Midlife for the Millennial: A Wooden Shack Instead of the Moon
I turned forty a little more than two years ago. I didn’t really do much to mark the milestone—didn’t even really think much about it at the time, but I’m thinking about it now.
When we were kids, and my mother was entering her early forties, it was common to hear her say, “Lordy, lordy! Mama’s forty!” She would recite her little mantra while cleaning the house or carpooling us somewhere. Sometimes she just said it spontaneously, to give herself rhythm (or at least rhyme) to stave off the blues, as once recommended by Johnny Cash. Eventually I came to think of it as the middle-aged suburban housewife’s version of the field song, the domestic version of “Bringing in the Sheaves.”
My mother—who I visited last week—is now something like seventy-four years old, maybe seventy-five. It’s pathetic, I know, that I don’t know exactly. This woman brought me into the world, sacrificed her life, her career, and her body for me, and I can’t even remember her age.
For shame!
Anyway, last week I had the opportunity several times to repeat the old rhyme. It had taken on a bit of an ironic bite now that I’m in my forties, and she’s in her seventies. Still, she found it amusing, and shook her head, and smiled, albeit wistfully. “Mama’s done been forty. For more than thirty years. And her baby is forty, too.”
Time has left its mark on both of us. She thinks quite a bit of death (she must, for she mentions it often), and I can feel myself slowing down. The transition from young to middle-aged was strange, that “gradually then all of a sudden” people like to paraphrase and misquote (me included), taken from Hemingway.
One day you just find yourself taking more afternoon naps, and that hot sauce you once enjoyed now makes it feel like a lithium battery’s exploding in your esophagus. You still get erections, but not as many as you used to, but no matter. There’s no woman around, at least not if you’re me, and you’d rather read than fuck.
I should add that I would have rather read than fucked even in my twenties, though in my teens I would have rather masturbated than breathed.
The nature of middle age is obviously different for men and women, especially as regards biology. A woman at or around middle-age experiences the “change of life,” as the old timers once euphemistically called menopause. There are myriad small changes—hot flashes, etcetera—accompanying the big one, but the big one’s the big deal. A significant part of a woman’s life is now over, and whether she’s experienced being a mother or not, her chances of doing so are dwindling.
No such condition is imposed upon men at the same time. Men, by contrast, can father children well into their dotage. That’s probably not morally advisable, as you don’t want to be senile during your son’s childhood, or dead when they’re ready to toss the pigskin, but whatever.
This, it goes without saying, is unfair.
“It’s not fair,” my sister said to me recently.
“What?” I asked.
“The older I get, the less attractive society views me. The older you get, the more attractive women and girls will view you.”
I’m not sure that’s quite as true as it once was. We tend to see more older women with younger men these days, and there are entire fetish subculture niches solely devoted to such pairings. Also, I’m not sure I’m eager to even attract the kind of “girl” in her twenties who gets turned on by grey hair. I really don’t have the desire, talent, or probably even the energy to work out some girl’s psychosexual Vaterkomplex. Still, there is a lot of data available about the mating game that corroborates my sister’s assessment. Poll after poll has shown that women generally find men at their most attractive in their early forties, and men find women most attractive in their early twenties.
This makes sense from a sociobiological perspective. Males of any species seek out females in their most fertile years, for mating. Females across the species spectrum, by contrast, must build nests, estivate—essentially sit in one place—once pregnant, until they have their child. This means they look for stability and established status in a mate. Birthing hips versus a bank account.
The only problem with my sister’s assessment and sociobiology’s own corroboration of the unfairness of it all is that I’m a big exception. Because—you see—I’ve had my head up my ass for decades, dreaming, reading, and writing, which means I’m not well-established. That said, I’m not in an entirely untenable position from a sociosexual perspective, either. I’m not a member of the newly-minted “precariat,” hostage to the gig economy. I have a master’s degree and some usable skills, as well as a decent CV. But there are plenty of men in their twenties with better financial prospects and more marketable skills than yours truly.
Not only that, but said-men are much closer to their sexual prime, their faces unwrinkled, the joy of youth not quite drained from their eyes.
A man in an expensive red Porsche convertible has grey hair that looks distinguished, silvery and sexy. Some schlub in his old Hyundai with its upholstery covered in doghair doesn’t quite give the same impression. His is not the greyness of the eminence grise, but the shocked white coif of a man who pressed a butterknife’s edge to a toaster’s heated element coil.
In case you haven’t already guessed, my main problem is that I am a fool who simply cannot deal with reality.
