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Does Life Begin At 40?

Started by Konki, April 14, 2018, 03:21:58 PM

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Cerys

#60
Quote from: RedRevolver on April 16, 2018, 01:24:49 AM
Comedy writing's never going to be a thing I can do when I've felt so terminally depressed for so long.

Tell that to Spike Milligan.

Edit - sorry, that sounds all kinds of dismissive.  Seriously, though, many legends of comedy have suffered from nasty and prolonged bouts of depression.  Please don't stop trying.

Desirable Industrial Unit

Quote from: RedRevolver on April 16, 2018, 01:24:49 AM
That said, I'm 26 in two months and I don't think I can really restart anything.

Don't be a daft biscuit.

Everything is ridiculously difficult, and I mean everything, but you're on a forum that's generally full of older bastards who have, in several cases that I know of including my own, completely re-started at an older age than yours.  Remember that you make the rules, it's only over when you want it to be.  Go for a walk, think about that novel that you probably have in you.

Paul Calf

Quote from: RedRevolver on April 16, 2018, 01:24:49 AM
Good on you for feeling really positive, it's great to be able to achieve new starts. I don't know what you're embarking on, but if it's a radical change then really very well done for doing it and being so optimistic.

That said, I'm 26 in two months and I don't think I can really restart anything. I'm of the opinion life starts at birth and ends when you die, whenever and however that's achieved. I'm aiming for dead within the year, might start drinking just to achieve that goal. Comedy writing's never going to be a thing I can do when I've felt so terminally depressed for so long.



There's no age limit to just saying "Fuck it, I'm going to do something different"

Beagle 2

I remember being 25 and thinking I was a busted flush, too old to achieve any of the things I wanted to. Ridiculously naive in retrospect. Everything good in my life I made happen after 27, and now I'm nearly 40 I think the opposite, that there's still plenty of time to achieve a bunch more ambitions, particularity creative ones. Maybe that's just as deluded, but I feel a lot better about it.

Ray Travez

Quote from: biggytitbo on April 14, 2018, 10:34:12 PM

It's too terrible to describe, which is why i have already described it on this forum.

Did you buy a day-return to Hull? :(

Konki

Quote from: Beagle 2 on April 16, 2018, 09:04:30 AM
I remember being 25 and thinking I was a busted flush, too old to achieve any of the things I wanted to. Ridiculously naive in retrospect. Everything good in my life I made happen after 27, and now I'm nearly 40 I think the opposite, that there's still plenty of time to achieve a bunch more ambitions, particularity creative ones. Maybe that's just as deluded, but I feel a lot better about it.

Indeed. At 30 I was made redundant from a job I'd spent a lot of time and effort working towards and the great relationship I was in hit the rocks. I went through a really dark period and contemplated all sorts of horrible shit. Now, ten years on, I'm happily married and have a new career I'm much happier with, the work suits me more and the people are good. There's plenty of time.

I also give much less of a shit about a whole host of stuff now which is definitely the best thing about getting older.

Icehaven

Quote from: Konki on April 16, 2018, 12:33:38 PM
Indeed. At 30 I was made redundant from a job I'd spent a lot of time and effort working towards and the great relationship I was in hit the rocks. I went through a really dark period and contemplated all sorts of horrible shit. Now, ten years on, I'm happily married and have a new career I'm much happier with, the work suits me more and the people are good. There's plenty of time.

About 10 years ago I was talking to a very highly strung friend who'd just broken up with yet another boyfriend and was just generally unhappy with her lot in life, and she kept saying ''I'm sorry I turned out like this, I'm just sad my life has ended up like this.'' She was about 25. I was about 30 and just tried, without being too patronising, to explain that at 25 you haven't 'ended up' anywhere, you're 5 years younger than me and I still feel a bit like I'm waiting for my life to start.

In the event I had to wait another 6 years but it was worth it, meanwhile my friend's high-strungness was finally diagnosed as bi-polar disorder, which she now manages really well with meds, is in a semi-successful band and hasn't had a shitty relationship for years so writing herself off at 25 was more than a bit premature.

Dr Syntax Head

Quote from: icehaven on April 16, 2018, 12:48:03 PM
About 10 years ago I was talking to a very highly strung friend who'd just broken up with yet another boyfriend and was just generally unhappy with her lot in life, and she kept saying ''I'm sorry I turned out like this, I'm just sad my life has ended up like this.'' She was about 25. I was about 30 and just tried, without being too patronising, to explain that at 25 you haven't 'ended up' anywhere, you're 5 years younger than me and I still feel a bit like I'm waiting for my life to start.

In the event I had to wait another 6 years but it was worth it, meanwhile my friend's high-strungness was finally diagnosed as bi-polar disorder, which she now manages really well with meds, is in a semi-successful band and hasn't had a shitty relationship for years so writing herself off at 25 was more than a bit premature.

