What age is no longer considered young/youthful?

I am 43, feel exactly like I did when I was 25. Still look good. Still have a six pack, still can hit the weights and run 4 days a week. I still can knock it out in the bedroom. I have kids and a wife, but I do not smoke, use drugs, and I drink beer occasionally. I get 7-8 hours a night and IMO, If you take care of yourself, you look and FEEL young for a loooong time.

Mentally, I think the increased wisdom and life experience outweigh the loss of cognitive function meaning that most people get smarter and smarter as they grow older until a certain point when the loss of cognitive function begins to outweigh the gain of memories and experiences. This loss of capacity is usually pretty obvious in folks over 75, so I'd say 'old' maybe starts around your 60s or 70s. My opinion is:

Early 20's and below - child
Mid 20's to mid 30's - young adult
Mid 30's to Late 50's - Adult
60s - 'Older' adult
70+ Elderly

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I'm going with 55. I feel too old to be young and too young to be old.

Whatever age you have a kid. I’d you don’t have kids you’re more youthful than people your own age that have kids.

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pretty old for a young man wrote:
Just wondering because at 26 I'm starting to feel older already. College kids seem immature and obnoxious to me now, even though looking back I was just like them in 2013. Man, getting old sucks.

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I dont konsider enyone attraktiv from age 8 and over.

When you wear clothing meant for a younger generation it will really show your age. I could get away with clothing styles meant for guys in their early 20's up until I was about 35. Then something changed around age 40 for me where it looked weird to have certain haircuts, wear particular styles of jeans, etc.

I looked a like middle-aged man trying to dress like teenager and maybe it was in my head, but I think people treated me differently. For example, I would feel weird wearing re-released Air Jordans and certain joggers at age 40. It looks weird.

Don't laugh, but my mother in law bought my some clothing from L.L. Bean and it just looked so much better on me than the younger trendy stuff.

So, 40 for me is when I knew I was "old".

Youth is probably more of a function of responsibility and circumstance than it is age. I'm 24, I sometimes run with undergrads and they often seem really young - many of them don't cook for themselves and don't have anything outside of school and hobbies (they are stuck in what seems an eternal becoming). I remember telling my friend that I had to get my windshield replaced because it cracked and he thought it was like a 'real life thing', something that older and more responsible people would do but he certainly couldn't or wouldn't

Who am I to talk though - I'm a graduate student, sure I own a couch and I take my car in for oil changes and repairs but what real responsibilities do I have? I have a friend who has a wife, pets, and is looking for a house, he's certainly much older than the three years he has on me.

A lot of people fight 'getting old' because they are afraid of dying and the equate youth with life. They think that youth means a pursuit of novelty, of new experience, and that somehow by constantly experiencing new things they'll be youthful. They don't understand that this just makes them a tourist in life. Never settling down, never finding and making a place of your own. If you never really find a place of your own you leave it up to the city, the government, or whomever, this creates more administrative bloat.

I'm sure we all know those people who are constantly looking for 'new music' - I was more than definitely one of them at one point. They're tourists, they can name all the artists and albums they've listened to, they probably know a good 'harsh noise' band or two and probably some interesting post-rock, just like some people can show you pictures of all of the places they've visited. For the life of them, it would be hard to really listen to something and understand it. They have the appearance of understanding music without have really experienced it. They probably don't know the experience of keeping, say, 10 CDs in your car and listening to them over and over again, till the songs can be played forwards and backwards in their head. \

To some extent this is the problem with education - many universities require that students satisfy some breadth requirement. The spirit is right - people who want an education should be educated, not trained. When this education amounts to a cursory survey of, say, British Literature of the 1800s, US Civil Rights, and soil science (for, say, an engineer), it does little to develop real interests in students. The students then resent these things and continue their adolescent consumption habits. Never growing up to appreciate anything challenging or worthwhile. This is how you end up with YA fiction and Marvel dominating culture. This is how an abundance of online 'subcultures' become greater homes to people than their geographic locales.

Tourism ruins the world - it exploits local communities and makes them dependent on wealthy foreigners. Tourism creates things like Spotify, where media can be consumed more or less for the sake of consumption and people don't bother to know how it's created. Tourism creates a world where people don't own anything, lest they not be able to fit it in their suitcase. Tourism ruins culture, by causing people to never develop real taste or interests. Tourism is not itself a great evil, it's an amalgamation of forces - atomization of society, unchecked globalization, and a narcissistic culture that create one easily identifiable trait.

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RuningManJumpSuit wrote:
Whatever age you have a kid. I’d you don’t have kids you’re more youthful than people your own age that have kids.

