This is a thread for ILXors in their 30's!!! yo yo yo breakdancing etc...

The ability to function without sleep? I'm not sure it actually decreases that much, you just don't remember being that tired in retrospect.

No, no, I mean ability to *function*. I used to be able to be tired, but still put in a day's work or whatever. Now, if I don't sleep properly, I simply don't function. Can't concentrate, can't focus, can't have a cup of coffee and snap to it.

I think I function slightly better without sleep than I did in my twenties, but maybe that's just because I don't drink as much!

I had a similar blip in my mid-30s when I first stopped drinking so much, but that has now passed and the decline is back on. By the time I am 50, I will be sleeping 10 hours a day. (If the world is not consumed by Hadron supercollider or Mayan prophecies of ruin, and I'm not hit by a bus, etc.)

I thought as you get older you don't need as much sleep anyway. My grandma is up at 5am and goes to bed at midnight. Does that only kick in when you get to your 60s or something?

I think it varies according to metabolism. People in my family tend to need more sleep as they get older. If they don't get it at night, they'll nap during the day. (God I miss naps from being unemployed.)

Things that freak me out. I have tennis lesson from a guy who's 28. I'm pretty sure he's the little brat I would play against when I was 15 years old (and he about 7-ish). I now realize if I had continued I woul... Ah I gotta stop thinking this way. hah.

Penpals! Had tons of'em. My "best/longest" one wanted to meet up after about 7 years of writing. I knew that when we would meet up, it would be the end of it as the "magic" would be broken. We did meet up. We continued to write but after a year or so it just kinda watered down and that was that. Kinda sad but then we were already in our late teens and you sort of move on/grow up.

Less sleep? Bollox. I need my sleep but then my youngest has decided otherwise. LE SIGH. My gran - who might have Alzheimer - sleeps about 16 hours per day if I am guessing right.

Sometimes the magic was broken by meeting penpals. But in my experience, they translated into IRL friends. I ended up being roommates for several years with someone I met through the penpal circuit!

THANKS GUYS, GREAT THREAD TO TELL ME I SEEM OLD ON

Not old, wise. Take it as a compliment.

I'm totally where Tom is now. My days of city-hopping, failed marriages (well just the one), and career-switching are done and I'm content to just live and build the life I have. Although it has taken me to 35 to reach this point.

Also, talking about being around younger people, my new job is playing with my head as I'm now supervising 19 and 20 year olds. I realize I am the old person which is bizarre. It doesn't make me feel bad but just strange seeing myself through other people's eyes.

Perhaps they'll keep me young trying to keep up with their mad web skillz and crazy music.

Surely I am not the only one for whom the passage of time seemed far different for my 20s than it is for my 30s. I swear that the time between age 22 and 29 was actually like 12 years.

Put another way, it seemed like I was in my 20s forever, while the 30s are clicking by really quickly.

-- quincie, Wednesday, August 27, 2008 7:43 PM (Wednesday, August 27, 2008 7:43 PM) Bookmark Link

this is frighteningly OTM.

We're all forgetting the best part of being in your mid-30s:

No longer being in the key 18-34 Marketing demographic target.

No, that's the worst part. No one cares about your tastes anymore. It's much harder to find clothes that fit or movies you care about seeing in the slightest or culture that tweaks your interests. ;_;

my new job is playing with my head as I'm now supervising 19 and 20 year olds

Ha, that's been my life for eleven years -- so to me it's all 'oh yeah, right.' Some of my old student workers have been back in touch lately, it's interesting to see where they ended up.

No one cares about your tastes anymore.

Hooray! (Personally I'm more than fine with this, I just keep creating my own aesthetic.)

You ever play that game to see how much closer one year is to ancient history than to the present?

I'd never done this until reading a Philip Sherburne piece which pointed out that Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" was closer to the end of WWII (hell, next year it'll be closer to the start) and now I can't stop.

I was watching (nerd alert) a 1980s "Tomorrow's World" 25th anniversary programme at the weekend and said "hey, all these 60s clips they're showing are as old to them as this show itself is to us now, do you think they would've seemed more dated?" and there was a confused non-response. Uh, yeah, not the funnest game, I guess, but still.

I am not yet in my thirties but if you guys are going to talk about 10" records, VHS tapes, zines, Colecovision and joint pain then this seems more my kind of place than the 20s thread, so, uh, hi! Then again, if this is the thread for people who've got their lives in order and are no longer mystified by adulthood, uh... well, there's a hope for the next 2 years, I guess.

Emsk just shouted at me at lunch for saying that I was functionally 40. She kept saying NO, YOU ARE IN YOUR THIRTIES.

Only just. I'm closer to 40 than to 30. I'm closer to 40 than to 35 these days! I tend to have more in common with 42 year old people than I do with 32 year olds.

And I can't stand music festivals. But I don't think that's anything to do with my age. I'd go to one I could sit down in nice seats and have a break every half hour to go to the loo and get some ice cream. But that would be a play or an opera, not a gig.

No one cares about your tastes anymore.

Fine by me! I feel like less of a "lifestyle target" for heavy-handed marketeers of products and services that don't really enrich my life.

Mind you, I guess I'm in a new "lifestyle demo" (the 35+ homeowner), so I'm now a target for all sorts of other (expensive) shit.

Hahah, if they try that around here with me, they'll be sorely disappointed.

I need to write Emsk! It's been too long.

I generally ignore being marketed to - and the things that were supposedly marketed to "my" demographic didn't really hold much interest to me anyway. So I guess, actually, not much has changed.

But there's a difference between... this is marketed to me but I just don't care about it and "OK, I might as well just not exist as far as demographics go."

