Life is sneaky sometimes.
We are often occupied with working, meeting deadlines, and keeping all our ducks in a row. Then suddenly, BOOM, the realization that we are physically or mentally not the same as when we were in our 20s cruelly slaps us in the face.
These reality checks can come in the form of random comments about our looks, or how our bodies feel the moment we get up out of bed.
"When did you realise that you are officially "not young" anymore?"
Age is just a number. Sure, but let's not talk about that.
Mutually Offended
"I was in my late 20s, at work talking with one of our new interns. I can't remember why but she asked how old someone was and I was like, 'I dunno, about our age?' She gasped and asked 'How old do you think I am??' Then I gasped and asked, 'HOW OLD DO YOU THINK I AM?!'"
"Anyway, that's when I realized I was 'not young' anymore."
The Fear Is Real
"I'm scared of teenagers now."
– -thegay-
"Just don't look them directly in the eyes."
– spp25
Nightclubbing is a thing of the past for these "old folk."
Club Patrons
"When I went to a nightclub last weekend and everyone looks like children..."
– smegly87
Checking IDs
"We went to a bar recently and the bouncer didn't check our IDs -- just us out of everyone going in. Fine. Then as we were leaving, the place was totally packed and I was outside waiting for my husband to come out and thought, 'We're the oldest people here by ten years at least.'"
"Then, to my relief, I saw an old guy in the crowd."
"Then, to my horror, I realized the old guy was my husband."
Reactions to pop culture references can give away your age.
The Not-So-Familiar Tune
"When a song I loved as a teenager appeared as an oldie on the radio."
Listenin' To The Oldies
"My 17-year old nephew has a girlfriend who's into 'the oldies' - you know, like Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins. That made me feel old, lol."
– Tauber10
Hey, Mr. DJ
"I DJ'd a wedding a year ago and the groom asked me if I could play that one oldie…'Get Low' from Lil Jon."
Random injuries are a clear indicator our bodies are headed six feet under sooner than we think.
Getting Unhinged
"When I dislocated my jaw lying in bed yawning. Didn't even think it was even possible."
Sleeping Injury
"Similar, except I woke up with a sprained ankle. No sleepwalking, no weird sleep Olympics, just held it or twisted it weird while sleeping and sprained it."
"I have done this 3 times after turning 40."
"Don't turn 40, kids, stay in your 20's and 30's."
– DrEnter
No More Yawning
"It was free day, Sunday, bad weather outside, I was in bed lying on the side, chilling, reading a book when mid yawn I heard weird noise. I was never out of the bed so fast. By the time I got to the mirror I heard another snap and jaw went on it's proper place, but I had swollen left lower side of the face for another 3 days. Talked to my doctor next day and he said, I should not eat hard or any food that needs a lot of chewing for a week or 2 and not to open mouth too much. I am reminded of this every single time I yawn."
As a Broadway dancer, I still frequented auditions to get me to the next gig.
That was pretty routine for me. Lining up in the hall, waiting for my group to be called in to learn the choreography and be judged on the spot to determine if I was good enough to make it to the next round.
I was so used to being focused on making a good impression while in the audition. But one day, I had a moment and noticed I was the only dancer among a group of college-aged kids.
That was when I realized I was being aged out from the business, at least as a dancer.
If my weak joints and lower back pain weren't clear indications, seeing all those spring chickens kicking their legs for Jesus was the biggest clue that my time was up.
Well, I had a good run. Speaking of which, I should go ice that knee after tripping on the treadmill the other day. Oops.
Reddit user motivetodayy asked:
"People born before 1980, What are some obsolete household items or gadgets from your childhood that younger generations may not even recognize?"
TV Tech
"Those GIANT projection TVs the size of a closet that only looked good if you were sat in the EXACT right spot. That one kid whose parents let him hook up his Nintendo to it was king."
"The same family probably had one of those satellite dishes in their back yard that were absolutely massive and made your house look like you were trying to spy on the Russians."
