Early 40s

[Reactionary Rage]

I saw a study recently that suggested men's mental health is at its lowest point around the age of 43 and then gradually picks up over the course of the rest of your 40s.  

I don't know what other folk's experiences of it were/are but I am finding it a bit strange, listless and unsatisfying.  Maybe certain Things just kick in at this point in your life that you never really experienced or thought about before.  Mortality for one, primarily through my parents ageing (they are now 78); generational differences are really starting to become obvious; relationships ending, friendships maybe drifting for a variety of reasons; a struggle to find meaning in life outside the usual day-to-day nonsense you have to do; a certain kind of spiritual boredom perhaps.   

What are other people's experiences of it?  Did you have a dip?  Does any of the above ring true?  Did things pick up for you?  Or was it just business as usual?

[DarknessFish]

I'm just worried that I'm actually in the middle of my midlife crisis. If this is as crazy as I get, I really am a fucking boring bastard.

[Mr. FOLLARD]

I remember my early 40s as a kind of 'last gasp'. I still felt young, and occasionally - very occasionally! - women were still interested. There was still a spring in my step.

A lot of what you say rings true, however - when you get past 30 or so you don't tend to make new friends often, you start to get into habits that last a lifetime ('settling down', basically) - in many ways it seems like the end of something good. But (and I suppose this goes without saying, but it's worth emphasising) I feel all of those things much more keenly now I'm 54. I'm not going to have kids now, there aren't really any big adventures round the corner, I struggle to get up out of the chair....you know?

I know I'm focussing on the physical more than the mental aspects of aging there but one impacts on the other, of course. Maybe one thing that's worth thinking about is that you have to work more to find fun things when you're 45, whereas when you're 25, 30, those things tend to come to you.

[Half Machine Lipschitz]

I was definitely doing more in my early 40's than I am now (53) - going out, playing shows, seeing bands, etc., but I can't help but wonder if I'd be doing more of that now if it weren't for this pesky pandemic. I suppose the true answer is "not as much". I'd rather sleep.

You should join/start a band, GB.

[fearlessfreap]

Early 40's -- kids starting school, we bought a new house, I started a new job -- I wouldn't want to go back.

[DarknessFish]

I don't know, I've always had a listless, aimless kind of life. I'm only 47 now, so there's not much of an age-difference between us, but I guess I've never been a driven kind of person, or someone who has any goals in life, or sought any meaning from it. Mortality is one thing, or even a fear of the lack of mortality. My wife's mum and dad both died young, over a decade ago, my dad died 4 years ago, there's only my mum left. She's healthy and happy now, able to go and get out and about, socialise, etc, she's off on a jaunt to Bournemouth this week with some friends. But I do hate the idea of her growing infirm and lonely, she wouldn't want a nursing home or even retirement village type thing, she's too proud and independent.

I only have a handful of close friendships left, there used to be a bunch of us, but a divorce split the group asunder. Everyone having kids means we meet up much less frequently, and having a job and kids means we're too tired to want to meet up more frequently, too. Having a bit of spare cash is one good thing about being 40-something, but I guess we should be thinking about retirement savings, too. I'd hate to save up though, and die at 65.

[Reactionary Rage]

Nov 7, 2022 11:45:46 GMT Mr. FOLLARD said:

I remember my early 40s as a kind of 'last gasp'. I still felt young, and occasionally - very occasionally! - women were still interested. There was still a spring in my step.

A lot of what you say rings true, however - when you get past 30 or so you don't tend to make new friends often, you start to get into habits that last a lifetime ('settling down', basically) - in many ways it seems like the end of something good. But (and I suppose this goes without saying, but it's worth emphasising) I feel all of those things much more keenly now I'm 54. I'm not going to have kids now, there aren't really any big adventures round the corner, I struggle to get up out of the chair....you know?

I know I'm focussing on the physical more than the mental aspects of aging there but one impacts on the other, of course. Maybe one thing that's worth thinking about is that you have to work more to find fun things when you're 45, whereas when you're 25, 30, those things tend to come to you.

Women?  What's that then?    

The friends thing gets harder.  People are always busy, people have families, it's usually up to one person (moi) to try and organise shit and you can feel like it's you doing all the legwork so why bother?  It's easy to move away from people but at this point in your life if you don't have a wife and kids then you need to move towards people more.  But it's hard.  It feels like it's just the way life is.

Maybe I should produce a bucket list.  Fun things to do...

skydive
start a band

"Hey, Barry, I'm thinking of starting a band, you in?"
"Yeah man, just let me chat to the wife first...."

