Ruminations on middle age

“Were you really born in 1971?” the millennial at the Sky Lounge asked, holding up my driver’s license to my face.  I suppose that my quest to “look” 35 until I got to 50 appeared to be working, at least on that morning a few weeks ago at LAX.

Tim Krieder’s Op-Ed in the New York Times on March 3, 2018 made me think about what separates middle age from youth. He noted that young people have “….a bottomless reservoir of moral rage that you burned out long ago”, and that “They haven’t faced life’s heartless compromises…” and “…glumly watched themselves do everything they’ve ever disapproved of.”

It made me think of some things I thought I’d never do, including:

-          Staying in on any Thursday, Friday or Saturday night.

-          Living in a gated community.

-          Paying full price for a brand new car (or paying full price for anything, really).

-          Getting married (it turns out I was wrong, being married is great!) 

I knew that I had become middle-aged when:

-          I regularly have to spend so much time and effort just to recognize myself in the mirror.

-          We have a tax return that is over a hundred pages long.

-          And own an amount of stuff that necessitates umbrella insurance.

-          My top choice is to be at home on the sofa, in my gated community, with my spouse, on a Saturday night.

“Young people have only just learned that the world is an unfair hierarchy of cruelty and greed, and it still shocks and outrages them”.  At the start of my career, I thought that we Gen Xers would be the ones to achieve equality in the work force, but a McKinsey study states that at current rates, gender parity is still 100 years away.  “Power is like money, entirely dependent upon belief.  Most of the power of institutions lies in the faith people have in them”.

Many things in life aren’t fair:  brown nosers are going to get promoted before you; rich, old men can have young, beautiful spouses, but not vice versa; most religions and some cultures subjugate women and reinforce the patriarchy. To me, these unwritten rules are like gravity, they have always existed and will live on well past us, whether we believe in them or not. Middle age is a constant battle between optimism and cynicism, at least in my household.  

I recently heard Maria Shiver speak at a conference, and read her book “I’ve been Thinking…”  It was interesting to see that someone of her wealth, fame and beauty still experienced being fired, getting divorced, and realizing that some of the tenets she grew up with were outmoded ways of thinking that have been perpetuated through the centuries.  Her book had some great advice, including:

-          Stop wishing you were a different age. Love the age you are.

-          Don’t assume anyone is better than you or you are better than anyone else.

-          Have faith that your best days are ahead of you, that your next frontier will be the most fulfilling time of your life.

And with that, I’m off to work on my tax return.  But first, coffee!!