- nailbunny2000
How To Keep In Contact
- fidelkastro
"Wow, you just brought back some memories of me playing with one of these as a kid!"
- ajlm
"I worked for a large, billion dollar company in 2007 and the CEO/founder, 70+, who I had to meet with occasionally, insisted on having that exact phone book. He had a computer on his desk, and an executive assistant, and still HAD to have that mechanical phone book to access his phone numbers. Much to the dismay of the office manager when his old one wore out. By god, she found one. Edit for detail."
- -mopjocky-
"We still use this where I work...."
"And we are the ones supplying the natural gas to your homes and businesses. Till next time"
- braize6
Party Lines
"Phone lines that you share with a few neighbors. It was called a party line. Don't confuse this with the party line of the 90s where people could in a talk with several strangers at one time."
- Cultural_Standard_58
"I remember these! Knowing what series of rings was your phone number, and picking up quietly when the old ladies up the road were gossiping lol"
- cinkiss
GiphyPause So You Don't Get The Commercials
"The VCR recording clicker to pause the recording during commercials."
"Single button with a long cord to the VCR"
- queuedUp
Be Kind, Rewind — With Your Model Car
"VHS rewinder. Ours was shaped like a race car. Be kind, rewind."
- EddieRando21
"Ours was a red sports car!"
- fire_fairy_
"Whoever started the rumor that rewinding videos ruined your VCR made a lot of money in the late 80s."
- Peemster99
"My memory was that it took 10 minutes in the VCR player. Not in the Race Car Rewinder though."
- postmaster15
Home Intercoms
"The house I grew up in had an intercom system."
- Geek_off_the_streets
"Yep, wired intercom systems that could also play AM and FM music to all the rooms were a big fad in 1970s new home construction"
- Xyzzydude
The Origin of CC
"An actual carbon sheet that was placed between two sheets of paper to carbon copy the bottom paper from the top paper."
- tranquilseafinally
"Fun fact, this is where 'cc:' on emails comes from. ('bcc' is blind carbon copy, since the recipient can’t see other recipients.)"
- vandezuma
"And that's how I learned to copy my mother's signature on to bad school stuff."
- MickCollins
Smoking Was Everywhere
"‘Floor model’ ashtrays. Short stands that sat on the floor, and the top was an ashtray. Back in the day when people would just walk into your house and fire up a dart without asking, and nobody thought twice about it."
"The only place you didn’t smoke was in church."
- Joseph_Bloggins
"My Grandparents had ashtrays with places to hold cigarettes, when I asked, my mom said it was normal to provide cigarettes at parties, along with alcohol and food. 1950s and 1960s"
- Jbruce63
"No one in our family smoked, but we had a stash of ashtrays Mom would have us set out for company."
- mustbethedragon
"Remember the ones where you push a button and the floor of it hinges open to dump all the ash and butts into a compartment below?"
- GozerDGozerian
GiphyErgonomics Are Important
"A neck phone holder."
- modshavenopenis
"Those things always drove me nuts, it seemed like they were always made for giant people."
- Rokhnal
"We have these at my work for employees who have to spend a lot of time on the phone - though now that I think of it, maybe everyone's transitioned to headphones. Hmm."
- froglover215
"Grandma had one of these all throughout my childhood. I never "got" it until I hit 40...."
- Glum_Time3479
Milk Doors
"A milk chute built into our house. The milk man would leave the milk in the chute in the morning from the outside and we would pick it up from the inside."
"I am beginning to believe that this is a good idea again, albeit with a good sturdy lock on the inside door, so packages and food deliveries can be left out of sight but available to the homeowner from the inside. If I were building a house now, I would add that in to the plans."
- aeraen
"I would love to just have the whole fresh milk delivery thing again."
- dblshot99
"Growing up, our house had a milk chute. Never had milk deliveries, but we had cats."
"The milk chute became the cat door, which they learned and taught each other to open. Came in handy for when I'd lock myself out of the house."