And a fool is ultimately a bad bet for anyone intent on surviving, which is what the mating game—beneath the surface romance—is actually about.
But that brings up another respect in which I’m exceptional, and not in a good way.
I didn’t have to wait for middle age for my grey hairs to show. Nor did I have to wait to feel mortality’s cold encroach in various bodily pains, soreness upon waking that wasn’t previously present. My hair started showing its salt and pepper streaks in my mid-twenties, when I first got back from Iraq, when I also needed surgery for a couple of injuries. Muscles once pliant and responsive were now slack and uncooperative. Even worse, they hurt sometimes bad enough to not even obey basic commands.
Granted, I was too distracted by suicidal ideations and sadness to notice, but a battle buddy helpfully pointed out the beginnings of my decline one day. It happened on the on-post barbershop at Kelly Barracks in Darmstadt, Germany, where I was stationed before and after deployment to the sandbox.
“You’ve got grey hair, troop.”
The barber—a rotund woman who was usually rude to all the GIs—patted me on the shoulder and said, “Don’t pay him any mind. It’s distinguished.”
I must have been really pathetic to actually get sympathy from her.
My buddy, bemused by her attempts to balm my ego, said, “Yeah, he’s distinguished from people who don’t have grey hair.”
I would get an update on that same buddy, some years later, by the way, from a fellow soldier who found his mugshot on a military crime blotter. In the photo, my old buddy looked much less bemused than he did on that day in the barbershop. He was also wearing one of those anti-self-harm “turtle smocks,” they give to high profile and dangerous prisoners.
The blotter item informed me that he had shot his wife and her lover, though neither fatally. I don’t know his age at the time, but he was younger than I, so maybe his mid-thirties? Regardless, he now has much bigger problems than grey hair, or a midlife crisis.
What about me, though? Am I going through one now? Did I go through one and just not notice it? Am I about to go through one?
I think not, and the reason is simple, and was previously alluded to, if not outright stated. The midlife crisis is for the company man, the dutiful son. The one who did what he was told, what he thought was expected of him. The one who got the job, the house, the woman, the kids, the money, or at least pursued those things with the vehemence we expect of every red-blooded American male. Having all of these things, though, and taking stock, he sees something is missing. There is some sort of gaping lacuna at the center of his soul, some personal mission he has ignored or forsaken in exchange for the obtainment of the things he was told to want.
As for me, I’ve made the opposite mistake of this man. I’ve forsaken the real world, the party line, the pretty women, the status and the attempt to establish myself in some field or in my community. My neighbors barely know I exist, and that I’m childless and don’t follow sports probably makes me doubly suspect in their eyes.
And while I may have holes in my shoe soles—lacunae in my bank account and a nonexistent stock portfolio—I’ve also spent the last twenty years fucking up in myriad, beautiful, and sundry ways.
I have few regrets, which is good, since age shows an inverse correlation between wisdom and ability.
What’s the old quote? “If youth only knew...if age only could.”
I know now, but I can’t.
But here’s the thing: that’s okay. Because there were always plenty of things I could never do, but youth provided the delusion of unlimited opportunity and ability, the idea of infinitely malleable identity. The self-help and self-esteem movements may have started with good intentions, but they’ve filled too many heads with helium rather than knowledge, especially practical knowledge. They also have opened another lane for the grifters who sell hope and spread it like herpes.
You can waste a lot of time trying to be a rockstar when you suck at the guitar. Or trying to be a successful, popular writer, when you’re destined to be a niche animal of the underground, whose only hope is posthumous reassessment.
But once you know your limits, you save a lot of time, and your focus begins to hone, which improves your ability in those realms where you actually have talent. But talent, except for the true prodigy, can never be taken for granted. You have to work, preferably every day. Experience not just the joys of virtuosity but the despair that comes with failure. Every day.
But again: that’s okay. Not just okay maybe, but exactly as it should be.
Henry David Thoreau said that when we’re young, we want to build a bridge to the moon and the stars. As we get older, we settle for building ourselves a little wooden shack in the woods. Wisdom, at least for me, is understanding that shack is not only enough, but is in some ways preferable to the moon.
So here I sit, looking forward to hemorrhoids, a prostate exam, the deaths of both my parents and yet another dog. Hopefully all of these maladies, afflictions, and sorrows don’t come too soon one upon the heels of the other. Hopefully, the washing machine, dryer, dishwasher, computer, and Hyundai hold up a little longer, too, because this upcoming dental work is likely to wipe me out.
Maybe I should just give it up and get dentures?
