How do you honestly feel about younger people complaining about being old?

[Edwardo Piet]

My first response is to wonder why they feel so old.

Perhaps because what is meant by feeling old is feeling weary and worn out and stressed as if someone who has had a long and difficult life has... way before you're actually old.

The difference is between being old and feeling old. A young person can 'feel old' by having the same sort of general feelings an older person does... and going through many of the stressful experiences that everyone has in some form by the time they are old... only having them much earlier.

Of course, there is no such thing as what it 'feels like to be old'. As like I said... there are also older people that feel young.

But on the whole, older people tend to feel more tired and weary and stressed because they've had more stress and their body is physically worn out more. Because they've simply lived longer and life has had more time to wear them down (and they've been dying for longer... in a way all living is is slowly dying). Although... hopefully this doesn't mean that people who feel old when they're younger have a shorter life expectation... although... more stress often does lead to a shorter life... (but of course, it depends what one means by 'feeling old'... this is merely what I mean by it and how i make sense of it). And, of course, stress can decrease and someone who is worn down more than the average person earlier in life can actually get worn down less than the average person later in life... if they go beyond mere recovery and they end up becoming more physically and mentally healthy than average...

... so the aging process whilst initially being quicker, in some way, can slow down later on and it averages out. That can certainly happen.

Anyways: Sure, there are certainly positive benefits to being older. But, of course, when a young person says they 'feel old' they usually are speaking of the negative effects.

I mean... for starters our biological age is distinct from our chronological age: This is why you can get your organs tested and be told that you have the kidney of a 60 year old despite being, say, 34.... so..... perhaps these young persons' feelings aren't quite as mistaken as some may think.

And of course, the brain and the body are connected (and the brain is, of course, party of the body).... surely there must be such a thing as chronologically being 34 but having the brain of a 60 year old as well... that is just - as far as I know - harder to measure... at least at this point.

Sometimes our intuitions are less wrong that one would think. What sounds like unscientific bunk and just people talking about their identity can later actually be backed up by science. For example: Transpeople who say that they feel like they are the opposite sex to their biology.... can later to be found to have brains matching the opposite sex to the rest of their body.... so perhaps this is even another example... of what seems just like a subjective intuition and personal 'feeling' may in fact be a sign of a deeper truth that hasn't been able to be tested scientifically yet.

Now, of course, this does not mean that one should jump to conclusions and assume that one's own feeling is correct despite no evidence supporting it.... but it does mean one should not jump to the opposite conclusion or be overly dismissve of one's feeling either. Perhaps one's feeling isn't quite as bizarre or crazy or outrageous to those who are chronologically older... as it seems.

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Some people feel like shit earlier than others. They can feel old whenever they want.

Quite agree. I felt much older and worn down by life 20 years ago.

I agree as well. And Shell B has nailed it.

Ultimately, who cares about chronological age? All chronological age is relevant to is the fact that usually people who are chronologically older are biologically and neurologically older. In the same way that ultimately, when deciding for the age of consent, or the age to be fit for driving, or deciding the age for alcohol, the age for gambling, etc, what the purpose of having chronological rules on that is about is to get at the biological and neurological maturity... and there is no more objective and fair way of getting at it than drawing the line somewhere chronologically. There may be some people who at 25 aren't as physically or emotionally mature as some people at 18, or younger, but we of course need rules and have to work on what is best overall. But this does not mean that the chronological age itself is what is aimed for. There's a reason why lines are drawn where they are. And there's a reason why, say, many other animals with shorter life spans aren't all considered adult at age 18... and are considered adult much younger... because the aging and maturing process is quicker for them.

So, ultimately it's not chronology that matters... it's merely that chronology seems to be the best way to get at it.

The key word here is "ultimately".... when it comes down to it what matters practically in the world we live in isn't what's true ultimately. For the same reason that if we were all living in The Matrix but had no way of knowing it... nothing in our life would change despite the truth ultimately being that this entire world wasn't real. Because there would be no way of us knowing it so what mattered in practice wouldn't be the ultimate truth that everything was 'unreal'.... what would 'really' be unreal would actually be the only world that mattered: The illusory world that we lived in. So, in a way, real reality, The Matrix, wouldn't actually matter and for all intense and purposes would, in a way, be less real than the so-called ultimate reality beyond that. So, effectively, all that ultimately mattered in life, would be the non-ultimate. And, in the same way, all that ultimately matters is the fact that we come up with rules that help us reach the goal or solve the problem that we need to solve... despite the fact that ultimately the only reason it matters in the first place is for a deeper or 'ultimate' reason. But this doesn't mean we should ignore the fact that ultimately it's, for example, not actually age (as in chronological age), that matters... it's the effects of age. But for all intents and purposes it is.

I probably went from clear to confusing at this point but hopefully you get what I'm saying. One thing I will make clear is: I never confuse myself. Just others. Lmao. Hopefully I haven't confused you.

I mean another way of looking at it is my position on philosophy is often: The metaphysics and philosophy of the matter is often what doesn't matter.... but then that is precisely why philosophy does matter... because you can't figure out what matters without having a distinction between what does and doesn't matter. By finding out all the philosophical stuff that doesn't matter you arrive at what's left: what does matter (the famous Sherlock Holmes quote comes to mind). The best example of this is science and natural philosophy, which is ultimately based on empirciism coming out of many failures of approaches that weren't empirical. To discover the empirical approach one had to discover the distinction between the empirical and non-empirical. I am not a fan of those people who say things like 'To know what something is you have to first know what it is not'... because it's misleading and sounds like all knowledge of X comes from understanding not X. But, it is partiallly true: The point is that you need knowledge of both sides of the coin (even if one side of the coin is 100% bullshit) to clearly see the whole coin..... to know what's correct you have to know what is incorrect and for incorrectness to have any meaning you also need correctness [This is also one theory about why we have dreams and why sleep depriviation can cause psychosis: because it's also dream deprivation and the bizarre unreality of dreams (or even if the dream is rather pedestrian and boring like just real life... the dream at least lacks the continuity of life).... is what help understanding the distinction between reality and unreality. Crazy dreams help us make sense of a more 'normal' world).].

So.... what is often deemed unimportant is important precisely because it's how we differentiate from the important in the first place. It's why getting at the truth indirectly by debunking bullshit and untruth is just as important to getting to the truth as seeking after the truth directly. If we ever feel like there isn't any bullshit or nonsense left and everything seems to make sense... we should take that as a warning that we are perhaps deluding ourselves... we should become suspicious of ourselves and try to see if we can find untruth... because maybe things don't quite make as much sense as we think they do (it's precisely why falsifying (trying to come up with explantions for why it is incorrect) a hypothesis that possibly explains a possible fact is the best way to strengthen a hypothesis and make it a full blown theory that certainly explains a certain fact (not absolutely 100% certain, of course, not absolute knowledge... but certain enough to be considered scientific knowledge. Which is perhaps the most certain form of knowledge of the world that we live in... simply because more certain mathematical and logical truths are less about the world and more about possible worlds and making sense of our actual world than the actual world we live in (as we live in it) itself).