From any hopes for a bounceback in career, a healthy love life, a more active friend circle .etc
For me it’s when you start entering your 50s. You start to think more and more in how you’ll end up being as you progress in age. Thoughts of the idea of how to maintain your health and how so much now is going to affect you set in. Thoughts on potentially retiring start setting in.
Things like getting friends and dates won’t be impossible, but they’ll be incredibly hard to get. Even if you have either, they most likely will not turn out how you expect to be whereas when you were younger, you had the time and energy on your side.
Careers and where you’ll work will just dry up where you could likely be stuck just doing retail work for the remainder of your life or any minimum wage position.
Very few people make a difference in their 50s or already had their life planned out to where they’re fine in their 50s. But a lot of the time, people really don’t.
The fuck? Do you know anyone 50 years old? I’m in my mid 50s and work full time, still have two kids at home, go to yoga, lift weights, hang out with family or friends, go to shows, walk and play Pokemon go, grow a food garden, basically just live a pretty good life.
In terms of giving up, I don’t think it’s an age, more to do with conditions, a spouse or child dying or a chronic illness. So for some people it happens young and for others never. I did aerobics with an 80 year old lady and at the end of class she put on roller skates to go skate around the bay on the long sidewalk because she was retired so she could basically just play all day.
ETA: I think being able to be satisfied and happy is a life skill. Some people can’t, they just never learned to. What is all that career progression and running around for, if you can’t be happy with the life you build?