Becoming a geriatric How did it make you feel?

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On the 15th I officially became a geriatric/pensioner. Cognitively I still feel as sharp as ever, but the last 15 months has seen my physical health go in a downward direction- falls resulting in reduced mobility, atrial fibrillation , swollen legs and feet for which I'm getting compression stockings - last but not least osteoporosis. I have decidedly mixed feelings.

Mixed feelings for me.

I am very grateful to have survived, especially as an Autistic person.

I miss physical things I used to be able to do that I can’t now.

I guess I should be grateful for making it to 66, with autism and severe mental illness.

I just retired from my main job at age 62.

I still work part-time at a library.

I’m lucky to be relatively healthy with relatively few aches and pains.

Thank you, my friend.

And I hope you get healthier. Just seek to keep a positive attitude. I’ve seen it happen that people in not-so-good health in their 60s get better in their 70s.

^ Thank you.

I turned 70 last year, to me this represents becoming a geriatric and my feelings are complicated. I dearly wish to respond to this but TBH I have so many thoughts that I beg to be forgiven if I give just a partial answer then follow up with further comments as time goes on.

So to begin I am in an interesting situation. In the US, one qualifies for the maximum Old Age benefit from the government if one waits until age 70 to claim it. Given there are valid arguments for claiming sooner, I did wait but furthermore I found myself not retiring. I decided to reduce my work week from 40 hours to 32 but it now seems there is a movement for people to do that at any age. What's truly unexpected is that the people I work with still value my contribution. I am a full-stack web developer (Java, Typescript, SQL, etc.) and this is a field supposedly dominated by people at least 30 years younger but the team I am working with don't seem bothered. If they were, I would probably retire fully, nevertheless it seems inescapable I will retire in the foreseeable future.

The occurrence of the pandemic when it did has definitely made a difference. I happen to think that people are less conscious of my age because they almost never actually see me. There have also been things happening in my life involving my mother-in-law (who recently passed but was living with us and needed increasing attention during the time of the pandemic) plus our Special Needs son being kicked out of his group home and moving in, and needing support from me, that would have been very problematic to deal with had I still been working in an office OTH there are things I truly miss about working in an office.

I have become very sedentary and am anxious to resume some sort of regular exercise OTOH I seem generally healthy, the only daily prescription medication I take is for blood pressure.

I certainly look to myself like an old man but I find people not obviously reacting to me as an old man. I can recall an encounter I had at the ballpark this past Summer when a man (let's say around age 40) started a conversation about what brand of beer each of us was buying (this is the sort of casual encounter Americans are sort of famous for) however at my age I should expect to be somewhat invisible to folks that much younger but apparently not to him, which is surprising.

Otherwise, being this age has pluses and minuses and I think I'll try to enumerate some of those in subsequent comments, if there's no objection!

^ A good and interesting reply.

It has happened gradually, health declines, strength weakens, my mind is still strong but most women on my mother's (autistic) side have had full dementia by age 80 so I am worried and each time I can't think of a word or can't remember why I walked into the room (what was I here after?) I worry more. I am 71. I am still adjusting to being autistic and learning to be old at the same time, but my life in general has got so much better since diagnosis! Knowing the answer to so many "whys" of my past has been such a relief, and now I can do self accommodation . Retirement is great, I worked hard for over 50 years, and it is so nice to take a nap whenever I want to, and to read a book through in one sitting if I feel like it. Age has a few perks! Its not all bad.

With a dx of schizophrenia( as well as ASD) I do worry about dementia, as there's an increased risk with the schizophrenia. My father at 92 now has to use a cane, but cognitively is a lot sharper than many half his age. If I can get fairly near to that I'll be happy.

I'm checking my visual reaction times, especially the deviation,which have a moderate negative correlation with cognitive ability, to keep a check on how I'm doing cognitively. So far all is well.

My best result so far.



They think my iron level is low, so a blood test was done yesterday. Testosterone level and protein electrophoresis will also be checked. It's reckoned that being long term on anti-psychotics is the cause of the osteoporosis , but they need to check for other possible causes.

I said I'd post more.

So being 70, although one may feel healthy nevertheless one hasn't that many years left on Earth. And of course, subjective time moves faster the longer one lives. I still very much care about the future whether or not I'm around to experience very much of it, but at the same time there are some things I'm thankful for not being around to experience, for example I don't really know what effect the growth of AI might have on members of my profession over the next couple of decades.

As previously stated, age hasn't affected my job performance very much apart from slowing me down a bit as in the number of hours I want to contribute. Gone are the days when I could work full-time then spend nights on a side hustle, which in the 90s I found necessary in order to continue to afford living in a house we just bought. One problem is that, as a corporate employee who undergoes self-assessment, one is generally expected to focus on one's "professional growth" but clearly that no longer matters very much. An advantage though is, my competitiveness has declined to the extent that I don't care giving credit to others for accomplishments for which I can arguably claim credit for myself. This is good for my position as a contractor as it's not hard for me to praise the work of government employees, which I think helps my working relationship with them.

Another thing is that the desire for new experiences has diminished (at least for me). I did a fair amount of traveling when I was young and now I don't yearn for foreign travel, although that may be partially due to the effect of global digital communication that makes it easy to know what is happening in other countries, what daily life there is like nowadays, as well as having access to content in languages I studied when I was younger, for example I no longer need to travel to a French-speaking country to watch a TV news program broadcast in French, and of course I can get a close look at different neighborhoods around the world via Google Street View. On the negative side, it is a bigger challenge to pack up and go travel to another country because being away from the comforts of my home is stressful. Also jet lag is a much bigger problem. Recently I took the first foreign trip I'd taken in 5 years. I went (with my wife and son) to Spain to visit friends, so one day we took a train into Madrid from the suburbs, walked around, and ate in a nice restaurant with fairly traditional Spanish food. When I was young this would have been a big deal, but now it sort of seems as though we were sightseeing because it was expected of us. Also differences from home aren't much of a big deal either. I can recall looking at houses and thinking how few Americans would want to live in houses that look like that (these were particular houses I was noticing not necessarily all houses in Spain) and just thinking how few Americans would spend good money to live in a house that looks like that. It's so different from here, it doesn't bother me but now it's more like "that's how they do things and we do things differently" but it's simply not as interesting as it would have been to me 50 years ago.

I don't worry about dementia as much as I worry about being perceived as having dementia for the autistic traits I've had my whole life. When you're 25 people think "weird," but when you're 70 they think "dementia."