[Mr. FOLLARD]

Get the band going, for sure. John's right. You're still young enough, who knows, you could have a talent for writing and performing? why not try, at least?

[rayge]

This is another of those cases where a general, average conclusion is made about a large group of people (here, men): it can be useful when deciding on matters of social planning and that sort of thing, but it says absolutely nothing about any individual in that group. This was the reason I gave up my potential academic career (in sociology), and, as you may have noticed, I still feel keenly about it half a century later

In my case, the worst decade of my life for mental, emotional, physical, and indeed social health was my twenties, or more accurately the period between my father's death when I was 18 in June 1967,and getting together with Chip when I was 33, in May 1982. These encompassed 18 months of being unemployed and royally skint, and five of regular employment in jobs I really did not like - paid imprisonment, basically. I didn't have sex, or indeed form any requited attachment (I had a sad habit of falling for women who were already in relationships with people I considered friends, and, as a demi-sexual avant la lettre was not interested in fucking strangers for the sake of it) between the summer of 1972 and late in 1981.

I kept a diary from 1969 to 1982, and have been reading some of it recently, from around the late Seventies, looking for info about various shows I'd seen, and was struck by how utterly lost I was, how often I felt ill, the drugs I was taking (as well as hash and heavier psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD, I was smoking tobacco, drinking, snorting and swallowing amphetamine sulphate, smoking some opium, very occasional cocaine), the amount of self-pity, my putting myself perversely into impossible situations, and periods of, if not exactly depression, certainly a degree of wallowing and a sense of futility, drifting and frustration, none of it helped by my then-unrecognized neuro-divergent traits.

My early 40s, by contrast (1988-1992), encompassed my getting married (and in doing so, living in the same house as my sexual partner for the first time in my life), moving from London to Bristol, getting lots of work, and in fact kick-starting a new, enjoyable career as a freelance editor and writer, commuting once a week to London and maintaining social relationships with my friends in the city and indeed my mother, and so on. My forties were probably the best decade of my life, although the breakdown in Chip's health not long after our wedding (she never really got better, as she subsequently developing a bad chronic case of ME that only went away under the drugs she took to palliate the cancer that killed her) was a dark cloud, but on the other hand, looking after her and our house, making money to support us both, gave me a sense of purpose and self-belief.

The sense of mortality you spoke about, Dougie, well that was with me from the death of my father, and permeated much of what I thought and did and felt in my twenties and thirties, but, when I was in my forties - specifically on 11/11/95, when I reached the age of 47 years and 26 days (my dad's age at death) - I carried out a magickal working I had envisaged to dispel this. It's the only time I have ever attempted to put my magickal beliefs to a proper test, and it worked. My obsession with I-death kind of melted away: it came back to a certain extent when Chip died, but it's now just an internal recognition that I will eventually die, but not 'before my time': I've already clocked up my biblical share, and I'm currently looking forward to living fully until I am 100, or at least have outlived most of the kunty-wunties who have attempted to blight my life. That's not to say that I won't die tomorrow, or even later today, but if I do make it to 100, at least I won't have any regrets about wasting the previous 26 years fretting about death when there's still a life to be lived.

I never understood the stuff about 'generations'. It's another example of those pesky generalizations I alluded to so long ago in my first sentence. I'm keenly aware of individual differences, and of changes of attitudes through time, but nothing I would ascribe to a particular 'generation'.

My friends didn't really start to drift away until I was in my 60s, and even now I still have half a dozen or so of around half a century's standing (or indeed falling down) that I see rarely nowadays (especially since Covid kyboshed travel) but am still in fairly regular contact with - and not just Facebook, which doesn't really count.

The meaning in life thing, well, I went through that in my twenties, along with the workplace angst thing, and I came out of the former with a - don't laugh, or indeed puke - sense of making my own meaning by abandoning imposed 'realities', and the latter by just quitting.

[rayge]

Nov 7, 2022 11:45:46 GMT Mr. FOLLARD said:

I know I'm focusing on the physical more than the mental aspects of aging there but one impacts on the other, of course. Maybe one thing that's worth thinking about is that you have to work more to find fun things when you're 45, whereas when you're 25, 30, those things tend to come to you.

My experience of the bit in italics (see above) is exactly inverted.

