy a house if you don't have any kids? Houses are easily a trap. Always pay cash (ie, avoid debt). Even for a car. Even for an education (tricky). And even for a house!
Save at least 50% of take-home salary to a high-yield investment account, even if just buying up the S&P 500 fund. Eventually, the amount saved/compounded will recover all after-tax money ever earned. At such a time, the interest/DRIP income will replace the take-home salary. Usually happens in 15-20 years.
‘What advice would I give my younger self’ also doesn’t compute. Because that would mean that I would end up with entirely different life experience and the person giving the advice would not exist as they would have changed. In sci fi, this would be the classic causal loop/temporal paradox time travel dilemma.
If this is about health, you are better off obtaining a DNA report and go through the high risk illnesses you have inherited with your physician. I did this and was able to identify a few things missed by my previous maternal units. Some of them probably died because one mutation was undiagnosed.
From a dietary perspective, follow the grandmother diet. Eat what your longest living ancestors lived. It helps if you haven’t migrated far off.
P.S: Don’t rely on dna ancestry reports migrations. I am South East Asian and ancestry report suggested that I had a Finnish ancestor. I doubt if I can follow the Sami diet. In California. So there is that...
My suggestion is to draw a family tree for upto 4-7 generations. 7 is ideal but would be tough for most.
Are you actually worried that speculating about your younger self might accidentally erase you from the sands of time? We don't actually have a way of delivering our advice to our past selves, so the activity seems mostly harmless.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_His_Bootstraps
+ PKD's The Skull...: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skull_(short_story)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_experiment
"Cohort" is the year you are born. This might make you a Baby Boomer, X, Y, Z, ... You keep your cohort throughout your life.
The cohort who got physics PhD's prior to 1968 got jobs in the field easily (e.g. most were good at physics, it didn't matter how good you were at musical chairs); after 1968 the job situation changed (you certainly were good at music chairs.) This is a function of when you were born.
Don't sabotage yourself by not taking care of your body. Avoid alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs. You can live without them, and you'll be much healthier. Avoid excess sugar. If its not a desert, it should not be high in sugar. Work out. Take walks. Hike. By the time you're 50, you'll notice that people who have not taken care of themselves are no longer able to work mentally demanding jobs.
Pay attention to stress. It's the big killer. It will kill your ability to think, and your ability to have meaningful relationships. And, eventually, it will kill you. If you're getting stressed, find a different way, a different job - change whatever you have to.
So be intentional to spend time doing things you actually want to focus on, or become good at, or have as habits.
I suspect this advice, like most advice from the old to the young, is difficult to really understand or follow from the perspective of the young.
Health:
when young I suffered muscle pain when I worked out. At 40 the pain changed to a skeletal pain, which wasn't nice. At 60 it started to be more tendonitis than anything else. At 70 it's gone unless I suffer an injury, whereupon weird stuff happens, e.g. hand injured a little in a fall, subsequent cat scratches cause the injury to flare up, time to get an antibiotic injection - strange!
I feel heavy, especially when I lay down to sleep at night. OTOH I'm working out more consistently than I ever have, my weight is down from 220 to 185, and so probably I'm more dense.
I'm much quicker than I ever was: I catch falling objects mid-air, stop other's falls, intercept slips and, in general, am scary quick. This weirds me out a bit. I have heard that some people are quicker than others but, other than extremely obvious cases of physically slow people, didn't believe that it was possible for one person to be significantly quicker than another. I've changed my mind about that now.
I have no known serious problems - everything is working fine, and am primarily concerned about my CV system: all else will IMO follow. I take a low dosage statin but I may not need it. More importantly, I'm realizing the simple frailty of the human body and so have re-evaluated different activities: driving (still do), cycling(won't do - crazy in my city!). Back pain: had it since I lifted too much weight 40 years ago. Almost debilitating in the last 2 years until I found some simple exercises that made it go away. Most every man will suffer at least one serious back injury - if you do, you just have to keep searching until you find the fix that works for you.
Advice:
1. Don't ever ever pick up more weight than you've picked up before unless it is a real emergency, 2. If a sexual opportunity seems too good to be true, it probably is - don't accept it. Herpes(or worse) is no fun, no matter how the herpetic community may spin it. Note to my younger self: don't touch the beautiful blonde!
3. Always take the highest offer but be ready to walk out if things go badly.
4. Don't fall for the sunken-cost fallacy - if you're in a bad relationship of any sort then get out early and consider yourself lucky. See "The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli for more. This especially includes love.