This resonates. I think I've been both writing myself off and being extremely optimistic about my life in cycles. I'm not bi-polar though. I found that one of the things that really helps destroy a realistic sense of self is social comparison. I started playing guitar at 18 and read about Van Halen who started when he was like 3 or something and since that I never felt good enough and wrote off a music career, my whole life. I wasn't to know I'd grow out of that type of music and now record the sort of music I like but I've always felt it's too late for me. It isn't but I can't shake that wasted my life feeling and I'm too old for anything now. Then a wave of positivity will sweep over and I feel optimistic about my future. It's just difficult to hold on to that when everything is falling down around you.

Sorry, rambling but my point was social comparison (Facebook is fucking evil) is very very damaging. That could be a whole other thread though.

TrenterPercenter

I was just in a conversation where the person said "he was doing that back in 1992, you probably weren't even born then".

I did a camp little skip back to my desk and then considered the poor lady's mental well-being and eyesight.


Soup

Funny so many people should mention the mid-20s - I'm 25 and have only recently got over a sort of quarter life crisis by realising that, obviously, there is loads of life ahead of me and that I actually have no desire to trade places with my more "successful" peers. I think there's something about that time in your life that makes it easy to despair - for the first time you don't feel like you're all youthful potential, and certainly a bit of morbidity starts creeping in. That said, you have to make time to enjoy the perks of where you're at. Certainly I like that I can drink until 5 and go on big old drug benders. And there's a certain giddiness around millennial desperation which is not entirely displeasing, a sort of punk rock "no future" except you're wearing chinos and actually quite hoping for a future please.

I can see 40 being a similar deal, a sudden realisation you have ceased to be in any way "young". But there's a lot to be said for the quiet confidence you see in a lot of middle aged people, who've left the youthful neuroses around status, achievement, and "success" (however nebulously it might be thought out) behind them. My dad had a little wobble at 40, but definitely from 50 onwards he's been a picture of relaxed contentment really, even if it is a contentment which is constructed largely around wine, crosswords and early nights. There's something to be said for the simplicity of it, I suppose.

In summation: you're all doing grand.

Dr Syntax Head

As I get older I keep a picture of George Clooney in my wallet for inspiration

Chairman Bodog

Whatever we think of Derk Gervais he did wind up achieving his dream at 40. Some inspo for y'all and m'e.

mothman

Quote from: Cerys on April 16, 2018, 01:20:00 AM
3.141592653.

Well, there you go. Unlike Morrison's, at CaB you CAN get pi before 9am.

VelourSpirit

I'm 20 and everything makes me feel so sick with worry and I can't get a degree what the fuck do I do everything looks impossible

Cerys

A degree isn't as necessary as all that.  There are people out there without degrees who are doing pretty damn well, and people with degrees who are in careers totally unconnected to their subject of choice.  Don't stress too much.  Enjoy your whippersnappery.

Sherringford Hovis

Quote from: Soup on April 16, 2018, 01:42:45 PM
I can see 40 being a similar deal, a sudden realisation you have ceased to be in any way "young". But there's a lot to be said for the quiet confidence you see in a lot of middle aged people, who've left the youthful neuroses around status, achievement, and "success" (however nebulously it might be thought out) behind them.

They had it right in the Sixties: don't trust anyone over 30. For a lot of over-40s, it's not "relaxed contentment" - it's resignation. And rather than sudden realisation, more a gradual pathetic acceptance of their lot in life fermented by societal expectation and the shackles of responsibility, both career and familial. And fear, the chickenshit bastards - nothing narrows the mind more than the feeling that purely by having been around a few years you've now got something to lose.

All three of these ogres crept up on me almost imperceptably, and I have to consciously fight them off when they awaken. Staying imaginative, enthusiastic about new interests and open to new ideas as you get older takes an effort that most people seem unwilling to expend - life has just ground off any edges that cut and clouded any surfaces that sparkled. My younger brother in his Twenties and Thirties was such an amazingly top bloke - politically aware, talented semi-pro musician, a huge circle of friends and an all-round good egg; in his early Forties he's just another overtired office-Dad who leadenly parrots whatever mind-rot Metro tells him he should be thinking that day, joylessly beholden to his ill-behaved crotch-fruit and ungrateful harridan of a wife (who used to be a top bird before middle-age wankerdom stole her away too). As one gets older, Timothy Leary's exhortation to "Find the others" becomes all-important. In my early Thirties, I traded in most of my friends and acquaintances for younger models, who took a decade to become as stale as the faces they'd usurped. Having been largely adrift at 40, I'm lucky enough in the five years since to have hooked up with some delightfully mad bastards similarly spitting in entropy's eye, raging at the dying of the light. And I imagine that most of them will have fallen by the wayside by 2025. And that's the reason I keep coming back to CaB - you lot are certainly "other".

It's a tragedy of the human condition that the older they get, even the most engaging, attractive and outgoing people are destined to become boring banal bell-ends. The Daily Mail will never go bust because as its current readership drift up the crematoria chimney, incessant battalions of beige buffoons will lockstep into their Lakeland electric foot-cosies.




