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PaperclipPerfector  23d ago (text post)   1457 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for September 23, 2026

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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Why are old people so obsessed with logistics? I'm definitely not the only person to notice this, I think it has come up in those Geico ads about "teaching people not to become their parents." I swear that every time I hang out with a parent or elder relative, they obsessively ask me about my car, my home, how I get from place to place, upkeep, roads, fuel, laundry, diets, etc. It's like the most important thing in the world is the random bullshit you have to deal with every day between the actual important things.

Also, the most old-person coded thing today is to tell someone how to get somewhere by referring to roads and landmarks instead of just saying the address amd assuming they'll use an app.

Im gonna blow your mind.

These kinds of things — they are, in a sense, the important stuff. Caring for yourself and your family, and figuring out how best to go about it is how real life works. Real life is jobs, chores, family and home care and so on. The ordinary stuff is where you care for yourself and the people and community you actually care about. Fake shit is the global type issues like international politics where you have no control over, culture war stuff that’s happening far away from you, AI stuff being done in companies you can’t control. They’re interesting to talk about, sure, but you have no control over it, and obsessing about it is not going to make your actual life better.

Im a woman, and a lot of older female conversations are about cooking, cleaning, husbands, and child care. Why? Because this is what adult female humans do with their time. Adult male humans deal with mechanical issues of the home and car, the yard, kids’ sports, and careers. And so you talk to your older relatives, you’ll get that, weather, and sports. Weather and sports are fun ways to connect to people around you, and the rest is real life.

To be honest, especially as I get older, I find the people who obsess over politics, culture war, fandoms, and so on to be the boring ones. They obsess over things like that mostly because their real life isn’t all that great. They don’t care about normal everyday life because they have nothing in their real life worth caring about. They don’t care about cooking because they live alone in an apartment and have no boyfriend or girlfriend to cook for. They don’t care about their career because they work in basement level restaurant or retail and thus they don’t have a career to care about. Their car is a junker, why worry about upkeep? In order to have time to obsess about politics and culture and viral trends and fandoms, you have to have the kind of life only a Redditor could love. They don’t have anything going on in their real life, so they can sit around and argue about non-real-life stuff.

For me it's the weather that's they won't stop talking about. It feels like they're trying to control the narrative and manipulate you- they get to say how the weather is, you tacitly agree because who cares about the weather, so they can feel like they have the upper hand when they want to move onto more important matters

I am a million percent certain it's not that deep.

You talk about the weather because either you have nothing better to talk about, one of you genuinely does care about the weather (genuinely nice or bad weather has a real impact if one's hobbies or chores involve touching grass), or, possibly, predicting the weather can be fun.

It sounds like you are complaining that the old people in your life are caring too much about your basic material well-being? Steak too juicy, lobster too buttery stuff.

It's not a steak too juicy situation when they consistently ignore your feelings, how you're actually doing as a person, the actually important things in life, to exclusively ask about 'dry' bullshit.

A lot of people don't do emotional and feelings talks, important as they are. It can be due to a lack of cultivated social skills, generational differences, or just apathy. But asking about the 'dry' bullshit is easier and within the basic parental instincts and ability of most people, much of my own elder family included. I don't think it's fair to criticize old people for not doing helpful things that are outside of their ability. They do what they can, and I'm glad for their effort even if it falls short compared to other old people.

Basically, some people are incapable of higher-level talks, and no amount of education or effort is going to change that, especially in old age.

It’s doubly aggravating when you have elderly bad parents. They don’t give one solitary shit about you having been molested as kid, but God help you if your tire pressure is 2 psi off.

Not to say that being molested isn't traumatic, but elderly don't know how to help process the abuse if they didn't help when they were younger and more mentally capable. It's a past event which can't be un-done, and bringing it up can retraumatize people and stress out the old people who mostly want to believe everything is fine and dandy out of mental self-preservation before they die.

Tire pressure is a quick easy fix though, and within some old guy's expertise. He can't help with the abuse though, that's probably closer to a car transmission full rebuild.

Yes, but I know what the old bastard’s cum smells like, so it’s a little tough to sit there and let him act like he’s my father, and not a human animal. And my mother knew back then and didn’t do jack shit, and she keeps trying to get me to interact with him and I hate her for it. I know she’s probably just getting up in the years and isn’t all there, but how am I supposed to get over that?

Damn, didn't know you were talking about the abuser themselves. Some things just can't be forgiven IMO and there's no point maintaining the relationship especially with the enablers too. Thought the abuse was from an unrelated party kind of situation, not that it would make it much better.

Oof, is that ever painfully accurate.

It's like the most important thing in the world is the random bullshit you have to deal with every day between the actual important things.

Do you have servants to handle the random bullshit for you? Are you naturally perfectly adept at handling the random bullshit? If no to both, then conversing about how to handle it seems like a good way to review your random-bullshit-handling.

About fifteen or so years ago, on my trips back stateside, my own father, who died at ninety in 2020, would always ask on the drive home from the airport: "What's the price of a gallon of gas in Japan?"

Very little, if anything, did he ask about my family, my job, my free time, what my opinions were on anything. It annoyed me then. It annoyed me even more when he'd ask the same question a day or so later. "George, what's the price of a gallon ah gas in Japan?" As if unlocking this truth (which, even then, would have been trivially easy to search for online) would also unlock some gulf between us, throw open a door, pull back the veil of Isis. Or, the uncomfortable possibility: maybe he just never had much to say to me.

