Middle-aged wisdom and youthful delusion – thoughts on turning 43

The other day I had a disorienting experience.

I opened up Spotify and saw that the Smashing Pumpkins had just released a 30th anniversary edition of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.

That’s one of the albums I was depressed to back when I was a teenager in the Arizona desert.

I was angsty as hell for several years, and it seemed like Billy Corgan was expressing my inner feelings much better than I ever could.

Now, I’m pretty sure that his lyrics are nonsense, but… well, I guess you had to be there.

The 90s were a bit different.

Anyway, looking at the 30th anniversary edition of one of my favorite albums from my teenage years, I was, as I said, a bit confused. “That can’t be right”, I thought. “Because that would mean that I was a teenager 30 years ago.”

Quickly, I did a bit of mental math, subtracting the number 30 from my current age.

“Oh shit. I was a teenager 30 years ago.”

White picket fences and naive delusions

Well, almost.

In a few days I’m turning 43.

So precisely thirty years ago, I was twelve, right on the cusp of my teen years.

Either way, it would seem that I’ve made it to middle age without figuring out what life is supposed to be like as a man in the 21st century.

When I was young, there was life advice coming at me from all angles: mostly, it involved getting good grades so I could someday have a steady 9 to 5 job and a house in the suburbs.

Just stay out of trouble, and everything else would work itself out along the way.

At this point, all that seems naive to the point of delusion. Nobody except my parents has ever cared much about my grades, I’ve never had a “steady 9 to 5 job” or a house in the suburbs. And despite making a great effort at staying out of trouble, the future appears to be just as uncertain as ever.

It does not, in fact, seem like my problems are going to spontaneously work themselves out. Adult life involves a lot more uncertainty and improvisation than I was once led to believe.

So what to do with middle age?

I don’t know how long you’ve been following, but I’ve gone through a few versions of my personality in the 15 or so years I’ve been writing articles here.

First, I was the sarcastic English teacher, satirizing life at the language school and Americans in Spain.

Mr Chorizo was my profane, cholesterol-obsessed alter ego who said what real-life Daniel never would.

Eventually I quit formal teaching, and went through several years of focusing on business – the hard-working Mr Daniel wrote all those books and made some courses, and spent quite a bit of time “crushing his enemies” – mainly, other authors in the education space on Amazon.

As a result of a few difficult breakups, Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo developed into a cynical thirty-something guy who was mostly interested in online dating and spending half of his days in bars.

After a few years of that, he (or perhaps we could say “I”) met Morena, who somehow saw through the gruff and often-tipsy exterior and decided I was husband material.

So we got married, I stopped drinking, we bought a house, and now, I’m just some middle-aged guy, walking around Barcelona in baggy jeans and a hoodie, and trying to stay caffeinated.

My hobbies include reading history books, doing Brazilian jiu jitsu, and being insufferably deep. Also, I’ve been practicing stoicism – something that’s rather difficult in a world in which cuteness and self-indulgence are the most celebrated virtues.

Friendly advice from H.D. Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau, in the classic Walden, wrote “I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors”.

He was about 30 when he wrote that, in the late 1840s, and it often seems like adult advice hasn’t improved much since then.

The earnest advice I do tend to find – for men at least – is the usual insipid twaddle we’ve been hearing for a while now: learn how to talk about your feelings, don’t be afraid to cry in public, and above all, develop a good skin-care routine.

Maybe that’s what you have to say if you’re cashing checks from the mainstream media, but I’m just a small-time podcaster working in my living room in Barcelona. I’m not under the thumb of some editor or publisher.

Popular culture tells men of a certain age to buy a new car, or take some pills, or get into therapy. Not coincidentally, a lot of “popular culture” is sponsored by companies that would benefit from you doing all that.

I think you should try some fasting, and meditation, and start a gratitude practice. But those things are all hard to monetize, so they don’t have large marketing budgets behind them.

Some wisdom from Modern Wisdom

On the other hand, Chris Williamson of the Modern Wisdom podcast has pointed out that all the good advice you need is right in front of you – it’s just so obvious that you’re ignoring it.

It’s the type of “OK boomer” stuff that you’ve heard a million times.

Work hard, be on time, tell the truth, love your wife, take care of your health. That’s all that matters.

Most of it is the stuff your parents told you, when you were an angsty teenager, and you just blew them off because you knew better – probably, you were trying to get your life wisdom from song lyrics.

To illustrate, something like the following happens to me at the gym all the time: I’m doing jiu jitsu, so I’m about to fight some 20-year-old, and I notice he’s not wearing a mouthguard.

“You should get a mouthguard,” I say. “New teeth are expensive.”

“Yeah, I know…”

I recognize the look the young guys give me. It’s the same look I used to give my dad, when he would make his “new teeth are expensive” speech. I ignored him then, and I went on not believing him right up until I had my first painful and expensive dental surgery, at age 40.

The advice was there. It just seemed too mundane.