I'm much younger, and definitely not "scary quick", but I did get significantly better all of a sudden after starting to mind my omega-3 intake. Could this be related for you as well?
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.
After going through a tough time with a parent in my early twenties, where an accident involving brain hemorrhaging caused a massive shift in personality and speech, I can not stress enough how good advice it is to savour and fully utilize each moment with your loved ones while you can. He ended up passing away less then a year after the accident.
Get rid of your fomo. There will always be new tech. There will always be something new. You can't do, see, experience, read, learn it all. Having gone through my twenties often in crippling fear of being "left behind", I look back now and see that I enjoyed those years less because of this need to be up on everything, which just had the oppposite intended effect.
Your health is important no matter your age, your mental health doubly so. Strive to work smart, not hard. Realize when you are being pushed into a situation where your health is going to be impacted, and stand your ground against it. I have gone through three burnouts, each one more serious than the previous one. One caused a relationship to end. Last one required me to seek professional assistance (which by the way helped immensely and I now openly talk to people about without shame). Know your limits, and work on pushing them in a reasonable manner, but do so on your terms if that is what you want to do.
Realize how difficult it is to live with another human being for a long time, and how rare it is to find somebody who genuinenly loves you for who you are as a person (both the good and the bad) and will stand by your side through thick and thin (and your own bullshit). Treasure that kind of relationship, above anything else. Momentary opportunities come and go. Never jepordize what you have for short time gains.
And be financially smart and frugal. Save. But also live life.
Trust - but take care in who.
Be so detached from material goods that it would be hard for someone to hurt you, intentionally or not.
Labels are meaningless; attach at your own peril - Brands, religions, ideology, all other thought patterns, people - choose local,intrinsic context; what works is all a crapshoot + past generational gifts anyway.
Keep learning; there's always something new and it never gets old learning new perspectives
You can endure much more than you think.
Remember all those challenges and struggles you overcame or failed? This one is no different, but you're still here.
Let go, relax.
Pay attention; your life depends on it.
Stop living in the past; that person/life is different and done or in some other multiverse. Live now with all it's joys and sorrows.
Outdoors and nature: she always heals
Bonus insight: you become more invisible and that has opportunities!
-- Alanis Morrissette
"As I started getting older, I realized, 'I'm so happy!' I didn't expect this. I wasn't happy when I was young."
-- Jane Fonda
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.
It's better to find someone who likes what you are than try to become something you're not.
also
Robert A. Heinlein Quote: “It's amazing how much 'mature wisdom' resembles being too tired.”
And then you'll find much fewer people interesting, and more people annoying. That's a function of knowing more.
Here is the basic concept: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating-....
Just split your plate (approximately of a hand size in diameter) on 4 parts: 2 parts vegetables, 1 is protein/meat, 1 is for carbs (should not be overcooked, just slightly undercooked to not transform it into fast digesting food). Spoon of healthy oils.
Thats it, 3 times per day. Nothing more, nothing less. Here is my diet for the last couple of months and this is the most impactful thing to the quality of my life besides walking every day at least an hour.
That is not a good idea. Eat at least twice per day to moderate insulin and other hormones.
The best advice I've seen is, "Eat what your grandmother ate."
Then avoid HFCS, and you're good.
How do you avoid, prevent or postpone getting "something the matter" with you? I second what others in this thread have said: attend to diet and exercise, take care not to injure your eyes, ears, back or knees. Diet might be the most important place to start - have a look at https://gamechangersmovie.com/
What it's been like to grow old
* My body's in officially lousy shape, but I don't feel much worse than I did at 21. Sure, arthritis makes music harder, and being fat makes it hard to tie my shoes. For some reason, though I know I should feel worse, I don't really.
* When you literally wake up glad to be alive every day, and I have done so for half a century, minor things like your body betraying you or someone else's political leanings take on much less importance.
* I am never, ever bored. There are so many things I want to learn, so many products I want to create. I have never known a programming language so well that it bored me, because I always used them as vehicles to get something interesting done. They are tools to me. Like any craftsperson, good tools are important but they are always subservient to the product.
* I have been fighting a losing battle with weight for 50+ years. It's terrible. I am ashamed that I'm morbidly obese and dependent on diabetes and high blood pressure pills. Every time I go out I'm embarrassed to be fat. Every thin person I see is a rebuke, unless they're smoking. (To me smokers are honorary fat people.) Don't fucking tell me to eat right and exercise right and sleep right. I fucking know it. It's just hard and I never stop trying.
