That leads quite often to the situation where you are looking in shock at some elderly, bald person in the mirror while thinking "Who's that old bastard?".

Or the sudden realisation "My God! I'm only two and a bit years off 80!"

As the article says, there's a difference between the age you feel you are 'in your head' and the age you feel you are 'in your body'. This also is rather annoying as your 'head' feels you can knock over a job completely in an hour or two but when you start doing it, your 'body' lets you down and and you find yourself exhausted about four hours later and stop working, only about a quarter-way through the job.

Once I started seriously considering retirement, admittedly a bit early-ish relative to the usual 65-70, the internal mental model of self has started to shift pretty dramatically, and the hypothetical "I have a lot of things i want to do" plans for the future now have the annotation "and a lot of them need to be done while I am still relatively young enough for them to be plausible."

That has honestly shifted the self-perception pretty dramatically. Or maybe I have the cause and effect reversed.

Do those things that are 'on your list' as soon as possible. There is an old saying 'Life is what happens while you're making other plans'. I discovered that I had, in practice, a mere six (6!) years in retrospect where it was possible do do things that were 'on MY list. If you miss that window of opportunity, you'll never get to do your list at all.

You have to make to effort to fit them in while you can. One of my lifelong dreams was to spend a year or two in a small village in France. The first time it was a possibility was in 2003, but 'No, I have the responsibility to make us a living' meant that that chance was lost and so eight years went by - lost opportunity - until I finally made it to my village in France in 2011 but by then I could only spend time there in bits and pieces rather than as a single block of time.

My "window of opportunity" closed at the end of 2016, though I wasn't aware of that fact till about 3 years later.

Many times I have said to my wife, "If only we were 10 years younger, we could have ... bought an apartment in Paris ... or a house in Italy, or .......". Lost opportunities by the score.

I once was working only part-time but I made it a goal to get to "Paris in April". That was 29 years ago. I can't remember now how we managed it, but somehow or other, we achieved that 'Paris in April' as part of a six-week round-the-world trip.

About 3 years after that, some friends invited us to spend a few weeks in Spain in their time-share holiday. We didn't have the money. They said 'Put it on the card'. So we did. Several months later, I received a very rare Tax Refund which allowed us to pay the credit card off. Twelve months later, the tax man took all the refund and more, back off me. So I sometimes say "The Tax Department lent us the money to go to Spain. We'd never have been able to that, otherwise."

    In my lungs I still feel young
    But my body won't play along
    I'm thinking this must not be where we
    Belong.

The other thing I will say is that I am getting to an age where a lot of people really get set in their ways, and I am noticing that I am not. Like on a recent project I was trying to get team buy-in to move from Java to Kotlin, and the people who were super excited about it were 5-10 years younger and the people who were like “but why” were my generation and carried the day. I told this struggle to my wife and she attributed it to neurodivergence, she thinks I might have a mild or high-functioning ADHD that essentially gives me perpetual mid-to-late 20s enthusiasm with sime mild drawbacks (difficulty “cleaning as I go” when cooking for example, not handling the taxes until April when it becomes urgent, that sort of thing).

Don't. I tried it, liked the language itself, but went back to Java.

Kotlin's syntax is nice, but it predates Java 8, so that syntax plays poorly with the stream API and lambdas. Iterop works as-promised, but again, Kotlin syntax doesn't work well with libraries that are Java-first (in my case, this was Hadoop). Finally, mainline Java keeps cherry-picking the best new language features while learning from their mistakes.

Along the same lines, is the realisation that we tend to judge (?) others by the outcome of their efforts, but we judge ourselves by the outcome of our thoughts. I've read that somewhere, certainly more eloquently put, but it also stuck - esp. afrer having kids.

It intuitively makes sense that this is the case, and for some reason it really stuck with me (it’s been 16-years since that class). Committing to working against this nearly universal implicit bias led me to being a more empathetic person over time.

Older people are more likely to have managed to do that before (introducing cool new tech/tools) and seen the costs of doing so. There simply are always switching costs, integration costs, and maintenance costs as well as new dependencies involved which can make it better in the long-run to simply keep using the potentially sub-optimal tech that everyone is already familiar with and using all day every day.

