Person to Person: The Middle Ages

Everyday we get a little bit older, and that's okay.

This edition was inspired by a text exchange I had with Dave Madden of Shenny about the tropes of the midlife crisis. Read his take here.

Hey. I hope you are doing as well as possible, given the perpetual thrum of governmental malice and uncertainty in the air. I feel a kaleidoscope of emotions daily, most of which I would prefer not to be having: fury, worry, outrage, despair — but I also have hope. I remind myself, perhaps naively, that the people ruining everything are incompetent idiots and will ultimately be felled by their stupidity. Still: we cannot abide people being kidnapped, deported, and tortured. We must act, however we see fit. We can beat these amoral assholes. We can and we must.

In January I quit Instagram and finally disavowed Twitter for good. (I haven’t really used Facebook for years, though I sometimes go there to reread correspondence with my grandmother, who died last September. Our old exchanges feel heartbreakingly alive; the cheery messaging interface teases me with the false expectation that I will receive replies to new messages I might send to her.) I am trying to read more printed material, trying to spend less money. My web design work with nonprofits — the bulk of my income — is imperiled due to government cuts; I might be forced to get the first “job job” I’ve had in twenty years.

In the meantime, I’m teaming up with friends on various projects: a business designing pitch decks for the entertainment industry called Big Deck Energy, a podcast about AI-generated music called AwesomeSongs.net (coming soon), an app to help people coordinate activities and strengthen real-life friendships called SignUp Sheet (also coming soon). Another friend and I are reading War and Peace together over the course of the year. Life feels full, if uneasy.

I am also, along with many of my friends, finally getting serious about drinking less alcohol. My love for booze will never die, but days are so much better when I haven’t imbibed the night before.

My friend Dave and I were texting about the effects of cutting back: Less bloat! Better sleep! He said he’d been hoping it would help with his acid reflux, but so far, no luck. Then he said, “God we’re having SUCH A MIDLIFE CONVERSATION.”

I told him that lately I’ve been feeling like I’m in a twentieth-century novel about the middle-class midlife experience, with friends divorcing and dating and dealing with the challenges of parenting and aging — something like Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, James Salter’s Light Years, Laurie Colwin’s Family Happiness, Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters. In my imagined personal version of this novel, I’d be the perpetually single friend with a cadre of casual lovers, doling out sympathy and wry advice to the protagonists. People would call me from phone booths in the rain and invite themselves over to my tasteful bohemian apartment, where we’d analyze everyone’s behavior over wine and cigarettes and fancy cheeses from Zabar’s.

What surprises me most about my forties is how much everyone talks about being in their forties. Maybe we’ve always noticed ourselves going through each stage of life, but for the first time we’re aware of a physical decline, and it freaks us out. We are having colonoscopies, we are wearing readers. But more than anything, we are fretting about looking older and reassuring each other that no, we don’t look older, we look the same. “Seriously, you look like you’re max 35. Seriously.”

The White Lotus friends had the conversation, too

Some of us are contemplating Botox and have started using Frownies. (I asked a Frownie-wearer if they’re working, and she said, “They are, because I’ve decided they are.”) If life were fair, we could freeze our physical selves at whatever age we felt our most vibrant and confident — I’d go with 37 — and just get to be that version until our time is up. We’re afraid of death, but we’re equally afraid of society deeming us irrelevant sad sacks on sight.

When I mentioned feeling like I’m living in a novel, Dave asked, “How do we break out of it without falling into midlife crisis tropes of pretending we’re still young?”

Midlife crisis tropes — the hot young girlfriend, the sports car, the radical haircut — are hacky attempts to reclaim time that once felt like an investment and now feels wasted. What looks to others like pretending to be young is often the first stage of grief: denial. As someone who dated a much younger person after a major breakup, I can tell you it works until you emerge from the haze you didn’t realize you were in. (And then you think, “Oh shit, what have I done?”)

But rebellious behavior also acts like a shot in the arm, a shake of the snow globe. Daily life in these middle years can feel like an endless checklist of things that need to get done before you can claim some thoughts for yourself. A makeover or a fling or an Eat, Pray, Love-style vacation reminds us that we possess potential — the same potential we had as kids to be whatever we want when we grow up. Who cares if people are embarrassed on our behalf?

Most people lapse back into their sedate middle-aged selves when the snow globe settles, though, so what’s the real answer? How do we cultivate positive, sustaining internal energy? Our cultural obsession with self-optimization and self-care feels unhealthy and competitve, a scheme to get us to buy trackers and creams, to make us think more about how we are viewed by the world than how we can enjoy existing in it. Focusing instead on the limitless delights life offers is much more fun than whatever this guy is doing.

This person is not happy and is going to die like the rest of us

Pursue joy; be good. I feel certain that the answer lies in seeking pleasure of all magnitudes, in trying to make life easier for others, and in doing as little damage to Earth and its creatures as we can muster. These pursuits sometimes collide; if I were a better person I’d be a vegetarian and stop using Saran wrap.

It is hard to turn your focus outward if you don’t feel comfortable in your own sagging skin, though, and for many of us, the changes our looks undergo in our fifth decade feel genuinely disturbing, like problems that need to be addressed. But they aren’t problems, and they don’t need to be addressed. To appear to be getting older is okay; it is okay for your corporeal form to reflect reality. I am not advocating not taking care of your body, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t do whatever you want to make yourself feel confident when you look in the mirror. I have been dyeing my hair for more than half my life, so I have no leg to stand on here.

But we could all benefit from thinking less about how we look. The people who love us will still love us with our crags and paunch and skin spots. I am saying nothing new, but I want to say it anyway, because the social pressure to remain youthful in appearance — to trick people who don’t know us into thinking we’ve lived less life than we have — is so pervasive and maddening and pointless.

I want strangers to think I’m younger than I am, too. But I want to stop wanting it. I have been in situations where people are nice to me because they like how I look and in situations where people ignore me because they don’t (presumably). Maybe the world will always work this way, but I don’t want to endorse it or bend myself to it.

When the spark of my soul, the purest version of myself, is lighting me up and guiding my path, I don’t give a damn about what I look like, and neither does anybody else. That is freedom, and it is the plane on which I’d like to live. It is possible for anyone at any age.

Recommendations

War and Peace
Tolstoy’s simple sentences contain magic. I was not expecting this giant novel to be so easy to read, so entertaining and cinematic and insightful. It is great.

Ladies & Gentlemen... 50 Years of SNL Music
I have been telling everyone to watch this documentary because it is so artfully made and enjoyable. Go watch it!

Zara Home
Sometimes when I’m all worked up about the dissolution of our institutions I soothe myself by looking at beautiful furniture and glassware and linens. The Zara Home newsletter is one of the few I open 100% of the time. There’s some really nice stuff here, if you’re in the market for home goods.