* I have been a horrible insomniac for 55 years. I figured by now there would be a cure for it. A good night of sleep for me is 3 1/2 hours. A bad night of sleep is 20 minutes. 3 1/2 hours is not enough for me to feel good for most of the day but it's enough to get essential work done.
* After a traumatic brain injury when young, my memory went bad. Consequently I have always been a slow learner. I have probably suffered some cognitive slowdowns but I don't notice them at my age. Learning is hard for me now, but it was hard for me at 21. I just have to work harder than anyone else. Fine with me! I chose work I enjoy.
* I still have absolutely no problem pulling all-nighters when the project interests me.
Things I saw that other people didn't seem to see as much
* By the time I was 14 I had observed that SV-type jobs were cyclical. Even though I wasn't tech-oriented then I realized if I ever got into a tech field I'd have to keep up in order to remain relevant. Decades and many millions of dollars later, I still keep up. I have worked for myself for the last 21 years but I still act as if I may need to get a job at Google tomorrow. I still study every night (in my case, Go, py4web, and database infrastructure).
* Whenever I got a job, I assumed things might get bad so I always stayed within bicycling distance in case there was a gas shortage or something.
* I saw that two-income families often contained two people who came home with a need to share their stress, but also take care of the kids. This results in neither one wanting to listen to the other, and the resulting tension harms family life. So I made a deal with my wife that one of us work, and one stay home. Didn't care which one (turned out that I was the worker, and we both like it that way). Also I married someone who understood that sometimes I have to work hard. We planned to be poorer than our friends, but the opposite happened. I was able to get ahead by studying at night and trying out different ideas.
* From a very early age I saw that some people got hit hard by "unexpected" events like high medical expenses or business failures. I knew I would either have to safe very carefully (like Asians, who make up most of my family) or be a good earner. I ended up being a good earner who doesn't save as carefully as he could. Result: I spent $40K/year on insurance premiums and can easily absorb it. I own several houses outright and have no debt.
* I never had a "special" way of treating women I dated. There was never a me-who-buys-flowers vs. a me-who-ignores-her-once-we-get-married. I always dated women I liked to be with during daily activities, like shopping or doing the laundry. I just never take the people close to me for granted. Of course I buy flowers for my wife after being married 30 years, and it's always because they look like good flowers, not because it's a day merchants tell me to buy them.
* I read history. I understand how long empires last. I love America and its values, but I fear the mob. So I own lots of guns and have always lived in places that felt defensible.
* You know those old movies and stories where the person is given a second chance on life and appreciates people around in a new light? I have always been that way. My wife, not so much. So we see our children differently. To me they are enormous treasures and (not recommending this, it's just me) even though they're all adults I live in abject fear that something bad happens to them.
What would I advise younger people to do? Well, my most successful idea, I think, was to figure out by 25 what my core values were, because everything comes out of that. In my particular case, it went:
* No one cares about your job more than you do. For me this led to the understanding that I should start my own business. You don't have to and, more important, may not want to! But I feel it's less risky than working for someone else. If you don't do that at least save up for a rainy year (below)
* Be a decent citizen
* Treat people different from me with respect
* Try to admit when I'm wrong
* Treat my kids with at least as much respect as I would treat Bill Gates or a cop or a waiter, and be as polite to them as I would be to anyone else
* Do work that wouldn't embarrass my kids if they told their friends about it
* Being rich is good because it helps with independence and safety buffers, but it's always subordinate to taking care of the people I love
* Expect people to be motivated by their base instincts, and by incentives. People are neither natively good or bad, so be ready for them to be bad. That means understanding your core values and sticking to them
* Take logical risks you can afford and be ready to learn from them
* Feel free to cut harmful family members out of your life. I will guess that I went through more than my share of bad stuff when young. This left me with a very simple rule. Family is important, but it's also what others make of it. I would give family members who harmed me an explanation of why I felt bad, then ghost them if nothing changed. Nothing ever changed. Do I feel bad after they died? Do I feel like I should have connected better with the people who raped or beat or neglected or abused me or accused me of horrible things I didn't do? Absolutely not. I have never regretted removing harmful people from my life, family or not
* When you're evaluating doing something big, the more you like it, the more you should try to talk yourself out of it. You should be super honest about both the potential upsides and the potential downsides. Project what would happen to you a year after the worst or the best happened
* Expect bad things to happen. Easy for me to say now? Sure, but I was totally ready for Covid by the year 2000. Completely. So were observant Mormons and many Chinese people
* Avoid debt
* Have at least a year's living expenses saved in case of unemployment, unrest, etc.