The answer to the gas question, if I could remember, was always prefaced by a didactic explanation on my part of liters and gallons and trying to sort out the conversion. It made me seem pedantic and foolish, and he'd get quiet again.

And now as I sit here in our living room staring at the light patterning the floor through the blinds I would give quite a bit to have him asking me that question, or any question.

Man this made me really sad. I need to spend more time with my dad.

my car, ... how I get from place to place, upkeep, roads, fuel,

This is the ideal conversation with any older guy who is worth talking to. It's great to shoot the shit about which back highways they've traveled, what conditions were like, what car they were driving, good view points along the way, noteworthy diners or gas stations, cool small towns, etc. This applies double to anyone who has done significant off-road driving. I'd much rather talk about all that than be subjected to the latest talking points from CNN/Fox/FB.

Now that I think about it, I'm starting to get into a new hobby/recreational activity that is skewing pretty pretty old (canoe camping) and the entire thing is a logistics puzzle for old people. You have to balance preparedness and comfort with ease of travel (more gear means more painful portages). It's like life is too simple and you need to find a way to make a challenge out of it.

Maybe they just try to be part of your life, and that's the way they know how to connect?

Physical logistics used to be a bigger part of the day to day. My dad took pride in knowing all the alley/residential shortcuts to avoid traffic on his way home when the bridges were stuck. People took pride in maintaining a house and car. A person's car was an extension of their competence, a reflection of their personality, etc. Handling all the small bullshit in the world was life.

Downstream of this:

  1. It works as a proxy for really asking how things are going without prying, as @birb_cromble notes. In a guess culture, you can't just be like, "HELLO FELLOW AUTIST. ARE YOU DEPRESSED?", but you can triangulate it by asking about their life and reading between the lines. They haven't done anything with friends in two months. They aren't cooking, aren't eating anything interesting. They haven't fixed those problems with their car in half a year. Etc.
  2. It's signaling, because conversation is not about exchanging information. When ye olde person says "Oh sure. Just head down Lakeview, take a left at the legion and you're there", it's kind of giving directions, but it's also boasting that they are a competent person who has experience navigating the area and plenty of knowledge to share.
  3. It leads to deeper conversation. "How's your car runnin?", "Not bad but I picked up a flat when I was coming down the old forest road on Mount Pointytops." "oh whatcha doin up Pointytops way?", "me n' Sophie went camping. You know Sophie from dance class", "just the two of you?". or whatever.

and like, a lot of that is still relevant. I think there's just a lot more to life that people who frequent this forum care about and we (projecting) maybe wish people wanted to talk about. Like, I would love to get into conversations (and sometimes I do try) about people's online lives, their philosophical musings, etc, but most people just aren't that thoughtful or online. e.g. Most people's thoughts on AI are like "boo datacenters", "hate AI slop", and aren't keeping up with it. Most people aren't in niche internet subcultures. Most people haven't read Heidegger.

My aunt spent years insisting that her hand drawn maps were superior to mapquest and foisted them on you at the drop of a hat. I wish I'd kept one or two.

People took pride in maintaining a house and car.

Maintaining a car used to also be more accessible (e.g. carburetors you could tune with hand tools vs fuel injection that's computer-controlled), more necessary (design changes have increased the average car's expected lifespan from like 100k to 200k miles, so these days why try to eke out an extra 5% when it'll be so old you'll want a new model anyway?), and more valuable (average mileage and horsepower have gone up enough that it's no longer as big a deal if they decay a bit from more lax maintenance) ... but if you learned to be a "car guy" back when it was practical, you're probably still going to be one today now that it's just fun. I'm not quite old enough to be in that category, but I sympathize; I still upgrade computers component-by-component, like I learned to when options were more limited and I was more poor, even though "just buy a new one" would make as much sense these days.

I don't know why "maintaining a house" has declined in status, though. Construction quality hasn't gone up a lot, and land prices have, so I'd think that maintaining the quality of your home should be a bigger deal now that the cost of doing so is a smaller fraction of the home's price.

I think it's more that people are older when they get their first house. You aren't allowed to do much work in rental places.

So DIY home repair skills are completely useless for your early life and by the time you need them you're financially established enough that you can just hire someone.

Also illegal immigration has collapsed the price of minor handyman tasks, so it's not a huge deal to hire someone.

General male (coded) competence doing/fixing has become a long lost art in some quarters. My dad built a motorcycle out of a bicycle in his teens. He could pretty much repair or at least find the problem and learn to repair anything--or so it seemed to me at the time. Computers would of course be his undoing and late in life he'd end up having ordered a bunch of stuff online, or acquiring viruses, and so on and so forth. But in his day he was the definition of a competent male, taught of course by the model of his own father. I am far less handy but I'm surprised by the phenomena you describe here, particularly noticeable in Japan, where sometimes it seems general maintenance and repair goes the way of just hire someone to replace anything that one has allowed entropy to destroy.

That's just small talk showing they care about you?

To what age range are you referring when you say "old person"?

60+

They don't have "cool stuff" to do. As you slow down and accumulate responsibilities as you age, your time for hobbies shrinks.

They care about you. Asking about all those little things is their way to make sure that you're healthy and safe. If you're not eating right and your car's on the fritz, the "important" things get a lot harder.

Random bullshit you have to deal with every day is one of the important things.

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