What makes you feel like it's time to just give up and start taking your Geritol? This question applies whether you're 16 or 60, I think, because no matter how young you are, there's always something you can look back on and think, "Man. I am so over that. What happened?"

For me it really is music, but also action movies, romantic comedies, and women's magazines. Can't stand any of the above anymore, and I wonder when I got to be so hard to please.

-- Anonymous, May 18, 2001

Answers

It was never so much any one thing that made me feel older. Rather, it tends to be situations that occur. For instance, mentioning an event or a celebrity from the 80s and having someone younger than me say "who?" is pretty horrendous. My sister is only 5 years younger than me and she wanted to perk herself up for going out. I told her to listen to some KC and the Sunshine Band. "Who?!" Sigh.

The worst though, recently, was sitting in a bar up north and having a few beers and shooting pool... with a girl i used to babysit and her friends who were all the younger brothers and sisters of people i used to know. If she had at least been 15 and drinking illegally, maybe i would have been okay but the fact that i suddenly realized this girl was now 21 and guzzling beer... Man, i felt so ancient. Don't EVER sit at a table with someone you babysat, it's awful.

-- Anonymous, May 18, 2001

I always said I'd feel old the day that I heard the Pixies' "Debaser" at Safeway, but now I'm wondering whether hearing "Where is My Mind" at the end of Fight Club, a movie starring Brad Pitt, might count.

I'm not nearly as scared of realizing my own interests have changed as I am of cherished things being defanged by time: a favorite band playing Reno or a country fair or used for selling Volkswagens.

-- Anonymous, May 18, 2001

Knowing that kids who were born the year I graduated high school are old enough to drive a car.

I used to work with a girl who sort of "adopted" me as her older sister. We were discussing Saving Private Ryan which I had gone to see the night before. I told her that my favorite "war" movie was Platoon and that when it came out I went to see 8 times. She looks me dead in the eye and says "Really? I never saw that. I think it came out when I was 5."

-- Anonymous, May 18, 2001

It happens all the time these days, but I remember the first time I thought "Damn, I'm old!" I was 21, and worked in a day care center, where one of my jobs was driving a van that went to go pick up the school age kids after school. I had the radio on, and was singing along to one of the songs and an 11 year old asked if it was a new song.

It was the Beatles singing "I Wanna Hold Your Hand".

Right now what's making me feel old isn't listening to the new stuff and noticing it all sucks - it's listening to all the new remakes of MY music, and they keep getting it all wrong! Damn kids.

-- Anonymous, May 18, 2001

Knowing that, when a woman my own age let's me touch her "down there", I'm definitely going to get laid makes me feel old. Old and happy.

-- Anonymous, May 18, 2001

Talk radio. I find myself preferring it to music of most sorts. I also listen to NPR, just to get a good balance. I'm getting old. I like to embarrass my 13-year old daughter by singing and bouncing along to her songs in the car. That's pretty entertaining. There was a book review in the paper about a book of kids quotes--things they'd do if the world was perfect. One girl said "In a perfect world my mom wouldn't wave to people she didn't know". That's me. Goofy and old. And loving it!

-- Anonymous, May 18, 2001

My feet. Good lord. I was wearing sandals today, and I looked down at my feet, and shee-yit. Those are some old looking feet. Really it's just because I have very skinny feet, but still, all those veins and bones make me look like a crone.

I'm resigned to the fact that my hands are the oldest-looking part of me, but I wasn't ready for the feet. My hands are also really skinny, and since I do so much gardening they're always dried out and covered in scabs and callouses. They're pretty bad. I still get carded and my boobs don't look a day over 27 (hey, shut up, let me have my fantasy), but my hands, man, they look 45.

-- Anonymous, May 18, 2001

The day "Sweet Dreams" by the Eurythmics came on the Oldies station. There it was, sandwiched between the Beach Boys and Herman's Hermits. I screamed through the entire song.

-- Anonymous, May 18, 2001

My younger siblings make me feel old. Normally, I actually feel rather youthful, as I am 5 years younger than my husband and younger than most of my friends (not all, not even nearly all, but most). But then I talk to my sibs. And I hear about their lives and I think, "DAMN, when did they get so old..." and I feel old myself. I have a sister starting law school, a brother doing cancer research on the side between soph and junior years of university, and the *baby* is graduating high school this year. I'm not old enough for them to be doing all that! Younger siblings should stay pre-pubescent forever, if you ask me.

-- Anonymous, May 18, 2001

Birthdays, man. I have two friends turning 40 in the next couple of weeks, and I'm not that far behind them.

-- Anonymous, May 18, 2001

When the orange-haired, multiply-pierced kids behind the counter at the coffee shop says "Here's your coffe, sir," I feel old. When I say "Hey, Led Zeppelin. I had that on vinyl when it came out in '71," they know I'm old.

-- Anonymous, May 18, 2001

Things that make me feel old (even though I'm not old and do realize that I am only 28 years old.)

1. A couple years ago one of my younger friend asked me, "What decade was this band popular in?" - in reference to Styx. She was born in 1978 so it's not like she really would know. It still made me feel ancient though.

2. People that have said: "Wow, you saw Xanadu in the movie theater?" (man, that's not even the half of it. I saw it 11 times in the theater, people.) If someone says this to me I usually come back with, "Yeah. I also saw Grease in the theatre and my Dad smoked through the entire movie". (To be honest though it does kind of freak me out a little that I remember when people were encouraged to smoke in movie theaters.)