Obviously YMMV, but because I wanted nothing more than to escape from my childhood home/school life, by 13 I had read autobiographies of famous achievers and had crystalized these values based on their successes and mistakes. I developed as a way of escaping the present. It was either that or kill myself. I'm very glad I didn't kill myself but I needed some logical reason to have hope.
Unless you're really unfortunate, there's a cure for insomnia. It consists of several simple but not always easy-to-follow rules: https://insomniasos.net/
After years of suffering from insomnia, I've started sleeping better 2 weeks ago.
[Edit: Sorry I know you weren't looking for advice, just can't resist sharing]
I had tried all of these things before, but when I consulted my sleep doctor he pointed out something that changed my life. Previously I had tried to wake up at say 6 or 7am, on the theory that if I'm going to bed at 9-10am anyway, what does it matter if I try to wake up early? It would be horrific either way.
But he recommended a later wakeup time (10am) and to roll it back a few minutes a week. That single change made the difference.
Thanks for caring. I've bookmarked the site.
Last night I had a pretty rough time but in general things have looked up a little each day. Biggest improvement I can remember since trying sleeping pills, which only work for a month or so on me.
For me it is my dog.
How I see it, taking care of a pet usually requires lots of effort and selflessness. You need to make sacrifices and stay consistent. E.g. with a dog, sometimes you have to go for a walk even if you'd prefer to stay at home and watch TV. All this seems to me the opposite of taking care about only yourself.
Don't waste time with romantic partners who don't love and respect you.
Don't waste time with people who don't have your best interests at heart.
Get as much education as you can handle and ask for help along the way.
Having given up soda around college (and never getting into coffee, and rarely drinking alcohol), almost 20 years later I'm glad I have the ability to drink just a little bit and get a good short burst of energy.
Treat caffeine as you'd treat aspirin, or bandages, especially when you're younger and you really do have an efficient power generator, and ability to do more with less. You'll have less of a tolerance you need to beat to get the same effect when you're older.
However, cutting out alcohol has increased my health and energy significantly. In your twenties you can drink every day, wake up at 8:00 and have a normal day. In your forties, that catches up with you.
However ..... for some reason you can't do as much. Some jobs that you could do all day once upon a time now leave you exhausted after an hour or so. Those hills seem steeper than they look. That package is heavier than you thought it was. I suppose I'm trying to say that your body hasn't maintained the same youthfulness as your head has.
I'm 43 and I recently had a reasonably bad bike wreck. The recovery time for cuts and bruises really surprised me, compared with inline skating injuries in my 20s. I can definitely tell the body isn't working as well as it did.
(2) I forget.
No wait! I remember! Be really careful who you have kids with (see item (1)). Most mistakes you can walk away from, but when an innocent human life (or two) is involved, you don't get to just reset.
(3) Bonus free advice (NOW how much would you pay?): Invest for the long term. Consider total return. Don't try to time the stock market.
I am 38 years old, and I can see my parents getting more frail every day.
Talk to them while you can. I could not shake off the teenager-like attitude of being too busy to spend quality time with them for far too long and now I regret it.
When i stopped having expectations then I did not add any complains when someone i loved did not behave/respond the way I like it and was happy.
That doesn't mean you will fail, but it means I'm not going to be particularly excited.
Oh, and wear sunscreen.
Seek out experts in the fields you're interested and start a correspondence with them and meet them if possible. Ask their advice about things that interest you and that they are experts in.
Many times in your life you will be faced with a choice between the hard road and the easy road. Most people take the easy road to mediocrity. You can further distinguish yourself, learn a lot more, gain more skills, and grow tougher by choosing the hard road.
Learn something thoroughly. If you are an expert at something you will be in demand. Generalists and jacks-of-all-trades get a nice, broad perspective and can make connections between fields that narrow specialists can't, but usually it's more feasible for specialists to broaden their horizons than for a generalist to become a real expert, especially later in life.
Be persistent. If you can master the skill of doing that which will improve your life and the lives of others no matter how unpleasant or boring that task is, especially over the long haul, then you will accomplish much more than most, who tend to easily give up and move on to something else.
Related to this, whenever you start something that will take a long time to finish, expect that there will be boring, frustrating periods where everything will seem hopeless. Plan well ahead of time what you'll do to overcome them when you'll encounter them. This is a place where your mentors and experts in the field can help, as you can ask them for advice when you run in to a roadblock.
