Polity: Forty
36 Responses
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Well that's depressing.
I find the best approach is to count backwards from 40 (I'm currently 34 again and loving it) and then when you reach zero for the second time start counting up again.
Honestly, when you consider the alternatives, turning 40's not so bad.
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I had a good forties. It's possible :) I'm looking forward to feeling happier later, though. The 50s so far haven't been terrific.
the State can’t really do much
You might be interested in 'What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society' It's wide-ranging (so far - I haven't finished it!) in considering the ways society creates identity, and what a market-based society does to individuals.
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Yay for Jane Kelsey ( although she is no longer forty)
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Closer to 50, life's better than ever. No lame rationalisations, sour grapes or excuses.
OK. One quick peek under the hood. Because things are better than I've ever known, I suddenly find myself more frightened of dying than ever.
Or, I suppose it could just be a function of age. I like growing old because you become both less tolerant AND more sensitive. It's like the perfect storm of a belligerent old git! Bah!
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I think the other thing about one's forties is that it's the decade bits start to fall off and you start thinking about mortality. That can take some getting through. But, y'know, you do.
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It would help if famous people would stop dying for a bit. If you had the standard dose of popular culture as a kid or young adult, then 20 or 30 years later those sports stars, musicians, actors and general telly faces are now in their dotage, and increasingly, their graves. Barely a day goes by without another obit for a name I recall from the 1970s or '80s. That adds to the ageing process like smoking 40-a-day.
This is why we should turn off the TV and read more books. The writers are already dead when you get to know them - or if not, it's a pleasant surprise.
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“can the government help?”
It used too, but the problems rolling down the tracks towards you young 'uns just makes our current lot fall back on trite, small minded solutions, while touting what a great job thy're doing. A fools paradise.
And as a 60 something I kinda look forward to dying just hope its not to painful.
Where are the drugs? yes the illegal ones -
The 40s have been good to me.
I actually decided I didn't really care about getting any further up the ladder by the time I was about 38, and actually took a step back from there - much less stress.
Paid off the mortgage when times were good instead of buying a new car (and we finished the day before my wife got made redundant) and now I'm pretty relaxed.
I took my current job because I wanted to work with the people here, doing the things they're doing, rather than because I cared about it looking good on the CV. That too is fairly liberating.
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Knowing that the middle-aged, supposed powerhouses of the workplace, self-identified rocks in their family, usually aren’t as bulletproof as they project is a good start.
Exactly so.
I think the thing that I'm finding hard at present (staring 50 in the eye come January) is that we have several friends and family members who have terminal diseases. People of our age and up. And it's becoming more usual for us now to hear of another person who is facing serious physical illness.
On the other hand, now that our children are teenagers, we're free to do many more things. I rather like my children so this is not free in the sense of escape, but free to do a few more things on our own schedule. Like going out to movies, or heading down to Wellington for a concert, or vaguely saying, "Shouldn't you kids be going to bed now?" instead of going through that nightly hell two hours with small children.
On the gripping hand, that means that they also go off and do their own thing. And our eldest will be leaving to go south for university in less than 18 months now. That's exciting, and I will miss her terribly.
On yet another hand, my long held desire to effect change through senior political roles may never come to fruition either, just because I'm too old to really get going in politics.
Life, eh.
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For me, 40 is the age of divorces and diseases. The best thing, though, is how it's generally so much better than the hellish nightmare world threatened by the "Life Begins at 40" song.
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chris, in reply to
my long held desire to effect change through senior political roles may never come to fruition either
This is a major failing of modern photogenic democracies, our kaumātua are relegated to political irrelevance and this is largely mirrored in society too, We need more leadership in the Corbyn, Sanders, Biden, Clinton age bracket. Hazarding a guess I’d speculate looking at average age that at any point in the last 30 years the Chinese Politburo has had 10-15 years more political experience than the western cabinets it’s been competing against, and it really shows. John Key is an adolescent and the puppet master Joyce isn’t any better.
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Sue,
According to my very wise & 40 years older than me Mother "0 Birthdays are the worst". So many, too many expectations come with them. Possibly a bit like a 21st i suspect - I was too ill to have one but in not having one i felt i was missing out somewhere.
But if you just ignore the 0 and act like the first number you'll be fine. It also feels like people write tomes about turning 40 or a 0 year, but nothing about 43 or 44, and I think it's because the is 0 pressure around those dates, 0 expectations.
Trust me on this - I'm turning 44 this year and i still live with my Mum. Not because she needs looking after, nope I'm the one with the giant medication box she just takes a fish oil capsule twice a day and looks after me.
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Rosemary McDonald, in reply to
On the gripping hand, that means that they also go off and do their own thing.
Yes, they'll potter off into the wild blue yonder, get an edjucashun and a whopping great big student loan, a marginal paying job and...
MOVE BACK HOME!
So, at 55 and 65 respectively the Old People bugger off in their old Bus and leave 'em to it.
(The OPs return periodically to cook decent meals, bake, restore a semblance of domestic order, bath the dogs, and utilise the YP''s internet)
Modern Life.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
For me, 40 is the age of divorces and diseases. The best thing, though, is how it's generally so much better than the hellish nightmare world threatened by the "Life Begins at 40" song.
True. But so is, say, being a character in The Walking Dead.
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Mine have both left in the past 6 months, we sent them off with degrees and no loans (put money aside 15 years ago, leveraged the 10% bonus for paying off loans early nefore the Nats nuked it), now they have jobs (sadly far away) we feel like we have won at parenthood. I did have an interesting text conversation with my daughter when she got her first real pay check ("this can't be right, where has all my money gone?")