3. Taking the time to let my hair grow out enough so I could see what color it is now - only to find out that a rather alarming portion of it is gray now.

-- Anonymous, May 19, 2001

When you realize that some of the people you call your best friends are approaching 70, and at the same time you remember some really rowdy partying you did back in the 70's with those same friends, and you wonder how you survived and became the old fart you are now, ...that's when you begin to feel old. Trust me.

-- Anonymous, May 19, 2001

Mirrors… I avoid them like the plague. Every time I walk by one it is not me, the me that I think I am, looking back. This is pretty damn scary.

-- Anonymous, May 19, 2001

You posted this question on my birthday. I'm 27. That's enough to make me feel old. I would have been happy staying 21 forever.

-- Anonymous, May 19, 2001

When movies come out that are remakes of movies I remember seeing the first time.

In theaters.

With my wife.

-- Anonymous, May 20, 2001

People ten years younger than I am complaining about feeling old.

-- Anonymous, May 20, 2001

When I catch myself thinking that some folks are young and inexperienced. Damn whippersnappers.

Awareness of biological clock makes me feel old.

Liking marching bands and also noticing that G keeps his car radio permanently tuned to A.M. talk radio.

And recently, I developed a love of lima beans. That means I'm ancient, right?

-- Anonymous, May 20, 2001

Yes, Nita, very old indeed.

How about this one: that commercial where the guy has a nightmare about eating his hamburger with asparagus instead of french fries? I see that and think, damn, I wish it was still asparagus season.

-- Anonymous, May 20, 2001

I just know I'm in true danger when I crave brussels sprouts. ICK!

-- Anonymous, May 20, 2001

My son got his driver's license -- that makes me feel ancient! And he looks like he's 25, and loves it, little punk. Ok, big punk! My daughter is having finals next week, first ever, as a freshman in high school. I've had one of those weekends where I wonder where the years went.

And I can see gray hairs, though everyone tells me I look like my kids' older sister.

http://www.therichards.org/~album/2001/051301_052.JPG

-- Anonymous, May 20, 2001

Hardly the first time, but this time I did it deliberately: I was shopping with a four-years-younger friend in a mall in 1999 when Prince's "1999" came on the store's system. My friend said she was so sick of this song, it had been played so much already and here it was only February. I said I hadn't heard it yet that year (which I hadn't; I didn't listen to the radio between when I left for college in late summer 1986 till May of 1999, when I finally had a car with a radio in it again) but I had heard it plenty when it first came out. This was also not strictly true, since I wasn't listening to the radio yet in 1981 or '82; but I wanted to shock the teenybobbers around me, who hadn't been born yet in 1982. Yeepers. (Wasn't that a battlefield? Sheesh, I crack me up.)

-- Anonymous, May 20, 2001

I was tutoring a boy who was about 10, and he told me his favorite channel is Mtv. I said, "Oh, really?" and was going to make some informed comments about its programming, but he interrupted me to ask, "Have you heard of it?"

-- Anonymous, May 21, 2001

This economic downturn is making me feel old. Because I have clear memories of working during the last one. I listen to the news and the commentators, and I'm apparently remembering stuff they don't. There they are, blathering on about Cisco as if its decline in value is unprecedented in history. Meanwhile I remember Digital heading for the crapper out of nowhere in '87 and Wang falling apart by '89. I remember reading sunny predictions about the future as all the New England banks were failing, and I was working at one that no longer exists. In fact, I remember reading one of my employer-bank's official predictions, in late 1989, that the local economy would not shrink, when New England was well into its third quarter of recession.

Also making me feel old -- if I persist at my current weight and fitness stauts, I'm already halfway through my life. Sigh.

-- Anonymous, May 21, 2001

When they re-released Star Wars and I was talking to my dental hygienist about it. She was going to go see it, and I mentioned that I saw it at the drive in (at least 5 times) when it came out. She mentioned that she wasn't even born then....

-- Anonymous, May 23, 2001

When I'm in the store and see a copy of TV Guide or something else I used to love when I was little and realize it costs almost three times as much as it did back then.

Or when I say something like "Oh my gosh, remember when..." and someone looks at me and goes "Uh, that was YEARS ago" when it seemed like only a few months to me.

-- Anonymous, May 23, 2001

When I think of movies or songs as being new and realize that they came out in the early/mid nineties when I was in college. Then I realize that kids graduating college now were like in eight grade or something.

-- Anonymous, May 23, 2001

I had always had passing feelings of old age, but today REALLY brought me down. For about eight years now in the summer, a group of about ten guys would get together everyday in a little park and play a few games of basketball, and nothinf ever changed. Then slowly playing for fun became playing for exercise, to work off that belly. Then the times of playing changed because everyone had full time jobs now, "we'll play after work". Then one by one certain regulars would stop arriving, pulling up in the string of cars always situated on the curb of the park. And for the first year younger kids started arriving who had aged all those years we played. Then today, a group of young kids beat us a couple games, given we were all a little heavier than we used to be, a little bit slower, but it still made us feel so old, so very, very, old.

-- Anonymous, July 16, 2001

I was watching TV the other day and someone mentioned Duran Duran during a conversation with a bunch of senior High School girls and they all said, "Who?" That's when it hit me. There is a whole chunk of my memory that living breathing almost adults have no concept of.

-- Anonymous, July 17, 2001