- residentialnemesis
"I could contort my upper body through ours since I’d forget my keys a lot and could open the back door. Ah the latchkey days I remember them so fondly."
- raylab810
GiphySo Many Antennae
"My six year old daughter and I were walking through the parking lot of Auto Zone and she started laughing pointing at this like early 90s truck that had an old, aerial antenna sticking three feet out of the car hood and started laughing:"
'"Daddy that car has a whisker! It has a kitty whisker!'"
"She'd never seen an old antenna like that before."
- SeaTie
"My dad had a Mercedes back in the day and when you started the car, the antenna would extend up."
- lzwzli
"Now there’s no where for an antenna ball. Makes me sad."
- jburton24
Video Games Were Very Different
"Computer games that were loaded on cassette tapes"
- PrincessTusi
"Even before the cassette tape, they’d publish the games’ code in a magazine and you’d have to type it all in without any mistakes. No editor. No debugger."
- sapientia-maxima
"R…U.…N Enter. And pray to god you didn’t miss a colon somewhere"
- LadyGreyNoJoy
Mr. Yuck
"Mr. Yuck"
- Bmc00
"Child safety: Should we lock up these absolutely lethal chemicals? Nah, let's just put this green sticker on them!"
"This is also why the number for poison control was always on the first page of a telephone book, and often written as one of the emergency numbers on your telephone."
- MrHyde_Is_Awake
"As of a few years ago, you could still contact your local poison control office and request a sheet of these."
- ThatsABunchOfCraft
Analog Doorbell
"A doorbell that uses pipes to make sound. Most contemporary doorbells are just a box on your wall, a buzzer, or an app. That's if you even have a doorbell."
- Sigseg
"We would switch the pipes around at my friend’s house. It would drive his mum mad when the doorbell would ring and the time was all wrong."
- badpuffthaikitty
What now-obsolete technology did you grow up with that you think the young people around you would be confused by?
When it comes to insults, clever is better.
Anyone can go the obvious route of simply calling out a person's physical appearance or intellectual capacity.
But if you really want to be remembered, you've got to be creative.
The playwright William Shakespeare was fond of clever insults.
And Ballroom culture made reading and shade into artforms.
Reddit user No_Throat_1574 asked:
"What is the most creative insult you’ve ever heard?"
Baked
"An employee of mine told me that I was the raisin in his day's chocolate chip cookie."
- SellingMakesNoSense
Not so artistic
"Your face looks like something I’d draw with my left hand."
- weshric
Talking out your butt
"'They ruined a perfectly good bum when they put teeth in your mouth.' - Billy Connolly."
- That80sguyspimp
"Growing up, my best friends mother used to say 'it’s a shame God put so many teeth in your mouth…ruined a perfectly good a**hole'…"
"Same energy. Shout out Tia 🖤"
- ends_and_odds
We all deserve a break
"You have your entire life to be an idiot. Why not take today off?"
- rip1980
Green with envy
"I envy people who don’t know you."
- StalinsPerfectHair
Right in the childhood
"'You're not being the person Mr. Rogers knew you could be.' Emotional damage"
- couch_hammer
Emotional Damage GIF by Jennifer AccomandoGiphySlow down a bit
"Knowledge has been chasing you, but you have always been faster."
- Bright-Baker8267
Common loot energy
"You look like you drop common loot when defeated."
- GeorgeCauldron7
A bit bland
"I’ve always enjoyed 'If she were a spice, she’d be flour.'"
- Toren8002
No excuses
"I bumped into a homeless guy. I said excuse me."
"He said 'There is no excuse for you!!!'"
"With his leathered vigor, he's probably right."
- LOGOisEGO
Pain in the foot
"One time a third grader who was very annoyed with me told me 'you’re a rock in my shoe' and I’ve never forgotten that"
- madagascarprincess
Reap what you sow
"I hope your day is as lovely as your personality."