Now in our late 50s we're free (well except for the dog) and feel that while we can maybe we could spend a few years travelling - I can work anywhere - who knows, maybe 2 months in Paris, 3 in Shenzhen, 6 back in SF, a few more in NY - spend some quality time in those places we visited for a week and wished we could spend more
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Loss.
How to deal with it.
Compassion.
How to have more of it.
These are the things I learn as I age.
In my forties (late late forties), I lost my world. I found renewed passion and vigour and a new purpose in other people.
It's okay. -
I’m not yet at the magic number, but all the same I’ve felt this whole ‘failure to launch’ thing. Being undiagnosed with ASD and subsequently being misunderstood can be a big factor in that.
After bombing out of university in my early 20s, I very much played it straight. I finally got some meaningful work later in that age decade, but the minimum wage no longer buys as much as it used to, and thanks to the Internet of Things I now seem to find myself in the same boat as Detroit’s car workers during the 1970s.
DevAcademy is seemingly my last chance to debunk the notion of “if you haven’t made it by 40, then you’ll never make it.” If I can somehow find a spare $11k without having to sell cocaine or pull a bank job. The $28m that Prostetnic Vogon Joyce is spending on the IT Grad School would be much better spent on apprenticeship-style schemes like DevAcademy.
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First 40 years trying to kill ourselves and second 40 trying to save ourselves has some resonance for me. In early my 50's now, career ok, (not stellar but fine) kids independent, more or less, we are eating better, drinking less, feeling sore for no reason, enjoying walking the dog, still getting the odd surf in, learning to live as a couple again, mortality reminder from one aging parent (all we have left), to be honest its a ball!
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I went through 40 by the book, feeling the same bummed out nowhere-man kind of thing that many report. It was bloody unpleasant, but for me, it's passed. It's like I worked through the stages of grief for my young life, or something. "By the book" for a person of my socioeconomic demography that is.
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Forty didn't bother me at all, just an excuse for a party, but 50! Not that it's bad, more a sense of disbelief. "I can't be 50, surely some mistake". That's mature, sensible, responsible. I don't even feel properly grown up yet, let alone old.
That said, it's rather nice. From years of planning holidays around school holidays, when it's hard to get accomodation and even harder to find things to keep the child amused, we're now at the stage of 'We're off, see you in a week". I'm still enjoying the novelty.
I haven't changed the world, and probably won't now, but I've also stopped worrying about that. I still follow politics, but with a detached interest rather than a passion. Increasingly, politics seems divorced from substance. There are serious issues to deal with, but politics is all spin and show and fluff. I find it hard to take it seriously any more.
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andin, in reply to
Altruism the human quality, that’s learned.
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Amy Gale, in reply to
DevAcademy is seemingly my last chance to debunk the notion of “if you haven’t made it by 40, then you’ll never make it.” If I can somehow find a spare $11k without having to sell cocaine or pull a bank job.
11k is a startling sum of money for a "nine week part-time remote + nine week on-campus immersive + one week optional career prep" program to become a "junior web developer".
I wonder whether we could have a separate thread for people to give advice about alternatives? Russell?
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Rich of Observationz, in reply to
There are two problems:
- learning how to do programming
- convincing potential employers/clients that you can do programmingThe first part is probably the easier one, if you have the aptitude and background.
(Most people don’t. You need numeracy, a pedantic sense of accuracy and the ability to comprehend and memorise a complex system. If you can’t convert a salary figure into weekly wages, can’t use an apostrophe correctly or can’t make your home internet setup work without help, you probably won’t make a good programmer).
If you manage the first part (and I suspect that most people with the aptitude could learn coding at home for negligible outlay), then you’ve got to work out how to convince employers. Some courses may do this (I’ve heard good things about Rails Girls) but others don’t. And there is already an oversupply of airhead business analysts with BComs and the like.
Working on an open source project, making mobile apps, or developing websites for friends, family or community groups are one way to get valid experience.
The trouble is, of course, that this path involves dedicating a lot of time to unpaid work, which only the already semi-affluent have the ability to do.
(It’s much easier to get a semi-fraudulent mortgage on a shack in Avondale, paint the walls and reseed the lawn and sell it for a 20% profit. That’s the hardworking keewee way)
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izogi, in reply to
If you manage the first part (and I suspect that most people with the aptitude could learn coding at home for negligible outlay), then you’ve got to work out how to convince employers.
Finding out there's even a job to apply for can also be a useful thing.
My perception could be biased through my own experiences, but over time I've found for me that knowing people is frequently a huge factor in landing jobs, probably moreso than being the most highly skilled person possible. Employers often seem to be more comfortable with someone they know plus often that's quicker and easier and less expensive than going through a recruitment process, and many jobs are never advertised. The path for getting into many workplaces is completely unfair.
It doesn't necessarily have to be people from prior workplaces, though, even though that's largely what it's been for me. My wife was finding that her involvement in Toastmasters, which attracts some very diverse crowds, was a factor in where she found out about potential job opportunities. Just from people who knew people who knew someone who was looking for someone, and so on.
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Amy Gale, in reply to
Working on an open source project, making mobile apps, or developing websites for friends, family or community groups are one way to get valid experience.
Another important one for web work is subcontracting for friends/acquaintances who have already gotten a foot in the door. Plus: paid.
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