The time to take that final humble will come, of course, when I take me own “ground sweat.” But death—while related to aging—is a topic for another day, another blog entry.
When we were kids, and my mother was entering her early forties, it was common to hear her say, “Lordy, lordy! Mama’s forty!” She would recite her little mantra while cleaning the house or carpooling us somewhere. Sometimes she just said it spontaneously, to give herself rhythm (or at least rhyme) to stave off the blues, as once recommended by Johnny Cash. Eventually I came to think of it as the middle-aged suburban housewife’s version of the field song, the domestic version of “Bringing in the Sheaves.”
My mother—who I visited last week—is now something like seventy-four years old, maybe seventy-five. It’s pathetic, I know, that I don’t know exactly. This woman brought me into the world, sacrificed her life, her career, and her body for me, and I can’t even remember her age.
For shame!
Anyway, last week I had the opportunity several times to repeat the old rhyme. It had taken on a bit of an ironic bite now that I’m in my forties, and she’s in her seventies. Still, she found it amusing, and shook her head, and smiled, albeit wistfully. “Mama’s done been forty. For more than thirty years. And her baby is forty, too.”
Time has left its mark on both of us. She thinks quite a bit of death (she must, for she mentions it often), and I can feel myself slowing down. The transition from young to middle-aged was strange, that “gradually then all of a sudden” people like to paraphrase and misquote (me included), taken from Hemingway.
One day you just find yourself taking more afternoon naps, and that hot sauce you once enjoyed now makes it feel like a lithium battery’s exploding in your esophagus. You still get erections, but not as many as you used to, but no matter. There’s no woman around, at least not if you’re me, and you’d rather read than fuck.
I should add that I would have rather read than fucked even in my twenties, though in my teens I would have rather masturbated than breathed.
The nature of middle age is obviously different for men and women, especially as regards biology. A woman at or around middle-age experiences the “change of life,” as the old timers once euphemistically called menopause. There are myriad small changes—hot flashes, etcetera—accompanying the big one, but the big one’s the big deal. A significant part of a woman’s life is now over, and whether she’s experienced being a mother or not, her chances of doing so are dwindling.
No such condition is imposed upon men at the same time. Men, by contrast, can father children well into their dotage. That’s probably not morally advisable, as you don’t want to be senile during your son’s childhood, or dead when they’re ready to toss the pigskin, but whatever.
This, it goes without saying, is unfair.
“It’s not fair,” my sister said to me recently.
“What?” I asked.
“The older I get, the less attractive society views me. The older you get, the more attractive women and girls will view you.”
I’m not sure that’s quite as true as it once was. We tend to see more older women with younger men these days, and there are entire fetish subculture niches solely devoted to such pairings. Also, I’m not sure I’m eager to even attract the kind of “girl” in her twenties who gets turned on by grey hair. I really don’t have the desire, talent, or probably even the energy to work out some girl’s psychosexual Vaterkomplex. Still, there is a lot of data available about the mating game that corroborates my sister’s assessment. Poll after poll has shown that women generally find men at their most attractive in their early forties, and men find women most attractive in their early twenties.
This makes sense from a sociobiological perspective. Males of any species seek out females in their most fertile years, for mating. Females across the species spectrum, by contrast, must build nests, estivate—essentially sit in one place—once pregnant, until they have their child. This means they look for stability and established status in a mate. Birthing hips versus a bank account.
The only problem with my sister’s assessment and sociobiology’s own corroboration of the unfairness of it all is that I’m a big exception. Because—you see—I’ve had my head up my ass for decades, dreaming, reading, and writing, which means I’m not well-established. That said, I’m not in an entirely untenable position from a sociosexual perspective, either. I’m not a member of the newly-minted “precariat,” hostage to the gig economy. I have a master’s degree and some usable skills, as well as a decent CV. But there are plenty of men in their twenties with better financial prospects and more marketable skills than yours truly.
Not only that, but said-men are much closer to their sexual prime, their faces unwrinkled, the joy of youth not quite drained from their eyes.
A man in an expensive red Porsche convertible has grey hair that looks distinguished, silvery and sexy. Some schlub in his old Hyundai with its upholstery covered in doghair doesn’t quite give the same impression. His is not the greyness of the eminence grise, but the shocked white coif of a man who pressed a butterknife’s edge to a toaster’s heated element coil.
In case you haven’t already guessed, my main problem is that I am a fool who simply cannot deal with reality.
And a fool is ultimately a bad bet for anyone intent on surviving, which is what the mating game—beneath the surface romance—is actually about.
