I totally understand what you feel!
I will turn 31 shortly and most of my friends are already buying house, preparing their wedding or choosing which room to use for their baby.
I fear the day they’ll start asking me routinely when I am getting married or having a baby…

@ Luke Maciak:
Reading comprehension – please get it.
I meant I would become older than you by using time travel. I would go back in time and live through ages and then win by becoming older than you. But unless time travel is possible I will be forever and ever younger than you.
-1 internet for not getting subtle hitchhikers guide reference.

@ Liudvikas:

Wait… How do you become younger via time travel? I mean, you can’t move your date of birth… Do you mean travel back and just live through the ages up until present, highlander style?

@ Gothmog:

Thank you!

@ Tormod Haugen:

Ah, yes…. Young people. When I was their age we carried our data on 5¹/₂” floppy disks… In the snow… Up the hill, both ways.

@ nitro2k01:

Yes! Thank you. It’s actually quite interesting that in a few hundred years we will all be approximately the same relative age. :)

@ Iam30too:

Welcome. I hope you will stick around.

Oh, and we are not dying, remember? We all talked about it few posts earlier and we are living forever. Screw death and aging. We will fix it with science.

@ Nathaniel Mikkola:

Well, I think part of it is that old people had their share of fuck-ups and mistakes, so they could technically advise younger people, and prevent them from making the same mistakes… But, that is changing. This still held true last two or three decades but nowadays, elderly people are becoming more and more hopeless. We have a growing population of elderly people who are either completely disconnected from the net, or have it, but don’t know what to do with it. They are frightened by progress, and scared of the social changes facilitated by technology. And they vote. :(

This is my greatest fear actually – becoming one of these people. If I become a senile old man who needs his grandson to come over to set up and configure some technological thingymabob, then you guys have my permission to perform a mercy killing. :P

@ MrJones:

Well, fuck…. I think I did this thing backwards. I spent my teenage years, and my twenties trying to pass as a normal, well adjusted person and just fit in (trying is the operative word here). Only now I’m slowly starting to realize that I’m much happier when I can just be myself, and don’t give a fuck about what the world thinks. :P

@ Matt`:

Turning twenty is actually pretty sweet. Here in US, it means you only have a year to go until you are finally considered a fully fledged person and allowed to get drunk legally. :)

Don’t sweat about this stuff too much yet – you will have more than enough time to do the sorting out after you graduate. Also, make sure you do some of that college stuff with the drinking, partying and being generally irresponsible. That’s the time for it. I wish I did more of that kind of stuff back then – but you know, social anxiety, shyness, etc… Plus I had this idea that college is SRS BUSINESS. So now I have sort of a deficit of crazy college party stories – especially ones that do not involve like twenty sided dice, or all night semi-sober coding marathons during finals week. So yeah, live a little. You can have some fun, and still maintain high grade point average. :)

@ Jason:

Well, right now I’m sort of obscenely aware of the 30. But hopefully it will pass. Few years ago if you asked me my age I would be like “twenty… si… even… I mean eight…” :P

@ jambarama:

Hey, enjoy your last year as a 20-something. :)

@ mcai8sh4:

Oh shit… Now I am going to obsess over crossing the Gigasecond threshold. Thanks a lot man. lol

@ Matthew Weathers:

Thanks. That actually could be why they do this. I never really wondered how they break these age groups down.

@ Rob:

Ok, this is not making me feel better at all. Science needs to hurry the fuck up with that immortality shit. I don’t want knee surgeries. :( Wait, is that mandatory? Can I get out of it on the grounds of being conscientious objector or something?

Welcome! I turned 30 last year and will be 31 in a little less than a month. From what I’ve heard and seen that’s when the shit really hits the fan. My buddy turned 31 back in January and just had knee surgery this week. I’ve heard similar stories from other people 31+…

Regarding those online demographic questions: I’ve seen a few that are grouped like “24-33,” “34-43,” “44-53,” etc., and I’ve wondered if they did that on purpose, to ease the choice for those of use whose odometer just turned over another 1’s digit. Afterall, if you’ve just turned 34, it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal to answer the “34-43” question. (“At least I’m still at the bottom end!” you think).

Anyway, Happy Birthday!

Welcome to the 30s! It was a shock for me too, I’m only 31 now and have got used to it.

I’d say the good thing about being a geek (and male, I suppose), is we reach our peak maturity around the early twentys. No-one expects us to grow up any more. I suppose in a sense, we may get a little more mature. I found myself in a pub discussing Vacuum cleaners the other day – mine was the most powerful, so whilst it’s a subject I would never have thought I’d be in discussions about, it still boiled down to whos was best.

I will only feel old in October then I’ve lived for 1 billion seconds – since I can’t really visualise 1 billion, that to me is an obscene age!

I’m just one year behind you :(

*Sigh* I hear ya… I’m… uh, what, 32? (Honestly, after the 100th time you’re asked your age, start to reply “20-…” and then realize you need to up the tens place, you stop caring. :p )

Matt: My advice is to stop worrying so much about the whole “big picture life-sorting” thing and just concentrate on doing well on each thing you take on. If you’re currently taking on education and doing well, it sounds like you’ll be fine, as long as you try to do equally well (or better) at whatever you take on next (be it job, relationship, whatever).@ Jason:

Turned 20 in February, not being a teenager any more seemed like a sort of a ‘big thing’… except not really. Now have all those “20-something” years to look forward to I guess. Any advice, having just finished doing that thing?

General note to self/plan for the decade: try to be further along with the whole “sorting own life out” thing in 10 years time. Not doing so wonderfully with that at the moment, with the exception of doing reasonably well with academia.

At the age of twenty, we don’t care what the world thinks of us; at thirty, we worry about what it is thinking of us; at forty, we discover that it wasn’t thinking of us at all.