Surround yourself with people who bring you up, not try to drag you down to their level or who are completely unmotivated. Always try to be around people who are smarter than you, who are better than you at something you're interested in, and who you can learn from and be inspired by.
Don't study for the test, but value knowledge for its own sake, to learn useful skills, and to improve yourself. This connects to the next crucial point:
Read A LOT. You can gain many lifetimes of experience through books. Real books, not blog post and tweets. It would not hurt to start by reading through "the classics", but often lists of classics overlook much excellent foreign literature, so try to seek out the best of what different cultures have to offer.
Travel (when the plague is over). Few things can open your mind to what is possible, let you meet fantastically interesting people, have unforgettable experiences, learn about other cultures and ways of being, and open up new opportunities for you than travel.
On the subject of travel, I would advise you to go off the beaten path and avoid super touristy areas. Stay in hostels.. it's a fantastic way to meet people and can save you a ton of money too. Don't try to see too much at once, and try to stay in one place for a good week or two, if you can, instead of doing 7 countries in a weekend.
Once you've traveled a while and got a taste of many different countries you're bound to find a favorite. Try living there for a year or two. You'll get a perspective on the place that a quick visit will not give you, and let you use it as a base for exploring other places in the area, and you'll gain even more valuable connections there that you couldn't as a mere tourist.
Learn some foreign languages. This is yet another way to make great connections and get to appreciate other places and cultures at a level you couldn't if you were just monolingual. It'll also open you up to the literature of other countries on a level you just can't get by reading it in translation. Many books don't even have translations, so you'll be at an advantage there too.
Learn to like yourself, enjoy your own company, and be your own best friend. Always seek out new subjects to learn and new teachers to learn from. A great teacher can make anything interesting.
Exercise and take thorough stock of what you're eating to make sure you don't have any nutritional imbalances. This can greatly affect your mood and energy levels, and ultimately let you live a lot longer and with many fewer debilitating conditions than you'd have otherwise. A sure way to physical misery is to not take care of your body.
Finally, try to help people and be as useful to them as possible. Apart from this being the right thing to do, it's also a lot more fulfilling than being purely selfish, and people are usually glad to be of help to someone who's helped them. So by helping others you'll be helping yourself.
[1]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX6NztnPU-4
2) Maintain friendships outside your main relationship.
3) Spend time with your children.
4) Look after your physical and mental health. Eat good food. Get exercise.
At this point of my life, I can definitely say my outlook will change in 20 years. 20 years ago I would have thought my belief systems to be set in stone more or less. If this is true, you will miss a whole lot of personal growth. It may depend on the person but I've certainly developed a whole lot more empathy and benefit of the doubt for people I would not have had in the past. I've also learned the world is a whole lot harsher and nicer than many would report, and humanity/society is a very complex thing. 99.9% of the world wants to hug you, not hit you, is something I always try to keep in mind.
A lot of this is based on what you expose yourself to though, so I've noted it's pretty easy to "grow" in the opposite direction if you never get out of your "early 20's" bubble of high school friends, or if you get "stuck" in a such a rut early on in life too scared to make the next step.
The largest lesson I think I've learned is that almost all my regrets have to do with inaction vs. action regardless of outcome. I highly regret many things I was too lazy/scared/talked out of doing, but even the things that turned out (at the moment) absolutely horrible that I actively participated in with my best effort I do not regret now in the least. At the worst some were learning experiences, most turned into (via completely unexpected ways) amazing experiences and opportunities. Note that this can mean almost anything - relationships, work, life experiences, travel, etc.
I guess all I can really give as 100% "for sure" advice is I have never regretted anything I've truly given 100% of my effort into. I've only regretted the moments where I've half-assed something. And this is regardless of outcomes. If I can go to my grave saying I did my best and tried to make my tiny corner of the world better - I'll be quite happy.
That and the mundane daily positive personal habits you can get into the earlier the better. You make yourself a far more attractive partner if you take basic care of yourself like doctor and dentist visits, basic daily hygiene, and at least making an attempt at eating healthy/being active. Others have covered this far more than I have, but I certainly endorse their advice. I simply wanted to point out it goes beyond your own personal health - your health is important to others in your life and for me at least it was easy to forget that for some time.
Also something I haven't seen said a lot here - surrounding yourself early with positive friends who share your values/aspirations in life is exceedingly important. I firmly believe in the "you are the average of your 5 best friends" theory.
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.
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 <40.
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 have no idea what that means other than you'd probably hate your future self so give people around you a break for their values you disagree with.