Reaching half-time

Thoughts on turning forty

I am not a fan of birthdays; or, my own birthdays, at least. It’s a day where you are the centre of attention, something I’ve always been personally uncomfortable with; my rather introverted self finds this somewhat trying.

I dislike big birthdays even more. The focus is on you to a greater extent than a standard birthday, but also, milestone birthdays find a way of forcing introspection upon you. Camus tells us that it is only when we face the reality of our situation that our fate becomes tragic, and big birthdays will do that. They make us take stock, evaluate where we are, what we’ve achieved, what we want.

A couple of months ago, I turned forty. There are a million articles out there which tell us all the things we should do before we hit this landmark age. I’m sure these pieces are meant as a call-to-arms, a journalistic carpe diem, but what happens if we enter our fifth decade without doing these things? I’ve never seen the Northern Lights. I never managed to get my book published. I haven’t run a marathon. Have I failed?

And if turning thirty felt like the point I was forced to stop thinking of myself as young, forty feels heavy in a different way; a feeling that it’s half-time, and in the second half I’ll be kicking uphill and into the wind. I can feel myself slowing down, taking longer to recover from exertions. This week I go for my first NHS Health Check for the over-40s. Every year, putting my socks on becomes just a little bit more of a challenge. Is this what I have to look forward to? Has the fun half been and gone?

Mind you, the first half was fun. If being forty places you between two poles - the young think you’re old and the old tell you you’re young - then being born in 1982 is also a strange no man’s land. Technically I’m a millennial, but at the very oldest end of that group, and I feel much more kinship with Generation X. I’m old enough to remember growing up without an internet connection or hundreds of television channels, I never had to deal with AS Levels, and although tuition fees had been introduced by the time I got to university, they were low by comparison to today. My cohort entered the workforce before the credit crunch and getting on the housing ladder was not an impossible dream for us.

I’m sure every generation feels this to an extent, but we find the politics of our successors to be confusing; whilst we believed in carrying forward and building upon the liberalising ideals of previous generations, millennials and Generation Z now without realising it press for regression, a repudiation of previous progressive beliefs, albeit swaddled in social justice verbosity. We are the last generation of big drinkers; we had alternative scenes and music subcultures, which we enjoyed in dingy clubs with sticky floors. It was great.

Still though, turning forty does feel like the clock has begun to tick down instead of upwards for the first time. Sigmund Freud believed that midlife crises were driven by thoughts turning to the fear of impending death, and whether that’s the case or not (I am rather Freudskeptical in general), hitting the big 4-0 does tend to bring on thoughts about what it will be like when we’re no longer here, whether we will leave a legacy.

In a particularly poignant episode of the beautiful black comedy-drama BoJack Horseman, we learn that when one of the characters has a bad day, she copes by imagining a future where one of her distant descendants talks about her as part of a school presentation. Psychologist Erik Erikson believed that 40 is when people enter his seventh stage of psychosocial development, where we start to think about making our mark on the world and contributing to future generations. There is a temptation, at this stage of life, to begin to wonder whether you’ll be remembered, whether you can achieve something which will hold you in heads and hearts, long after you’re gone.

But y’know, sad as it might be, that just isn’t going to happen. Even people who achieve extraordinary things at the very peak of their profession are forgotten by the passing of time. Who scored the winning goal in the 1934 World Cup final? Who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1992, and what did they do to earn it? To return to Camus, the way we can overcome the tragedy of our situation is to accept our fate. None of us will be remembered two centuries’ hence, and that’s ok.

Because maybe the search for legacy is to look at things from the wrong end of the telescope. We cannot control whether we will be remembered at all after we’ve gone, let alone what for. But we are here now, and so there are things we can do. If we think remembering is vital, that legacy matters, then we have the power to remember those who are important to us, those who did their best in their own time so that we can be here and happy now, or those who have inspired us. And if we will all one day be forgotten, then that frees us to live with more of a focus on the here and now, to make things better for those in our lives while we are around to do so. We don’t need to aim our thoughts towards some idea of posterity when we’re in a position to make a difference today.

I struggled when I turned forty. A friend asked whether I experienced any existential dread, to which the answer was: yes, a huge amount. James Harris referred to it as a “heavy birthday” here, in a piece well worth reading. What has helped pull me out of it has been thinking in terms of the immediate; being grateful for all the good things I already have in my life. I am incredibly blessed to have friends, family, a happy relationship, my health, and a good career. There is so much still to look forward to. And most importantly of all, I’m here. I’m out on the pitch, ready to do my best in the second half, and that’s got to be a good place to start.