The Halfway Point: Reflections on Turning Forty
The average man in America lives for 78 years. I just turned 40. I am now past the halfway point of my life based on the two most salient facts that insurance actuaries care about when calculating those sorts of things.
Obligations define my schedule and reflect my priorities at this stage of life.
Most mornings start just after 6 AM. I either hear footsteps coming up the stairs as our 8-year-old comes to ask for breakfast or the rhythm of our 20-month-old banging against the crib as he tries to soothe himself back to sleep.
I feel the cold kitchen floor on my feet while making my daughter breakfast. An egg-in-a-hole or pancakes is the most frequent request. The 20-month-old almost always starts his day gnawing through a banana.
I drink coffee while staring at my phone as the kids eat. Most nights, my wife and I watch TV silently on the couch while one of us reads our phone after the kids are in bed.
Over the last year, I’ve continued the gradual elimination of vices from my life that started after our first child was born. Coffee is often decaf. Late nights are beyond a rare occurrence. I gave up smoking pot years ago. In many ways, I’m a more polished version of myself. Smoother, but also less interesting.
Occasionally I will find myself enrobed in melancholy brought on by the relentless responsibilities of adulthood and the exhaustion of being a parent with two young children. An emotional greyness creeps in. The accumulated stresses of life made visible through negative emotion.
Gratitude is usually a balm to these feelings.
At 40 years old, the choices that define our day-to-day existence are largely set. If you’re lucky, you’ve chosen a place to live, a career to pursue, and built a family. But, those same choices also eliminated all of the potential lives you once dreamed about at a younger age.
The National Bureau of Economic Research did a study tracking people’s happiness as they age. The resulting chart takes the shape of a U-curve (or if you prefer irony: a smile). It says that on average the happiness of individuals reaches its lowest point at 47 years old. I guess that makes me 80% towards the least happy I’ll ever be. After that, it’s all upside.
The person I am at 40 isn’t who I envisioned being at age 20. That version of me would consider my lifestyle utterly suburban. He’d probably ask if I followed through on my plan to spend a month in a new and different country each and every year. Or if I had sold my company and retired by age 35 as I had dreamed of.
On both accounts, I’d have to disappoint the person I used to be with the response of “No, things didn’t work out that way.”
Becoming a normie middle-aged dad works the same way that most things do in life. “Gradually, then suddenly.” to paraphrase Hemingway.
On the other hand, the rootless life that I envisioned in my early 20s would not have been as fulfilling as the one I have now. Responsibilities to people other than ourselves create a sense of meaning that is greater than the hedonistic pleasure of a forever adolescence focused on finding new adventures at every turn.
The routine of daily life with young kids is necessary, but it does make the days blend together. A blur of activity interrupted by the occasional spark of joy that life with children brings. But love isn’t love without sacrifice, and parenthood requires some level of losing one’s own individual identity to become part of a greater whole. The same is true of marriage.
There are days I dream of the respite that solitude can bring, but I don’t miss the loneliness of extended adolescence. I wouldn’t trade one for the other.
The metaphor of life as a journey is apt, if overused. But perhaps it explains why middle age feels somewhat unsatisfying. You’re not at the final destination so you can’t appreciate how far you came, and the excitement of just beginning has long passed.
You’re merely in the middle. Waiting to arrive.
