Reflections on My Birthday
Thoughts on the not-so-early 40's
God was gracious enough to give me another year of life this past year. Here’s what I’m thinking as the years accumulate:
I’m not really thinking about “mid-life.” This is because I consider everything before 30 to be developmental; I was still growing up. Around 30, and probably even later for me, one finally has enough wisdom to start putting the various aspects of life in their proper proportion. For myself, I now can look back and see how I had a particularly naive, child-like mind that took longer to mature. There are certain advantages to that in terms of thinking outside of the box and not taking things for granted, but it took me longer than normal to arrive at conclusions that other people see as common sense.
If I look at 30 as the beginning of full adulthood, and 80 as a reasonable life expectancy, 40-something is statistically only about 25% of my useful, fully mature adult life.
I am thankful I was able to get married and start having children in my early 20’s. It’s a really nice feeling to be the young guy among the parents when taking a teenager on college tours.
I appreciate more than ever that good health is the most valuable possession in this life. I was able to make a big change in my late 20’s in this area, and having energy levels that haven’t dropped significantly is like a cheat code for life. If you’re in your 30’s or 40’s, my best piece of advice is to fix this now if it’s broken. I’ve observed that the mental effects of bad health really start to accumulate in the 50’s, and once that happens, the ability to make a deliberate change is severely diminished. I’ll send a post out later this summer with my top ten health hacks, but it’s really not a mystery, it’s the doing of it that’s the challenge.
Can we all just admit that the concept of aging gracefully is more or less a cope? I hate the gray hairs, the wrinkles, all of it. In Christian theology, it’s not supposed to be this way, and it won’t be this way in our eternal bodies. So while it’s inevitable, and I fight it as best I can, I don’t feel a need to act like it’s a good thing.
I continue to personally reject the concept of retirement. I think it’s particularly bad for men. At the highest income levels, the life expectancy gap between men and women narrows from 6 years to only 18 months:
I chalk this up mostly to the fact that wealthier men tend to have ongoing business interests even if retired from their primary occupation. Men who aren’t actively producing something seem to give up and die. Dave Ramsey recommends the book Thou Shalt Prosper by Rabbi Daniel Lapin, which discusses the reasons why the author thinks Jewish people succeed economically. One of those reasons is that Jewish men tend not to retire. An extra decade or two adding value instead of retiring to the hunting lodge or golf course makes an exponential difference in the productivity of one’s life. Your kids will also appreciate it if you avoid the nihilist goal of dying broke.
I look at life probabilistically, like a hand dealt in poker. In a fallen world, no one gets a perfect hand. I think it’s true for me and most of the people reading this that we’ve all been dealt hands in life that are way above average and certainly not as bad as they could be. Contentment, for me, is appreciating the goodness of the hand I have, not focusing on its imperfections. If I died tomorrow, I know I’ve had an extraordinary life. Whatever else life brings is just gravy.