Ian Drunken Smurf

In my 41st year, I've been mainly changing nationality and finding out that I am going to be father of twins. Hopefully the former happens before the latter...

Johnny Yesno

Quote from: Sherringford Hovis on April 18, 2018, 03:29:05 AM
It's a tragedy of the human condition that the older they get, even the most engaging, attractive and outgoing people are destined to become boring banal bell-ends. The Daily Mail will never go bust because as its current readership drift up the crematoria chimney, incessant battalions of beige buffoons will lockstep into their Lakeland electric foot-cosies.

Cheered me right up, that did.

steve98

Quote from: Konki on April 14, 2018, 04:52:26 PM
You say that but I actually did shit myself a few weeks back (for the first time in about 20 years) while I was ill. I was going to start a thread about it once back to full fitness but completely forgot. Thanks for reminding me. Still, only fouling oneself twice in 20 years isn't a bad ratio I guess.
To those who've never shat themselves it's a bad ratio.

SteveDave

I became 40 on New Years Eve and so far it's been OK.

I got my first UTI the other day which is nice.

massive bereavement

Quote from: TwinPeaks on April 18, 2018, 01:42:56 AM
I'm 20 and everything makes me feel so sick with worry and I can't get a degree what the fuck do I do everything looks impossible


As Brian Eno said "My first message to people is, try not to get a job. That doesn't mean try not to do anything, it means try to leave yourself in a position where you do the things that you want to do with your time."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-53tzx69fM

wooders1978

I turn 40 in July so I bloody hope so
Mind you, the body's shutting down - arthritis kicking in, hair fucking off, everything is going grey, memory is shit - hangovers are seriously awful and last for days - it's all feeling very bleak to be honest

Icehaven

Quote from: wooders1978 on April 18, 2018, 01:29:26 PM
I turn 40 in July so I bloody hope so
Mind you, the body's shutting down - arthritis kicking in, hair fucking off, everything is going grey, memory is shit - hangovers are seriously awful and last for days - it's all feeling very bleak to be honest

My knees have been playing up for months now, really hurting for weeks at a time for no apparent reason, or hurting going up and down stairs even when they're otherwise not too bad etc. I just couldn't understand it and thought I must either have damaged them somehow, slept funny or something, or there was something actually wrong. A worrying number of people (usually older than me) that I've mentioned it to have, on learning I'm 38/39, just nodded and said ''Well, that's what starts to happen around 40, get used to it." Seeing ads for stuff like Voltarol, which seem to  suggest relatively young (i.e. not decrepit) and otherwise healthy people apparently just live with painful joints and backs without there apparently being any definable reason or cure for the pain really concerns me, surely 'natural wear and tear' shouldn't kick in to the point you need medication and heat packs etc. just to live your life normally unless you've actually injured yourself or you're geriatric?

Paul Calf

Body falling to pieces to the extent that I might have to have bits cut off soon. My mind seems to be sorting itself out though - I've learned three new programming languages in 2018 and am much less of a social basket case (although still quite a social basket case).


Perhaps dementia's just really enjoyable?

Perhaps the slide into twilight is like coming up on a pill or down on an opiate?

Perhaps knowledge really does come with death's release.



As you can see, I'm still a lugubrious, depressive fucker despite all this.

bgmnts

Being mega fat and broken now means i wont experience the huge sense of loss and decay as i get older.

Every cloud!

Sorry if this is a rude question, but was there a time when you weren't overweight?

bgmnts

Quote from: to infect aside on April 18, 2018, 03:41:02 PM
Sorry if this is a rude question, but was there a time when you weren't overweight?

I am eternal, child.

Nah, probably 17/18. Then a period around 20 21 when i was the perfect level of happy chub. Then my body just turned into a Fiat and just broke down.

pancreas

Quote from: Paul Calf on April 16, 2018, 08:55:30 AM
There's no age limit to just saying "Fuck it, I'm going to do something different"

Yes, look at me for instance. I started taking organ lessons a couple of months ago and I'm 37. I can now play not one but two Bach Preludes and Fugues.

(Well, they're probably not by Bach actually—the actual ones by Bach are much harder, but still.)

Pick a thing and start doing it, why not?

Dex Sawash


Paul Calf

Quote from: pancreas on April 18, 2018, 04:09:05 PM
Yes, look at me for instance. I started taking organ lessons a couple of months ago and I'm 37. I can now play not one but two Bach Preludes and Fugues.

(Well, they're probably not by Bach actually—the actual ones by Bach are much harder, but still.)

Pick a thing and start doing it, why not?

I've been lots of things

Dole scum
Wannabe actor
1st-gen rave drugfucker
Ghost tour guide
Chef
Factory worker
Fruit picker
Door-to-door karate salesman
Project manager

And I'm thick and lazy.