Life begins at 40 (or so they say)

Carl Jung thought that “Life really does begin at 40. Up until then”, he said, “you’re just doing research.”

That sounds about as plausible as anything else I’ve heard about mid-life.

It sure seems like I’ve figured a few things out in all this time. For one, I’ve decided that a lot of what people take so seriously is not worth caring about at all.

These days, it seems like all I do is work, eat protein, go to the gym, read, hang out with my wife, and then go to bed early so I can do the same thing the next day.

I know it sounds boring, but it’s exactly what I want to be doing.

My desire for novelty seems to have gotten lost somewhere along the way. And more than that, I really don’t care if it “sounds boring” – it’s what I want to do, and that’s enough.

I’m no longer worried about seeming fun, or “cool”, or interesting. I just don’t care. And it’s liberating.

So while I once would have written off “life begins at 40” as a coping mechanism for people facing old age, from where I’m sitting now it seems more realistic.

Because most of the so-called “fun” I had in my 20s and 30s was actually not all that fun.

The house parties, and the hangovers, and the endless string of Tinder dates… I don’t miss that stuff at all.

How to be a successful lobster

Stand up straight. Clean your room. Be useful.

This Jordan Peterson-style advice seems trivial to a lot of people.

Then again, next time you’re out in public, look around for a minute. “A lot of people” look like they’re walking train-wrecks who desperately need to get their lives in order.

Good habits will eventually become your destiny, and so will bad ones. So it’s not like skipping the gym or having ice cream for dinner is going to kill you today. It’s the repetition that’ll get you.

Back when I was drinking, I’d often walk to the supermarket and see the guys hanging out on the sidewalk, holding big cans of beer at 11 AM. Despite my middle-class lifestyle, I was fully aware that I was walking on a razor’s edge – the difference between me and those guys was not some massive chasm.

It was probably about a decade of repeating the same stupid habits every day. Maybe less.

That’s what made me quit, actually. I just projected my negative tendencies forward in time, and didn’t like what I saw. Think Ebenezer Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Future.

It’s a valuable exercise, and I recommend you try it. Be honest. Your future self will thank you.

Tips for an optimistic middle age

All this to say, I’m cautiously optimistic about middle age.

As long as I stay healthy, and keep up my current habits, I should have plenty of good years left. (Knock on wood.)

In fact, most days, I feel like I’ve won the existential lottery. There are a lot of people in the world, and if you think about it, you could have been born as any one of them.

Here’s a quote from Socrates: “If all our misfortunes were laid in one common heap from which everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be content to take their own and depart.”

So I’m grateful for everything – even my age.

After all, a lot of people don’t make it to 40.

When I read about history, it’s just shocking: the number of guys basically like me who died in wars, or who got what we now consider to be a “preventable” disease and never made it to middle age.

It wasn’t even that long ago. Half of Europe’s brightest and best in the first decades of the 20th century died face-down in the mud, many before the invention of antibiotics.

Closer to home, plenty of people I went to school with didn’t have long lives. They barely even had short lives.

Thoreau – who was not a popular writer during his own time – died at 44.

Taking a look at the common heap of the world’s misfortunes, like Socrates suggests, I’m more than happy to take my own, and depart.

(Socrates, incidentally, lived a long life, but he was put on trial and executed in 399 BC for impiety and “corrupting the youth”. He had some ideas that went against those favored by the Athenian political establishment, and they made him drink hemlock. An early victim of cancel culture, in other words.)

Time: it’s happening to all of us

When I was a teenager, I thought people in their mid-20s were old. I’d look around at guys my (current) age and think “that’s never going to happen to me!”

I really thought that: somehow, I was going to be immune to the process of aging.

And yet, here we are. It happened to me – despite my doubts. Actually, it’s a lot better than I imagined.

If I could give teenage me some advice, I’d say… nothing. Because teenage me would never have listened to some guy in his 40s. That’s the whole thing about being a teenager.

Or at least, that’s what I remember. Like I said, it was 30 years ago.

Yours,

Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.

P..S. I have trolls now. This is actually a mark of success for bloggers, and I’m grateful for them, too. Probably someone out there is having a fit because I mentioned Jordan Peterson and his lobsters. Someone else will drop into the comments to point out that Carl Jung cheated on his wife, and that my musical tastes are disgustingly “normie”. Thanks for the feedback, guys! (Also, I don’t engage with trolls…)

P.P.S. At this point, I don’t even know how popular the Smashing Pumpkins were. They sure seemed important among my middle-school group of misfits and dorks back in the mid-90s. Now, they’re just a gaggle of funny-looking old people, like everyone else from back then… So it goes. Anyway, if you want to know more about 90s music, check out my article about 60 Songs that Explain the 90s.

P.P.S. If you like “insufferably deep Daniel” he shows up around here sometimes. For example, my article about the Stoic Virtues is pretty good. Also, part II of that, which is about the practice of discipline. There’s also seeking transcendence, and my report on sobriety and introvert hell in Dublin (long story – best to read it).