On having turned 40
Reflections one year on
Hello SUQers!
I’m really delighted to say that I’ll be hosting my first Interllect salon next month. It’s on the theme of ‘Personal failure’, building on my viral essay on this very newsletter (still my most popular post - nothing succeeds like failure)!
Tickets are here.
Please come along - tickets are as cheap as I could make them, and it’s a fantastic way to support this newsletter. And if more of you do that, I can keep writing it.
Now, on with today’s piece.
About a year ago, I wrote this piece about turning 40, which I look back on fondly as the first edition of this newsletter which attracted any serious attention. Thirteen months on, I have now completed the next step of actually turning 40 and wanted to briefly expand on my first thoughts.
The first thing to say is that being 40 is not as bad as feared. Now, I do stick by the claim that reaching this birthday is a big deal; in all but the most charitable reflections upon the matter, 40 is halfway through life, and if that doesn’t occasion reflection on your circumstances you are crossing the barrier from ‘not especially introspective’ to ‘incurious lump’.
When I put personal stuff out there such as that essay, the response is almost always exceptionally positive, with a lot of people revealing themselves to be thinking exactly the same thoughts – nobody’s worries are particularly unique. But there’s also usually a small strand of ‘How dare you make a fuss of this’, in this case from someone who is now, get this, at an even older age. With all due respect, I don’t think it’s controversial to say we’re all heading in the same direction, and there’s something peculiarly English about getting annoyed with someone for having the temerity to acknowledge the human condition.
Still, a year on, things do feel a little better. Far from the immediate precipitous health collapse I on some level feared - I think, as a lifelong hypochondriac, I’d imagined immediate complete organ failure after the clock struck midnight - I’m actually feeling fitter than I did a year ago, helped by intense marathon training. My loved ones are generally doing alright, allowing that my parents are old, of course, which always adds a note of the bittersweet to things. I have somewhere stable to live, and, most positively of all, in terms of my own mental health, I self-published my novel last summer; I had fairly modest expectations of it, so am pleased as to the small but appreciative response to it. It doesn’t take much to encourage me, so inspired by the positive feedback I received, I wrote another novel last year. I’ll be refining it once my finances allow another period of work on it.
I’ve also not felt alone in entering middle age, as my fellow geriatric Millennials are also marking the date this year, which offers a handy way of working out who is in your exact cohort. Matt Forde, Helen Lewis, former West Ham striker Jermain Defoe; this isn’t exactly a bad lot to be in. Of course, many of them have on paper achieved more than me, certainly in Defoe’s case in terms of goalscoring, but at the same time, none of them have done what I’ve done, or would have been able to.
Here I’d mention Rob Francis’ piece on turning 40 as a companion to my own; Rob seems to lack my messianic sense of thwarted destiny, which is only to his credit, but reading his piece definitely convinced me some of the emotions this event provokes are universal, certainly for middle-aged blokes with centre-left politics.
Indeed, one phrase Rob used – ‘the clock has begun to tick down instead of upwards for the first time’ – really identified the root of why I’ve found it so tricky. It’s that the time remaining to you is now conceivable. When you’re young ten, twenty, thirty years is unimaginable – you are luxurious with future time. You have so much time you can fritter it away; you can pursue things you don’t like, you can stick it out in dead-end jobs.
But now thirty years is not only imaginable by reference to experience but likely the upper expectation of what you’ve got left. That’s where the panic comes from, really, from being able to picture what remains. Your 40s, I suspect, is the first decade where it really begins to feel that time is not on your side - and if you’ve been hoping for certain things to happen, it certainly feels like they should be happening by now. And if they’re not happening, panic can easily arise.
What I’ve settled on thinking, though, is that those first 40 years were about forming what I am; that those 40 years involved a painful struggle for self-definition which just isn’t part of what’s ahead. What’s ahead is more about excelling at what I am, not changing it, like an actor in a long-running soap opera who by now really knows their role. Oh of course, I’ll still want to improve things, but what’s ahead is not a painful and tender quest to work myself out.
And as I do go forward, I want to immodestly claim that what I am now has never been better; I was never kinder, gentler or more tolerant than I am today, and certainly not in the pomp of my youth. Indeed, if what’s ahead is, in part, more loss and decline, it’s fortunate I’m in such good shape to meet it.
In some ways the stage of life I’m at now – squarely in the middle with, all being well, similar tranches of time before and ahead – is the juicy bit of life. It’s what you’re working towards; it’s what you’ll work away from. I have chosen to see this year, my intensely packed 40th year, as like being on the top of a summit; the moment of the best views and vistas and taking group photos before you feel a chill in the air and begin your walk down.
Is it too cheap to point out the way down is usually easier? Certainly if there’s companionship, and it’s worth saying that my spouse absolutely made my 40th; she took me to Bratislava, ordered a cake which had my novel cover on it, and generally treated me like an absolute king. Indeed, after four days of constant validation, I told her that even I was beginning to feel a bit embarrassed by it. As such I do not anticipate making such a fuss about turning 41.
As someone a good 10 years on from the milestone, I would say this: there are the elements of feeling the march of time - the grey hairs, the creaking joints, the bigger muffin top. But that is compensated for by a more settled sense of self and MUCH less tolerance for people’s bullshit. I don’t have as much time, maybe, but these days I feel I use it more wisely.