One place where I've seen success with using different tech is in some batch-processing script-like thing that you can just deploy, set up a cron job, and then everyone can forget about it while it runs happily in the background for years. Of course, that'll mean another cost when it eventually does need to be changed, but if that's many years later, that may be negligible. Another is one-offs that you can run once, verify the results, and then throw away.

But for something that's going to need substantial development or ongoing routine changes, the benefit might not outweigh the costs.

Younger people might not have had that experience or be thinking in terms of that whole long-term lifecycle thing, while older people have already dealt with it.

I definitely thought personally that Kotlin had some big advantages.

• The most common comment on a pull request was asking people to remember to “@NonNull all the things!” so Kotlin’s non-null by default aspects seemed wonderful.

• Maybe the second most common comment on a pull request was to replace “==” with Objects.equals(x, y), Kotlin just has a sane ==. Note that Objects.equals() is the correct choice because y.equals(x) is “safe” but unfortunately written Yoda-style whereas x.equals(y) causes null pointer exceptions (the x usually comes from a getter which is null-tolerant).

• Kotlin had immutable records by default which made tests automatically more readable.

• The ability to mix declarations for functions and data structures etc in one file, allowed for much less jumping between files. Meanwhile, the lighter syntax meant that the code in those files took up a lot less visual space, so these files were not overwhelming...

So to your point it definitely “felt better to use and gave me more of my time back”, I felt, otherwise I would not have pushed for it.

And yes I agree the time to learn the language should all be accounted for in development hours, not some weekend homework project, and I would definitely validate your skepticism about the dangers about caring for the company more than it cares about you.

That is interesting! I do have ADHD and I'm now in my low 40s. The enthusiasm never goes away. I met an old housemate, whom I had not seen in 20 years, and he said "You were eager, and unlike the other housemates you were much more open to things and not set in your ways."

I said mate, nothing has changed! It really is a pain when your peers don't want to try new things, but on the other hand, it's a good personality for leading a bunch of young guns with fire in their bellies!

Edit: I suppose I feel now much the same as when I was actually 22, but all that suggests is that there isn't any "age feeling".

Much like you, I don't feel much of a change, but I also feel very lucky because of that. Not sure if I'm aging well or if I'm accepting aging well, but then again I'm only turning 40. If I'm lucky enough, there'll be a ton more to lament in the future.

I suppose, like you, that I feel no differently now than I felt at 22, so in a sense, I reckon I have stayed at 22 'in my head'.

But that is why it is a shock at times to look in the mirror and see somebody who doesn't at all look like I looked at 22.

Until 5 years ago every moment was spent on some sort of hobby or interest. I could not begin to comprehend those people who would finish their day aNd then conk out in front of tv.

Now... It's a special night if we have enough energy for tv once kids are in bed :->

(I've also enjoyed Outer Wilds more on SteamDeck than any other device, for whatever reason; similarly, I can't make myself play Cyberpunk 2077 on 8" screen with fan redlining, even though apparently many do!:)

My wife broke her leg and our existence has been more miserable than typical. To keep my sanity this weekend, I've been working on getting a reliable stream setup from my desktop. One day I'll start playing through Red Dead Redemption 2.

Steam Remote Play works fine when the deck is the server, but it seems rather buggy as the client. "Hardware decoding" freezes up, and "software decoding" has messed up color on the preview release. Software decoding works on stable, but even then it's choppy and has lots of artifacts.

Yesterday I set up sunshine on my desktop, and today I got moonlight set up on the deck. Out of the box it seems to work very well. It looks better than Remote Play, and it seems to be better latency too. The only problem I've encountered is an inability to unlock my screen from the steam deck over moonlight; I type in the password, but my desktop rejects it for some reason, then after a few tries locks me out for 10 minutes. Thanks Arch Linux!

Since I'm incoherently rambling, I also tried to launch linux-native Tomb Raider yesterday, as I have successfully for several years. It didn't work because that would bring me too much joy. I switched to proton and it worked, but didn't have my progress saved. Okay, I am a software engineer with multiple computer science degrees. Missing libssl.so.1.0.0. An hour later, 10 minutes of compiling half a dozen random libraries, and a 200 character LD_LIBRARY_PATH override spanning four directories, it works again. How did it ever work?! According to the internet this problem happened to everyone else in 2017. Also a joke that's not a joke, windows has become linux's most stable ABI.

Kids really aged me. I'm in my 40s but I feel like I am so ready to hang it up and retire. Sit on the front porch with a iPad and a pipe.