- montanagrizfan
"This works as both an insult and a compliment"
- Yezzzzzzzzzzzz
"'If my dog had a face like yours, I’d shave it’s @ss and teach it to walk backwards'"
- WteMxy
boxer dog gifofdogs GIF by Rover.comGiphyI would consult my own
"'If I wanted to hear an a**hole’s opinion, I would have just farted.' Learned this one a month ago and don’t know how I survived 40.5 years without it!!"
- ITSBRITNEYsBrITCHES
I'm not that flexible
"I'm trying to see things from your point of view but my head won't fit up my arse."
- Horrorbmoviepunk
It's generally better to try to play nice with others when you can but, if you're going to be mean, at least get creative.
Redditor Churbuddahbread wanted to hear from the people who believe they have lived through meeting other life forms, so they asked:
"People of Reddit who have been abducted by aliens. What’s your story?"
I have no alien stories.
Apparently, they don't want me.
I don't want them either.
NO!
alien GIFGiphy"Not sure if this was a dream or not but I remember being in some kind of craft facing towards one of the walls. I felt a presence behind me and was so scared I couldn’t move at all. Then out of nowhere I suddenly felt completely at ease. To my left out of the corner of my eye, I could see a big being that almost looked like a large tardigrade behind some kind of control panel."
"I turned to see another being. (Can’t really remember what this one looked like) but I remember asking if I could ask some questions. I then received a reply which came from within my own head. 'No' And that’s all I remember."
Churbuddahbread
It wasn't there before
"My brother-in-law says he was abducted. Don't know too much except he was out in the woods walking around. He was gone overnight. He never does that without letting somebody know that at least, he's leaving. He was found the next morning completely stunned. On shock. He could barely talk."
"He never really said what happened. He won't talk about it. He said only, that they performed examinations on him. His right foot now has what I can only describe as a birthmark on his right foot. It wasn't there before. That I know!! It wasn't there!! Now he's got a deep purple mark that covers most of his foot.? Wtf??"
Lazy-Lawfulness3472
In the middle of the night...
"They took me in the middle of the night. I was out feeding the cattle under the moonlight and then a big light came over me. The next thing I knew, I was driving down the road talking to what I later realized was my father. Or... the person whose body I am now in’s father. He made a joke about the time being slow and he had seen an episode of XFiles that mentioned that time reverses when aliens abduct so they can drop you off at the same time as they picked you up."
"Except I think they mixed something up because I am not in the same body I left in. I still remember my whole life before but I am 18 years younger in this body so I don't really mind... But a few years after the incident, I went to see if the farm I once lived on was still there, but it took me a while to get there without suspicion. It's gone. Like it never stood. Maybe it was all just a dream."
Biggmamaaa
The sun is up
"One of my old high school friends believes she was abducted when we were in our teens. She said that one evening she was hanging out in bed, drawing in her sketchbook. A pair of lights like headlights on a car caught her eye out the window, but when she looked properly she could see that the lights were higher up above the road than they should have been, and there was no noise."
"The lights continued getting closer to her apartment building and eventually shone right into her window. She blinked, and the next thing she knew, she was lying down in bed under the covers and the sun was coming up."
CosmicJellyroll
Hybrids
"I was genuinely abducted by aliens. I was driving at night on my own down the M62 motorway in the UK around 3 am for a job I was working. The next thing I know, it's 5 am. 2 hours had gone nowhere. I thought I was going or mad at something and when I got home I went to bed."
"Anyways, when in bed I dreamed about what happened and it came back to me. On the alien craft, they put me in a room and I was lying on the floor... Then they put an injection into my arm which was this red, rusty-like liquid. I think this was to monitor me."
"Every few weeks or so I'll wake up in the morning at 5 am and I know I've been back there, but can never remember it. Sometimes I get a feeling that I've been visited or am about to be visited. It's not fun and nobody believes me, but what they're doing is using our genetic makeup to populate other planets with hybrid beings."
iLikeGingerGirlslol
It's always a joke until someone gets abducted by aliens.
Quick as That...
