My experience has been quite different. The time when I was most active and productive in my career was the time when I was really searching for and trying to create meaning. It was also the time when I had the most friends -- as well as opponents (I was quite outspoken). Now, as an old man I am comfortable with the meaning I have created.

Just curious. How many times have you needed friends to help bury a body?

Meaning is overrated.

Being older is pretty good when you consider the alternative, which is to be dead. As Betty Davis said "Old age is not for sissys". As I get older, I realize life is getting shorter. I have seen many people I cared about die. Death ceases to be a distant acquaintance & becomes a constant companion. But death needs no help from us. It takes care of itself.

Things that seemed important once lose their interest. I find myself more efficient in harboring & using my time & energy. The things I thought gave meaning, I realize, were just ego. Self importance is an illusion, a luxury I choose not to afford

Ah, the meaning of life. Loved Monty Python's movie.

For me, just being alive and breathing, just enjoying pleasures and comfort seems a bit shallow and pointless. As I got older I lost interest in cheap thrills and selfish interests. I want my life to matter in the grander scheme of things and I want a reason to keep up the struggle of day to day life.

I do not need religion to have a meaning or purpose for my life. I look to my values and find meaning and purpose there.

The only meaning to life is that which we give it or which we construct from it.

As I read this, I realized that I still search for meaning. I'm happiest when I think I'm having a positive effect on someone else's life, but the depression comes back when it becomes obvious that it was all an illusion.

I'm with ya!
I don't worry about "meaning".
Personally, the whole "quest for meaning" makes me laugh. I think it's silly.
Strikes me as not much more than a marketing ploy. Or self-important indulgence.
Another reason I also don't have any use for philosophy.

Getting old is a mixed bag. On the one hand, you get over yourself (hopefully) and mature in other ways (hopefully) and have better perspective, are less needy, and so forth.

On the other hand you come to this point in life with a certain fund of sorrows which can be oppressively cumulative. And how one deals with that is pretty critical. Sometimes I feel like I'm on a knife edge between being a bitter old man and making peace with existence. Between a cheerful laughing at absurdity and just Vanting To Be Alone.

I think articles like this are trying to talk us into the upside of getting old so we won't focus so much on oversized prostates and ear and nose hair and arthritis and lack of resilience and endurance and the fact that everyone we know / knew / care / cared about are dropping around us like flies, etc. And that's fine. Whatever you gotta do to get through your day.

So I agree with you, the clickbait title is over-generalizing, but "this" age can be a time of resetting expectations and priorities in healthy ways.