At 41 shit is starting to hurt, 3 hours of riding a quad equals a few days of being sore. Sleep is more important than ever, I take naps before my bartending shifts and need 7-8 hours of sleep per day. I you will never find me sitting near, eating near or being the vicinity of children or their parents in a public place. After having skin cancer 3 times, I am always puts shit on my face. I have narrowed down things I like doing to 4, working, hunting, fishing and not more than once a day fornicating with my wife. I do not like parties, crowds, reunions or soirees. I look forward to being more and more crotchety.
Teenagers and college students have started calling me sir. Loud bars piss me off. Going out all night just to get wasted seems stupid.
This is easy. For me, I don't NEED to rub one out before I have any hope of going to sleep. From my teenage years until about the time I hit 30, trying to sleep without jacking off first was tough. Doable, but tough and if I was alone, you could bet your sweet ass I was going to jack off before going to bed, no matter how drunk or tired I was. Now, I can take it or leave it most of the time and sometimes I'd just rather go to bed. Fucking weird. If I tried to explain any of this to 14 year old me, I'd think I was fucking with myself.
Is there a weird curve with this as you get older? When I was in college/early 20s, I was shit on under 7 hours, now I work great on 6-7, figured it was shifts in my sleep patterns. But I've heard that from people in their 30s and 40s that they need more. And obviously old people sleep like 5 minutes a night.
I think it's a mixed bag of things: 1.) In your early 20's your sleep schedule was probably all over the place so you needed more quantity for the lack of quality sleep. 2.) When most people get older they start valuing feeling good when they wake up over having a balls top the wall fun night before. I really didn't get this when I was younger, especially since we live in America where sleep is pretty much frowned upon, but try going two weeks where you turn off all screens an hour before bed and get 9-10 hours of sleep, you'll wake up feeling like you can flip a bus. 3.) I have no clue about old people, but I don't think it's that they require less sleep, but that their bodies are just so inflamed after a lifetime of unnatural food and an artificial lifestyle that they can't sleep and just live the rest of their lives with a huge sleep debt. I could be wrong on all three points though, this is just conjecture, but I think about this shit a lot.
Old people still get the same amount of sleep. They just go to bed at 9 and get up at 5. Then, all the times they get up during the night to pee or toss and turn is made up in bits throughout the day, like when they nod off watching Wheel of Fortune. But seriously, you should get lots of sleep. My father was an Ob/Gyn, and had to take call and go to the hospital all hours of the night. He was also very active in the community and attended all my sisters and my sports games, recitals, programs, etc., meaning he was ALWAYS sleep-deprived. He developed early onset Alzheimer's disease and died from it in his early 70's. My mother is convinced that his lack of sleep contributed to that. I don't know if that's true, but there have a number of studies that show a link between the two.
Yeah, as much as I harp on eating paleo to be healthy, I think adequate sleep is just as, if not more important. Which totally blows for me since while it's mostly resolved, I still have a hard time falling asleep.
The biggest thing for me is that my perspective of time has changed. Occasionally I'll catch a movie that I absolutely loved and saw when it came out, like say Goodfellas, and realize that that movie is fucking 23 years old. Holy shit. Do you realize Goodfellas is 23 years old? Twenty three years have passed but it seems like it was just a couple of weeks ago my brother and I were laughing and joking, and going back and forth with lines from that movie. Or I'll be watching Raiders of The Lost Ark and it will suddenly hit me that I was 10 when that movie came out, and in my head it doesn't seem like it's been 33 years since I was ten. It feels more like a year or two, but it's been an entire lifetime, and suddenly I'm seeing the entire arc of my life and it just CAN'T be that long ago. It's such a mind fuck how incredibly fast life goes by without even realizing it.
I think it's common knowledge that I like to have a good time. However, if I have to work, which is currently 6 days a week, I call it a night with 7-8 hrs before I have to get up. Even then, the way I drink, I'm still going into work fuzzy at best. But I am just slinging booze and it's muscle memory. I'm fine. Pre-kid, I could work a double on 3 hrs, after boozing all night, 6 days a week. Post-kid, I lived on mini-naps and liquour had limited time in my life. It was pure survival. Sleep is golden, even if it's during the day and the neighbourhood is noisy and 4 cats like to jump on your head and crowd you.
-The girl and I make plans to go look at new furniture on the weekend; -Most bars suck ass. I'd rather go to a hole-in-the-wall pub or a jazz club. Then again, I've always kind of felt that way, I've just tolerated bars more when I was younger; -I obsess over my 401k and retirement planning; -When I see my friends (from home), it's usually at their kids birthday party or something. At least my school friends can still get down.
It's 8:30 am and I'm headed to a bar in a college town for some drinking before a Homecoming football game, I'm sure I will be reminded a hundred times over today exactly how much older I have become!
I'll echo what others have said. More often than not, I'm in bed by 11-11:30 on the weekends. I start to feel old because my cousin (who's actually 4 years older) will text when she's at the bar down the street. I feel a little ridiculous because most of the time the bf and I are ready for bed at 10 and not in the mood to get ready and go out that late. Smoky bars didn't used to bother me. There's still one part of town that allows smoking. I was there for a friend's birthday a few weeks ago and got really irritated by all the smoke. That made me feel old.