But that brings up another respect in which I’m exceptional, and not in a good way.
I didn’t have to wait for middle age for my grey hairs to show. Nor did I have to wait to feel mortality’s cold encroach in various bodily pains, soreness upon waking that wasn’t previously present. My hair started showing its salt and pepper streaks in my mid-twenties, when I first got back from Iraq, when I also needed surgery for a couple of injuries. Muscles once pliant and responsive were now slack and uncooperative. Even worse, they hurt sometimes bad enough to not even obey basic commands.
Granted, I was too distracted by suicidal ideations and sadness to notice, but a battle buddy helpfully pointed out the beginnings of my decline one day. It happened on the on-post barbershop at Kelly Barracks in Darmstadt, Germany, where I was stationed before and after deployment to the sandbox.
“You’ve got grey hair, troop.”
The barber—a rotund woman who was usually rude to all the GIs—patted me on the shoulder and said, “Don’t pay him any mind. It’s distinguished.”
I must have been really pathetic to actually get sympathy from her.
My buddy, bemused by her attempts to balm my ego, said, “Yeah, he’s distinguished from people who don’t have grey hair.”
I would get an update on that same buddy, some years later, by the way, from a fellow soldier who found his mugshot on a military crime blotter. In the photo, my old buddy looked much less bemused than he did on that day in the barbershop. He was also wearing one of those anti-self-harm “turtle smocks,” they give to high profile and dangerous prisoners.
The blotter item informed me that he had shot his wife and her lover, though neither fatally. I don’t know his age at the time, but he was younger than I, so maybe his mid-thirties? Regardless, he now has much bigger problems than grey hair, or a midlife crisis.
What about me, though? Am I going through one now? Did I go through one and just not notice it? Am I about to go through one?
I think not, and the reason is simple, and was previously alluded to, if not outright stated. The midlife crisis is for the company man, the dutiful son. The one who did what he was told, what he thought was expected of him. The one who got the job, the house, the woman, the kids, the money, or at least pursued those things with the vehemence we expect of every red-blooded American male. Having all of these things, though, and taking stock, he sees something is missing. There is some sort of gaping lacuna at the center of his soul, some personal mission he has ignored or forsaken in exchange for the obtainment of the things he was told to want.
As for me, I’ve made the opposite mistake of this man. I’ve forsaken the real world, the party line, the pretty women, the status and the attempt to establish myself in some field or in my community. My neighbors barely know I exist, and that I’m childless and don’t follow sports probably makes me doubly suspect in their eyes.
And while I may have holes in my shoe soles—lacunae in my bank account and a nonexistent stock portfolio—I’ve also spent the last twenty years fucking up in myriad, beautiful, and sundry ways.
I have few regrets, which is good, since age shows an inverse correlation between wisdom and ability.
What’s the old quote? “If youth only knew...if age only could.”
I know now, but I can’t.
But here’s the thing: that’s okay. Because there were always plenty of things I could never do, but youth provided the delusion of unlimited opportunity and ability, the idea of infinitely malleable identity. The self-help and self-esteem movements may have started with good intentions, but they’ve filled too many heads with helium rather than knowledge, especially practical knowledge. They also have opened another lane for the grifters who sell hope and spread it like herpes.
You can waste a lot of time trying to be a rockstar when you suck at the guitar. Or trying to be a successful, popular writer, when you’re destined to be a niche animal of the underground, whose only hope is posthumous reassessment.
But once you know your limits, you save a lot of time, and your focus begins to hone, which improves your ability in those realms where you actually have talent. But talent, except for the true prodigy, can never be taken for granted. You have to work, preferably every day. Experience not just the joys of virtuosity but the despair that comes with failure. Every day.
But again: that’s okay. Not just okay maybe, but exactly as it should be.
Henry David Thoreau said that when we’re young, we want to build a bridge to the moon and the stars. As we get older, we settle for building ourselves a little wooden shack in the woods. Wisdom, at least for me, is understanding that shack is not only enough, but is in some ways preferable to the moon.
So here I sit, looking forward to hemorrhoids, a prostate exam, the deaths of both my parents and yet another dog. Hopefully all of these maladies, afflictions, and sorrows don’t come too soon one upon the heels of the other. Hopefully, the washing machine, dryer, dishwasher, computer, and Hyundai hold up a little longer, too, because this upcoming dental work is likely to wipe me out.
Maybe I should just give it up and get dentures?
The time to take that final humble will come, of course, when I take me own “ground sweat.” But death—while related to aging—is a topic for another day, another blog entry.
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