Nobody tells you this when you are young.
They tell you to wear your seatbelt. They tell you to eat your vegetables. They tell you to get enough sleep and drink enough water and for heaven’s sake stop doing that thing you are doing because you are going to regret it someday.
What they do not tell you is how someday works.
Someday does not arrive like a bill in the mail with a due date printed on it. It does not announce itself. It seeps in. Slowly at first. Then all at once. The way water gets into an old house. You do not notice it until the wall starts to bow.
I have a body that has been through things. Most people my age do. You accumulate a history the same way you accumulate everything else in life — a little at a time, mostly without thinking about it, mostly because you were busy living and the consequences felt distant and theoretical.
They are not distant anymore.
Here is what nobody prepares you for. The older you get, the less capacity your body and your mind have to absorb the daily load. The reserve tank gets smaller. What used to bounce off you now lands. What used to land now lingers. What used to linger now sits down and makes itself at home.
And here is the part that took me a long time to understand.
The speed of it is not random. It is not just age. Age is the condition. Stress is the accelerant.
High stress does not just make you feel bad in the moment. It burns through your reserve. It takes what your body was going to use for repair and maintenance and redirects it to survival. Day after day of that and the repair work falls behind. The gaps widen. The things that were manageable become harder to manage. The things that were harder become the daily reality.
I know this not from reading about it. I know it from living inside it.
A disability that was workable at forty is a different animal at seventy. Not because the disability changed. Because the system running it has less bandwidth. Less cushion. Less room to compensate. The body that used to route around the problem now has to negotiate with it.
And stress — real stress, daily grinding stress, the kind that does not turn off at night — that is the thing that speeds the whole process up. Not a little. Significantly.
This is not a complaint. I want to be clear about that. I am not looking for sympathy and I am not asking anyone to feel sorry for me or for themselves. That is not what this is.
This is what I wish someone had told me plainly when I was young enough to do something with the information.
Protect your reserve. Guard it the way you guard your money, your time, your relationships. Because the body keeps the score and it keeps it accurately and it does not forgive debt the way people sometimes do. Every sustained period of high stress you run through without recovery is a withdrawal from an account that gets harder to replenish the older you get.
The people who age well — and I have watched enough of them to know what it looks like — are not necessarily the ones who had the easiest lives. Some of them had hard lives. What they had was a discipline around recovery. They knew when to put the load down. They knew how to be still. They did not treat rest as laziness. They treated it as maintenance.
I am still learning that. At my age. Still learning it.
The curse of getting old is not the aches. It is not the slowing down. It is the clarity. You can finally see exactly what you were doing to yourself all those years and exactly what it cost you and you cannot go back and make different choices. You can only make better ones starting now.
That is the bill. It comes due for everyone.
The only variable is how much is on it when it arrives.
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“Intelligent People Assume Nothing” | Michael S Faust Sr. | Substack
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