There are so many possible sources for depression, so I can’t possibly give any specific, actionable advice. Just remember, you don’t need to settle for how things are now.

Good luck, hope things turn around. :)

I’m not anyone to be giving out psychological advice - but given my high “overhead of life” I’ve found it a convenient time to focus on physical health. I just need 30 minutes a day for exercise, and then it’s just a matter of eating healthy. Kids may take my time but they can’t force junk food down my throat! My time will free up down the road - and I think your “muse” will also return with time. Which is why I figure now is a great time to instead focus on health (low opportunity cost wrt side projects). You may as well start with that, and if we believe a lot of what’s written these days, it’s entirely possible that improved diet and exercise might clear and focus your mind too (that would be house money if so). But at least when your drive returns, hopefully the new healthy habits you’ve gained will stick.

Last thought - if you can’t think of anything else interesting to work on, I’d recommend blogging about a subject matter you find interesting. Just my 2 cents.

Maybe it helps that I don't live in a city but out in the woods on a farm? Discovery here entails tramping through the woods, digging up things, building stuff. Get a bunch of branches and build a "stone-age home", why not? A swing on a rope between two trees or hang up a hammock there and see how high you can make it swing (answer: very). As long as my body plays along - and it better do so or I'll get mighty angry with it - I expect to feel more or less ageless, neither young nor old. If it starts to fail me I'll probably change my mind but for now I simply don't bother with the concept of 'age' - going so far as to have to think about how old I actually am, something which trips up my children every time age is mentioned. It is just a number, something like those vague values seen in a S.M.A.R.T. report telling you about the health of a drive:

   ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH
   1   Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000f   116   099   006

(yes I feel older and yes in my case it is a symptom of ptsd)

My mind and body feel like I’m in my fifties and I’m in my mid thirties. It feels like I have more life experience than most of the people my age.

On the other hand, a friend and I were walking along a frozen river throwing snowballs just to hear them splat on the ice. Neither of us will ever grow out of that. We have no shame in taking joy in simple things. We’re responsible, mature adults where we need to be. :)

I was going to add 3) How long it takes to find something on my computer, but that might be a function of adding more stuff and never getting rid of anything. I don't think I was more organized as a kid, just there was less stuff to organize.

In terms of things like social attitudes, having kids go through high school and college age was a big "reset" button, because I kind of observed the world through their eyes and listened to their arguments. They're the ones who have to live with this ** after all.

One of the silver linings of losing parents so young is getting a genuine interest to not have that happen to you, so I've made my health a pretty important part of my life - enough so that I won't die in my 50's unless a freak accident happens. My body could be misplaced for a 30 year old, even if my face looks 40.

Yeah, I know, it's just an temporary thing, but while it lasted it really did shift my perception of my age.

It's nice to finally say "Oh I don't know if I have it in me to do that today." and have people actually accept your answer. I don't miss youth because I never experienced it. Would have killed myself long ago but I never worked up the willpower to even achieve that (also no guns or high cliffs in my country - when you start researching it you find it's surprisingly hard to reliably end a life without suffering). I'm finally finding life slightly enjoyable for once being an old fart.

I tutor a handful of teenage Gen Z kids and it's unnerving how much I can relate to them. Neither of us expect to have much of a future - for me it was my medical issues and suicidal thoughts, but for them it's the outside world they're going into. Two of my brightest students have said they don't expect to make it to 40 and if they do life will be much much harder. They're healthy, happy, mentally well - but with both political and literal climate going the way they are they can't see humanity realistically making it that far without some kind of mass war, famine, genocide, not to even mention untold horrors AI will usher in.

I used to go out every Friday night and carry on into the long hours of the night. Nowadays by the time Friday comes around I'm completely exhausted.

I've noticed it with sleep as well - these days if I stay up later than usual or I have a poor night of sleep I really feel it at work the next day.

Lastly my metabolism has changed I've never really struggled with my weight but last 2 years or so I have begun putting on weight and for the first time in my life I am starting to develop a gut. I suspect some of it was due to pandemic and being less active than usual during that time but I really started to notice it towards the end of last year.

When you're older, if you want to change buckets, there is no easy mechanism. Even going back to university is clunky. It's by no means impossible, but I do wonder if we're missing out as a society for not having a very formalized process for adults who want to change buckets later in life.