Surely I am not the only one for whom the passage of time seemed far different for my 20s than it is for my 30s. I swear that the time between age 22 and 29 was actually like 12 years.

Put another way, it seemed like I was in my 20s forever, while the 30s are clicking by really quickly.

yeah it's kind of fascinating and annoying all at once. Each year becomes a smaller percentage of your total life span as you age. When you're two, a year is half of your entire life, so it seems like forever - literally a lifetime. And it's the reason why the phrase "slow as Christmas" means nothing to me now.

Marketers for the "35+" demo can hit me over the head all they want about home improvements, furniture, luxury SUVs, vacation properties, and all manner of things I'm supposed to want, but 'I'm rubber, you're glue', etc...

Ned, when you started your job, weren't you closer to the age of your students?

Thinking about what is closer to what. . .it trips me out to realize that the rap I listened to when I was young is older to my nieces/nephews (Oh "backspin" channel, you make me cry) now than the Beatles my parents listened to when I was a child. How can the Beastie Boys have been making music longer than the Beatles? When did this happen?

i really don't think anyone ever really cared about my tastes and i always lie on any sort of marketing survey so that doesn't much matter to me.

Ned, when you started your job, weren't you closer to the age of your students?

Oh, of course! But there's a stasis when you work in a college, a useful one in many ways. I don't want to say that work here 'keeps you young' but by default you're always dealing both with your fellow staffers year-by-year as well as a constantly rotating cast of thousands generally between 18 to 22. It just feels normal, for lack of a better word.

The only thing that made me think "Hmm, yeah, time HAS passed" lately was realizing that when I was listening to the new Verve album the other day that the last one before that came out a few months after I started work here. And THAT does seem like a long time.

18-34 demographic? that's a huge group! you start being irrelevant once you're out of the 18-24 one. sorry guys!

massive xposts

xpost

I get older and they keep staying the same age. .. or something like that.

No one cares about your tastes anymore.

This suits me as well. When I was in the 18-34 group, I didn't care about the "hip" stuff the marketeers were trying to push on me, and was vaguely annoyed that they thought we were all morons. It's actually a relief now that marketing departments don't consider me to be worth the cost of targeting their advertising towards.

(xxxxxpost to Rob Bolton) I think all of that stuff is a bit easier to tune out, as it's less about trying to appeal to people's personal/emotional insecurities as it is about "keeping up with the Jones'es"

but hey, realtors, investment planners, and AARP (why the hell have i started to get admail from these dudes?!) still care what you think, if that's any solace.

I did start to get some of that, but it stopped after about a year, I think the banks/etc. realised that I didn't have any money.

I was at a dinner party recently, and the topic turned to litmus tests to see whether someone was the sort of person you'd want to date or not. And this one young woman said "I like to ask what his favourite album is, I find that tells me a lot about a person." And I had to bite my tongue from saying "Wow, you really are 21, aren't you?"

I've got a good friend of mine who's a bit younger than me, complaining about the fact that his job didn't "inspire" him. I just laughed and said, "Yeah, that's why it's your JOB."

OTM-o-rama on this thread

I live near the University. The students get younger every year, I swear I don't get any older.

What about policemen? It's always the first sign of real aging when policemen start to look ridiculously young.

(College students have always seemed like kids to me - even when I was one.)

I was at a dinner party recently, and the topic turned to litmus tests to see whether someone was the sort of person you'd want to date or not. And this one young woman said "I like to ask what his favourite album is, I find that tells me a lot about a person." And I had to bite my tongue from saying "Wow, you really are 21, aren't you?"

Roffle. So otm. My friend and I were walking on a saturday evening. I noticed the young kids walking around in their "hip threads." I told my friend I didn't understand it nor could I read the "cues". My friend said that theur clothes were horrific. I replied that if these teenagers would hear, they'd be glad she said that. Then she added:"But my son would agree." I jokingly said her son had the mental age of a 40 year old. ;-) I sincerely hope my kids do sort of rebel and act young. That's what they are supposed to do. I sadly did that way too late.

That said, I do really like the fashion of young people nowadays even though I can not "read" it that well.

guys, michael jackson turns 50 today.

Such a down thread. What about all the cool stuff? The ability to go out without being carded? The extra salary you (probably) command? The heightened sex drive in women?

The ability to go out without being carded?

Hahah, I get carded all the time, trust me. I did get the extra salary, though, just the other day.

By "carded" you mean being asked for proof of age in a bar, right? That's never happened to me, even when I was 17/18. The extra salary though? Yeah, I'm, er... working on it...

I was carded for the first time on my 18th birthday and kicked out of the pub because they thought I had fake ID.

xxp Is that what we all have to look forward to? WAU.

The heightened sex drive in women?

The what now?

You are bang on your sexual peak ffs.

Tell that to my implanon implant *mutter*.

The heightened sex drive in women?

Yeah, I was going to ask about that one. Always assumed it was a myth to help women of a certain age get boyfriends.

The ability to go out without being carded?

on saturday i was at 7-11 picking up a 6 pack before a bbq. there were three cops in line behind me, when i got to the register there was a sign that says 'WE CARD ANYONE WHO APPEARS TO BE UNDER 40 YEARS OF AGE'. i did not get carded.

"14 YEAR OLD PASSES MEDICAL BOARD - KID DOCTOR CAN'T BUY BEER - CAN PRESCRIBE DRUGS"

No, it's that a woman reaches her sexual PEAK at age 39.

Peak != heightened sex drive, it's that sex is physically more enjoyable for older women. Supposedly.

Me, I can't remember.