Yeah, I noticed in my late 20s that the world has changed from my childhood. All my childhood sports heroes have retired. New music genres have replaced what I heard on the radio. A lot of my old haunts are still there, but some have been knocked down and replaced. It’s an… unsettling feeling when you realize the ground is moving beneath your feet. The best thing you can do is to keep moving yourself (figuratively, not literally). Explore new places, make new hobbies. Fill up your time with new experiences and you won’t have as much of a sense of loss.
The best is when you are lying in bed at night and some odd mix of neurotransmitters unlocks a memory you haven’t thought of in years, and then you spend an hour crying about the gulf of time between then and now, for what/who you’ve lost, and managing the crushing guilt that follows when you feel awful about not tending to the garden of your memories better.
Aging brings along the realization of how many things only exist in your memory, and even if they are recorded or memorialized no one will ever experience them the way you did.
That restaurant with your parents, That Mall, staying with distant family in some house that was sold 30 years ago or outright bulldozed. Those places are only special to you, and when you cease to exist, they won’t be special in the same exact way to anyone else. It’s the stupid childhood memories that honestly don’t mean anything on their own that feel the worst IMO
Almost 40 here, I feel the same. Some things evolve, some things get replaced and some mostly stay the same, but the worst is when it feels stagnant or even decaying. That’s worse than actual loss in some ways.
Yeah, I noticed in my late 20s that the world has changed from my childhood. All my childhood sports heroes have retired. New music genres have replaced what I heard on the radio. A lot of my old haunts are still there, but some have been knocked down and replaced. It’s an… unsettling feeling when you realize the ground is moving beneath your feet. The best thing you can do is to keep moving yourself (figuratively, not literally). Explore new places, make new hobbies. Fill up your time with new experiences and you won’t have as much of a sense of loss.
But all the new stuff is enshittified by capitalism so it’s not as enjoyable as the old stuff.
The best is when you are lying in bed at night and some odd mix of neurotransmitters unlocks a memory you haven’t thought of in years, and then you spend an hour crying about the gulf of time between then and now, for what/who you’ve lost, and managing the crushing guilt that follows when you feel awful about not tending to the garden of your memories better.
Aging brings along the realization of how many things only exist in your memory, and even if they are recorded or memorialized no one will ever experience them the way you did.
That restaurant with your parents, That Mall, staying with distant family in some house that was sold 30 years ago or outright bulldozed. Those places are only special to you, and when you cease to exist, they won’t be special in the same exact way to anyone else. It’s the stupid childhood memories that honestly don’t mean anything on their own that feel the worst IMO
Almost 40 here, I feel the same. Some things evolve, some things get replaced and some mostly stay the same, but the worst is when it feels stagnant or even decaying. That’s worse than actual loss in some ways.