And as for the physical aspects, apart from failing teeth, ears and eyes (all sorted by prosthetics), and the overall tendency to take longer to get over injuries, I'm in just as good shape as I was in my forties: I can still run, jump (not that I was ever great at that), storm up hills, go up steps two at a time, walk at four mph or more (and at slightly slower speeds for several miles a day), and so on: I have a blood pressure of 130-80, cholesterol in normal ranges, the kidney function of a 20 year-old (doc's words, not mine)  and a BMI in the normal range, having been officially 'obese' or 'overweight' for decades. This isn't a boast, I certainly don't 'deserve' this, I've just lucked out with some genes from my mother's side  (she lived to 95), gave up booze and tabs in my 30s, and have always eaten well, not because I was a health nut, but because I had the great good fortune to like the taste of loads of healthy foods.

[tory]

I had a career break at 40 to look after my baby boy. In many ways it was one of the best things I have ever done, as I was able to gain a sense of purpose and meaning from both that and my subsequent retraining to become a teacher. I am grateful to my wife for essentially bearing the financial burden during this time, particularly as she decided to become self-employed during it. For anyone who always worries about what might happen, just do it because otherwise you would regret it.

I went to a birthday bash for my best friend's 50th yesterday. We aren't really best friends anymore unfortunately; there's a sense that we are friends purely because we grew up together from 16 to 30 or so. I saw a few people there that I knew in a quite intense way from 2002 to 2012 and since then, things have ebbed away. We are friends because we were friends then. That sense of commonality between us, which was created through similar interests in music, is inevitably ebbing away, like the slow dawn of incompatibility that you get in a failing relationship. For one thing, whereas 20 years ago, in a similar way to the BCB Jolly, where everyone thrived on there being this multiplicity of voices in one place and you'd spend the whole day talking to lots of different people and you'd get that false sense of enduring friendship bonding over love of a Skip Spence album, now the sheer tumult of voices in one place made me just think "I'd much rather be talking one or two people in one place rather than feeling guilty for not speaking in any great detail to any of the people here". This issue continues to happen because the only time we see each other is in these big gatherings and it's just not possible to speak to everyone in any concerted detail.

My wife has a few enduring friendships. Women, on the whole, are more proactive at maintaining bonds over friendships than men are. Around men it generally is over some sort of activity. I'm always jealous of men who have "out with the lads" nights because that's a big thing I reckon, that maintenance of friendship based on some sort of tradition. My problem has been that I was the organiser of such events back then and made a real effort over it, but now I'm not so bothered, or more realistically that I secretly hope someone else can step up to the mark and take over and then sneer a bit because no-one has the time or energy to do it.

I don't know really - friendships are harder for men once they reach their forties. There's much more effort needed and, essentially, marriage and parenting changes you dramatically.

[~ / % ? *]

Yes, GB what you are experiencing is normal, i went through it, everyone goes through it specific to them. You have the ability to do whatever you want, some can happen quickly, some will take some planning, some will take some open-ness/willingness. Regardless if you do or don't do anything time is passing, that is your currency: time. You probably have some ideas of what you want, so get the life you want. (also don't poo-poo the idea of counseling, coaching, etc., many of us have old destructive tapes playing in our minds that may deny/prevent us from better living). Identify what you want.

[fonz]

My 30s were so awful, by the time I hit 40 things were really looking up again.
Physically you’ve got to accept some changes, but there’s a lot to get excited about too.
I’m wise now.

[fonz]

I do think that what you do, physically, in your forties is probably crucial to how you’re going to weather your fifties and beyond.

Good habits re: eating, drinking, exercise, and moderation in booze etc are important if you want a good physical quality of life in older age. It’s not necessarily about having a longer life, but about being better able to enjoy your sixties and seventies.

As far as the emotional side of things, I’m still learning. In my twenties I thought I knew it all. My thirties were awful because of bad decisions I made back then. I’d say that my forties were notable for an acceptance that I’d never know it all, and that opened me up to all sorts of better experiences.


The idea of ‘time’ being the only important currency, I’d agree to a large extent.

[Reactionary Rage]

Yeah, that is important. I've been swimming 4/5 times a week for over a year now. I did swim quite a bit before that but had a year long break when the pool shut down at work but I'm committed to swimming this amount (50+ 25m lengths front crawl) for the foreseeable future. It's definitely helped me with avoiding little aches and pains that I noticed I was getting before. Plus it's helped me lose quite a bit of weight which is good for when I start dating again! Sad as that sounds.

I could drink less. It's hard when you're on your own not to drink at the weekends, you know? When I was with the ex that was constrained a bit but two nights a week doesn't seem massively excessive though. I could eat more veg and maybe I should move towards a more veggie diet.

You do have to start making changes and planning don't you? Which in itself is a new experience because when you're young you couldn't give a fuck could you? When I was a stoner I'd eat shitloads and never put on weight even though I did zero exercise.