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pretty old for a young man wrote:
Just wondering because at 26 I'm starting to feel older already. College kids seem immature and obnoxious to me now, even though looking back I was just like them in 2013. Man, getting old sucks.

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Bra-ket wrote:
Youth is probably more of a function of responsibility and circumstance than it is age. I'm 24, I sometimes run with undergrads and they often seem really young - many of them don't cook for themselves and don't have anything outside of school and hobbies (they are stuck in what seems an eternal becoming). I remember telling my friend that I had to get my windshield replaced because it cracked and he thought it was like a 'real life thing', something that older and more responsible people would do but he certainly couldn't or wouldn't

Who am I to talk though - I'm a graduate student, sure I own a couch and I take my car in for oil changes and repairs but what real responsibilities do I have? I have a friend who has a wife, pets, and is looking for a house, he's certainly much older than the three years he has on me.

A lot of people fight 'getting old' because they are afraid of dying and the equate youth with life. They think that youth means a pursuit of novelty, of new experience, and that somehow by constantly experiencing new things they'll be youthful. They don't understand that this just makes them a tourist in life. Never settling down, never finding and making a place of your own. If you never really find a place of your own you leave it up to the city, the government, or whomever, this creates more administrative bloat.

I'm sure we all know those people who are constantly looking for 'new music' - I was more than definitely one of them at one point. They're tourists, they can name all the artists and albums they've listened to, they probably know a good 'harsh noise' band or two and probably some interesting post-rock, just like some people can show you pictures of all of the places they've visited. For the life of them, it would be hard to really listen to something and understand it. They have the appearance of understanding music without have really experienced it. They probably don't know the experience of keeping, say, 10 CDs in your car and listening to them over and over again, till the songs can be played forwards and backwards in their head. \

To some extent this is the problem with education - many universities require that students satisfy some breadth requirement. The spirit is right - people who want an education should be educated, not trained. When this education amounts to a cursory survey of, say, British Literature of the 1800s, US Civil Rights, and soil science (for, say, an engineer), it does little to develop real interests in students. The students then resent these things and continue their adolescent consumption habits. Never growing up to appreciate anything challenging or worthwhile. This is how you end up with YA fiction and Marvel dominating culture. This is how an abundance of online 'subcultures' become greater homes to people than their geographic locales.

Tourism ruins the world - it exploits local communities and makes them dependent on wealthy foreigners. Tourism creates things like Spotify, where media can be consumed more or less for the sake of consumption and people don't bother to know how it's created. Tourism creates a world where people don't own anything, lest they not be able to fit it in their suitcase. Tourism ruins culture, by causing people to never develop real taste or interests. Tourism is not itself a great evil, it's an amalgamation of forces - atomization of society, unchecked globalization, and a narcissistic culture that create one easily identifiable trait.

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when pubes turn gray. You can pretend up until that point.

When you have children. Done...well within a year.

Watch that scene in Taxi Driver where Travis talks to the old cab driver Wizard.

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Bra-ket wrote:
...they probably know a good 'harsh noise' band or two ...

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Broken Down Old Stiff wrote:

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track chick wrote:
I would say 60. Some 60 year olds are still active, healthy.

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Huh? I'm on the short side of 60 and healthy but literally falling apart with running. Decades of competitive running has led me to the trash heap. Chronic injuries, big time injuries (tendon/ligament ruptures), post-traumatic osteoarthritis, etc., has limited me to barely 12 mpw and no more racing. I walk with a limp the day after a run and need some help in getting around the house. And I have an on-going prescription for a pain killer to get through bad pain days. 😬

I would say by age 50, you're no longer considered youthful in terms of running. So many of my training partners & competitors of the old days pretty much blew up in their 50s with most giving up running entirely. You've got to have some pretty damn good genetics and a lot of luck to be running competitively in your 50s.

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Sub age 30 opinion wrote:

I am 24 as well and this post sounds so dramatic. You are writing like you are 50 years old seeing friends never settle down. You are only like 3 or 4 years older then most of those kids and you are asking like you are so much more wiser and mature. 3 years older is nothing in the grand scheme of life. Most people marry someone that has a difference of age of 3-5 years. My advice to you is to enjoy being young and stop being so dramatic. Some day you will actually be old and wish you weren’t thinking like this in your 20s.

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I’ll be 70 next month. I’m slower sure and a few extra aches here and there but friends I’m getting older but I ain’t old.
“How old would you be if you didn’t know how old your were”.
LeRoy “ satchel“ Paige.

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Cousin Ernie wrote:
I'm going with 55. I feel too old to be young and too young to be old.

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BLtheKid wrote:
1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89

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