The other problem is for lengthy training periods. Giving up 10 years for education and training when you're 20 is acceptable. When you're in your 30s or 40s, why that's a substantial amount of the time you have left before society decides you are old and must retire.

30-50 is hard, primarily due to obligations you can't just walk away from. Your mortgage drains $Xk/month and the kids need braces is a bad time to try and find yourself ;)

- Oscar Wilde

“The <$5 word for an emotion> with/of <noun> is not that it <does a banal thing> but that <slightly offbeat insight>”.

1. The surprising thing about rain is not that it falls during your parade but that it never does when you have to attend someone else’s.

2. Some people read books to educate themselves, others to subjugate others.

3. I have nothing to declare but I’m too much of a genius to just “No” when asked.

How did I do?

And then that perceived age very slowly drifts up, but still with considerable lag to “real” age.

me, i've felt 9 since i was 9. it's actually kind of weird, i remember waking up on the morning of my ninth birthday, and that's where my episodic memory begins. i have earlier memories, but they're outside of time.

Why people think it is a good idea to learn how to guess age? I think, it is because we need to guess age of others to fine tune our communication skills. If it is so, then probably we apply this very guessing abilities to ourselves and get the wrong answer. Which is not very surprising: we see ourselves differently, we see ourselves from the inside, so skills learned for measuring others do not do a great job.

So there are some traits, that can be measured based on our appearance and behavior, that are used to predict age, but they looks completely different from the inside. What are they?

It also made me wonder if this might be why surveys show that in general men prefer women who are in their early 20s. Perhaps men are basing it off of how old they feel (so they are the same age as the women they are seeking) rather than how old they are. Of course, the same surveys show that in general women prefer men near their own actual age. Perhaps women base it off of how old they are rather than how old the think they are. I have no idea if the above has any basis in reality. It’s just a “I wonder…”

Of course not all men have this preference etc etc

Boomers I think invented the 40 is the new 30 and 70 is the new 50 nonsense, so of course they are confused about what age they are. It's easy to "feel 20" when you haven't taken on the appropriate responsibility.

I am an example of that. I am 41, only married 3 years, to a younger woman and we have a baby and a toddler. Just bought a house etc. Very easy to feel young with all that, but the reality is I am more like "late to the party" - this all should have happened 10-14 years ago. I'd feel "older" if my kid was going into highschool rather than pre-school right now.

I meant the former definition but they are intertwined for me so it makes sense that it came out ambiguously.

To elaborate:

As I grow up, I see in myself and others a deeper life satisfaction from being parents/grandparents at "the appropriate age." This was not obvious to me when I was 20-30.

So I don't mean for "appropriate" to suggest you owe it to anybody to reproduce, but I do believe that it's a path most likely to yield the most satisfaction for a typical person.

(As an analogy, I can say the "appropriate" weight for a 6 ft tall man like me is 170-180LBs. That doesn't mean that I am obligated to lose 20LBs, just that my life would be better if I did)

In my book it's fine to have an opinion of what can be good for others, as long as I am clear that it's ultimately their life, their choice, and I don't have all the context anyway.

So I try to be honest about the patterns I see and opinions that I have (ie, "what would I do if that were me?") while being super open to being wrong.

It's a bit like asking someone how far they have walked today. They aren't going to go back and count the steps. Instead, they will consider what landmarks they passed, and what events they encountered, try to add them all together, and compare that sum against other distances traveled that they do have explicit measurements for.

The length of a journey is most often described, not as an accounting of unit measure, but from weighing the complexity of the story one would tell about it.

This kind of narrative measurement is already present in most of our conversations about age. What age do people learn to read, to swim, or to ride a bicycle? How old is a grandparent? Are you too late in life to start a family? When should a person begin retirement? All of those narratives set a rubric of expectations: a domain and scale for age itself.

When we ask someone how old they "feel", we are intentionally vague. We are asking for the "age" that isn't defined by time. So a person constructs a new definition or of the narratives that are familiar to them, and tells us where they see themselves in that collection of narratives.

Once beautiful, stretchy creatures that probably now resemble a curmudgeon being asked to be nice to a neighbor.

Been playing soccer with my soccer mad 8 yr old. I too was that guy. Brings me back and I am so much better at technique now but boy oh boy does my hip and lower back hurt the next day!!!