Kate Mckinnon Snl GIF by Saturday Night LiveGiphy"It went from daylight to dark in a blink, my mom walked by where I should have been if I was asleep, but I wasn't there apparently, and I'll never forget that. Maybe it was aliens, never figured it out. When I was 7 or 8, during the summer, mid-day around noon. I'm home sitting by the door, looking into the lagoon waiting for my mom to come home. I blink and it's now nighttime. Quick as that."
"No fatigue, no sleep, just a blink. Hours have gone by and I'm sitting in the same spot, wide awake, except it's dark out. Just a blink. My mom is in the kitchen making food and playing music. When I go in, she asks where I was. I told her, sitting in front of the door waiting for her to come home."
"She didn't believe me and chalked it up to being a kid's joke, she's been home for hours now and assumed I was at my friend's house a couple of houses over. After that, I had a tiny lump on my right shin under my skin. I could roll it around a little with my fingers. It dissolved after about 2 months. If a BB pellet is 4.6 mm, it was probably like 1.3mm."
BYNCody
Therapy
"I actually had a therapist who treated people for their trauma from alien abductions. I’m not kidding and I’m not suggesting I really believed they were abducted. I’m not sure she even did but she seemed to suggest to me that if they felt traumatized by something that happened to them, she would help them."
Turbulent_End_2211
4
"You know I have been saying this since I was about 4. Somebody took me. I've always pointed to a spot on my calf that I've always thought it was a scar from a foreign insertion. But I have zero recollection of anything. And at 4 I was too young to make it up or even know the word alien. But my mom would always say the same thing no matter what, it's a growing pain. We could have been dying and that was her come back."
AssumptionAdvanced58
A Light Sleeper
"Not my story, but my Father in law swears he was abducted on a camping trip in the Northern Appalachians with about 4 other people. They hiked up near a lake and set up a campsite, and set up camp. He says they all remember swimming, then eating dinner but no one remembers cleaning up camp or going into their tents."
"They woke up about 10 yards away from their original site, in the exact formation that they had set up the camp, but all of the little stuff was in the same spot and there was no fire in the middle of the original area but not in the new one. They pulled out a measuring tape my FIL had in his backpack from work and measured the distance between the stakes of the tent poles and it was the EXACT distance between all of the tent poles from where they originally were and the new area."
"And before anyone says anything, my FIL is a super light sleeper( according to my MIL) and doesn't drink or do drugs, has no history or symptoms of mental illness, and was the first one awake. He still refuses to go hiking on that trail to this day, it's an easy hike so he isn't trying to be lazy and get out of it."
preggomuhegggggo
Fascinations
"I believe I have been abducted multiple times. Probably about once every two or three years since I was eight. I have been examined, but nothing invasive was ever done and the extraterrestrials seemed genuinely curious about humans. More often it is just an interview via telepathy about how I am feeling and how things are going."
"The last abduction was about six months ago. I remember waking up, seeing figures through my bedroom window make their way into my home, never waking my girlfriend or dogs, and leading me out to their craft. One even seemed fascinated with one of my dogs, but I sort of thought how angry and hurt I would be if anything happened to that dog and he backed away."
Termi89
Still Shaken
James Cameron Aliens GIF by 20th Century Fox Home EntertainmentGiphy"Not my story, it's my dad's, he gets a little shaky and doesn't like talking about it when it's brought up. When he was about 15 he and his friend did the childhood tradition of camping in the backyard. Everything seemed pretty much normal and they went to bed at around midnight. Shortly after falling asleep, they both woke up in a state of extreme disorientation and mental fog 2.5 miles away from his house in a empty grass field."
"When he checked his watch it was 4 AM with no recollection of what happened those 4 hours. There was no alcohol or drugs involved. He never let me camp in our backyard growing up so I have a slight distaste for our extraterrestrial neighbors."
UrbanDowntown
This is why alien movies still freak me out.
I can't do them, just in case.
Do you have any stories? Let us know in the comments below.