"I'm still winning at pong, but it costs him little trouble and me more and more..."

"Next day" makes me think it's just DOMS.

I'm mostly pointing this out because "back pain" has scary connotations, any sort of pain gets them worried, even if it's just DOMS.

And some DOMS :)

Some quotes:

It was to be expected. It was the way of Youth, expending its splendor and excellence in wild insurgence and furious onslaught, overwhelming opposition with its own unlimited glory of strength and desire.

And Tom King patiently endured. He knew his business, and he knew Youth now that Youth was no longer his. There was nothing to do till the other lost some of his steam, was his thought,

Sandel must foam the froth of Youth away before discreet Age could dare to retaliate.

He grinned with a certain wistful pathos in his ring-battered countenance, and went on cherishing his strength with the jealousy of which only Age is capable. Sandel was Youth, and he threw his strength away with the munificent abandon of Youth.

But that was the trouble. Sandel would never become a world champion. He lacked the wisdom, and the only way for him to get it was to buy it with Youth; and when wisdom was his, Youth would have been spent in buying it.

Yet he looked upon the fight as his. It was impossible that a man so punished could rise. Only Youth could rise, and Sandel rose.

Brilliant.

If we talk about how I feel, I think I'll be forever 30; that was around the time in my life when I had the most friends, experienced the most, traveled the most and had the most fun.

But then, last year I turned 50, and the realization that I have a lot more behind me than ahead is a thought that lives rent free in my mind now.

That's a limitation you placed on yourself. At 55 I divorced a lead weight and started investigating opportunities. At 67 I am doing more and accomplishing more of my own dreams than I ever have. Don't ever underestimate yourself or your options, no matter what your age.

If we solved the problem of aging this wouldn’t be a puzzle at all and it would immediately make perfect sense. The age we feel we are would correspond roughly to the age we were fully developed (mid 20s) and the age our body would stay at without aging.

Memento Mori.

After that, he said, he felt like he had aged a ton.

The only difference is the people around me. I used to be surrounded by people I looked up to, who seemed to know everything.

But now everyone around me has become mysteriously less and less competent and they're acting like I am the established authority, which just shows how little they must know!

I'm also OK being the same fraud I've felt like since my 20's. Starting to be comfortable in my skin, I just wish it wasn't so wrinkly now that I can enjoy it.

I don't see my coworkers getting less competent, I'm just aware that I did way more stupid shit than they did and have the benefit of experience.

Younger coworkers are inevitably much better than I was at their age. How could they not be? Everything is better, and enlightenment is always just a few clicks away.

But the internet can’t teach you when to give up and try a different pattern. I have some younger colleagues who are in a hell of their own making and trying to solve it with locks. I showed them a lock-free pattern and they are a) utterly gobsmacked that this even exists b) still reluctant to abandon their approach, largely due to deadlines and sunk cost fallacy IMO. I am still working on how to even use all this wisdom; there are many barriers to doing the right thing, even when you know what it is.

I feel as we gain experience we learn that most of the things can be learned! It kinda removes a lot of magic from the world but also is weirdly freeing. I dread if there's the other end of the bell curve somewhere out there where we start to think that learning is not possible or practical anymore.

We all feel like that image of a dog in front of a computer with the subtitle “I haz no idea what I’m doing.” Some of us manage JVMs, some others are CEOs, no-one know what they’re doing, but we have a world to govern.

Some of us have countries and nuclear weapons to govern…

The wake of aging parents transitioning (death, stroke/care home) has without doubt accelerated my mental age, which in turn has changed what I'd call my horizon. When younger and prior to said events, the horizon was far away; time enough for everything/anything. Not so much anymore, much greater sense of uncertainty.

Mentally, I felt older, "an old soul". But physically, not having the energy to do anything, sleeping almost in excess, not going outside, not laughing or smiling . . . they all seem to have kept my body younger.

Midlife crisis definitely happened for me, and might actually have been my internal age adjusting to my external one.

Makes me wonder if I'll feel 47 for the rest of my life...

I felt like a 20-something until my late 30s when I had children. When my third kid came, I felt like I skipped my 30s and turned 40... right before my 40th birthday.

- younger—I had a vastly accelerated "social puberty" bc I started so much later than most folks.

- older—for the reason you mentioned.

- but now younger again—I don't feel the same pressure to have biokids, and thus not beholden to the "biological clock" that forces birthing parents to start families in their 30s. I'm 32 and just went back to school, because why not! Plus, the pressure of the white gay dating scene forces me to take better care of myself (sleep, diet, exercise), which also make me feel younger.

In my earlier teens I might have been able to sound like a young adult talking about something like politics, but if anything I was all the more early teenager in terms of uncertainty over sexuality and how people would react.

Never thought it would be advantageous to be a schlubby balding guy, but I saw someone start the same day as me get way more respect immediately despite me being pretty clearly more technically competent than him. Maybe he was schmoozing behind the scenes, I don't know.

This year I've turned 38 and for some reason this number stopped being funny. I know a lot people make a fuss about turning 40, but for me the transition happened to be 38.

Also, I have this for other people. I still think of my brother as 23, and I have to do math to figure out how old he really is.

I didn't really realize how much hair I'd lost until I saw a random photo of a crowd of people with me in it with my back to the camera. That was quite a surprise.

The curves really are very good!

30's through mid 40's was the best physical segment of my life.

I’m 35 and my body just doesn’t like the things I did with it even 10 years ago. Half of my beard is gray. I feel like this is something that should happen to other ‘older’ people.

I feel young. On average, I feel about 25 mentally and maybe 30 physically, but sometimes I feel like I am stuck as a precocious 15 year old. I have a silly sense of humor. I feel like as my numerical age increases, the more I am expected to be boring and not be myself anymore. Quite frankly, it's led me into a depression.

Sometimes, I'll be walking past a shop window and say, "Who's that old dude?"

So you're clearly doing a lot right.

I'm working on an electronics program for the local makerspace - some combination of ham radio topics, microcontrollers and sensors - trying to figure out some good projects that can pull those fields together and get the younger crowd to realize they are carrying four microwave radios and a supercomputer in their pockets and that they ought to be interested in rf electronics.

Trying to get the makerspace off of Google Docs, Photoshop, Twitter, and other proprietary software and onto FOSS hardware and software is really an uphill battle. It's so convenient.

Your comment also illustrates something I already feel, that software and systems knowledge can be lost over time and that wisdom from long experience can be valuable to younger generations as we get older.

It’s too bad FOSS is such a battle. One odd Linux desktop adoption tip I’ve found. I setup people on Ubuntu mate instead of regular Ubuntu desktop, the fast streamlined, lightweight, more old school desktop environment seems to draw them in more than MacOS and Win11 imitation desktops.

I'm thinking that if I show them the Alpine installer script, they can get a feel for (and even participate in) the system construction without going all the way down to Linux from Scratch.

If you feel worn out when you are 25, you just think that’s what being 25 feels like.

For example you see a lot of people today who grew up on the internet and are now into their 40s say "I'm too old for this, I shouldn't enjoy this as much" etc. The expectation to behave a certain way and what people really want creates a sort of mismatch.

And really it's kind of silly because when someone is 50 and says they feel like they're 35 that's probably because there's really not that much of a difference. Their brain just works all the same. The reverse is true as well I think. A lot of kids 'feel older' in their head than they are and that's probably just because they're not as different as we treat them. That we treat older and younger people like different species sometimes has always been weird to me.

I feel about 20 whenever I get on my motorcycle or around a pretty girl

I know I'm exactly my age by what time I go to bed.

I keep that in mind when I look at old people, just trapped in an old body

Anyway, the main age-related shift I've experienced is that the socio-professional aura of my skills and experience went from "holy crap, he's 20 year-old wunderkind" to just kind of table stakes. Nobody's really shocked that mid-30s me is pretty good at what I do and have a lot of experience doing it, and it hasn't been a shock in quite a while.

Sure, I'm a lot more credible now as a self-employed consultant than I was at, say, 23, but younger me was a bit of a primadonna and had a big head because I front-loaded so much of the career development and climbing the ladder, at least as engineering per se goes. In these settings, lots of older people resent you (for reasons I find very justifiable in hindsight), but plenty of people pat you on the head along the way, too. I'm not praise-dependent in any extraordinary way, I'd like to think, but anyone can be habituated to something pleasant and can it be a bit of a jolt to feel the tide going out. In addition to undergoing the normal humbling that comes with getting older and realising you're not as brilliant as everyone around you leads you to believe, people also stop telling you you're brilliant to begin with. :-)