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Comment by wincy | Hacker News Reader

At 35 I started calling myself “middle aged” and my coworkers around the same age looked at me like I was insane and then a rather uncomfortable discussion ensued about age and average lifespan in the US. Nobody in their 30s wants to think that they are in fact “middle aged” and it might be the time to have a “midlife crisis”.

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It's even worse when you take into consideration quality of life. For many people their last decade may come with severe medical issues.

That's why you need to let go of this idea of some awesome 2 decades of retirement where you finally get to enjoy and do all the things you want.

You'll be broken, half your friends are dead or dying, the kids won't visit, and you have no energy.

I'm being intentionally brutal to make it as clear as I can. Whatever you want to do, do it NOW. During good years.

Or even worse, you could die in a car accident tomorrow. So much for a midlife crisis, let alone happy retirement.

Obviously, throwing the future to the wind and only caring about the present is stupid, but like you say there is absolutely an argument to be made that we should make the most of the time we have right now because tomorrow isn't guaranteed.

Retirement is a new thing, however. In fact, this is the first generation to retire with money being paid for by the current working generation. If you are using that same system for your retirement, you are basically betting on the new-born of today to pay for your retirement.

35 years from now.

Think about how much the world, technology, politics and ideology have changed since 1987. If you think the born-now will honor your retirement claim (that you/gov are making since new-born can't agree?) then, yeah, go for that retirement thing.

I think a lot of it is that people mostly think of it as "the middle phase of adult life" rather than "the middle of your entire life"; 20s and 30s are when people traditionally establish their careers and families, 40s and 50s are the "middle age" where people would settle down into a routine with their career, raising their kids, etc., and then after that they'd start thinking about retirement and the "golden years" so to speak. If someone has followed this sort of pattern in their own life, it's probably pretty jarring to think of yourself as only just approaching the tail end of your establishing phase of your adult life and then have it pointed out that you might be past the midpoint of your lifespan.

That said, I've also always found the terms "middle aged" and "midlife crisis" to be weird due to them not really making a lot of sense literally. Idioms like this seem pretty common in everyday language though, to the point of being standardized; as a young kid I was shocked when my punishment for some minor thing that was supposed to be for the "weekend" extended into Sunday despite the fact that our family calendar clearly showed it as the beginning of the week, not the end. It's not just language either; the earliest New Year's Eve I can remember, my parents had a very hard time convincing me that we had changed from December 31 to January first at 12:00 because it seemed so unreasonable to me that 12 would be the first hour of the day instead of the last, and I felt cheated that I didn't get to stay up until 1:00 like I expected.

It's all about the culture of your location. In New York City, 35 is young and vibrant and full of life.

I came here to say this.

'Midlife' is not about how long do you live, it's about how advanced you are in the expectations of the social life script, after 'raving youth' and 'settled elderly'.

Some cultures have four-part scripts, some three -- not all two.

I once read a book about Ulyssean aging, IIRC. It described persons such as Thor Hyerdal who in essence started new lives (full of recognized accomplishment) near age 60.

Yeah I'm 34 in SF, turning 35 this autumn, and feeling like I'm literally in my prime. Old enough to have matured, experienced enough to have some good battle scars, young and energetic enough that there's decades of quality life ahead of me.

The mindset stability that came in the past few years has been nice. Hustling for the shiniest immediate goal in sight no longer appeals, but there's plenty of energy to go after long-term goals in ridiculously effective ways. The sort of laser focus and disregard for extraneous bullshit that 10 years ago I couldn't even imagine was possible.

It's nice. Life is barely getting started.

A friend died at 51 not long ago. If you die at is age, you are already 68% of the way there. It's not barely getting started, it's behind you.

More realistically, a man who is 35 years old has a life expectancy of another 43 years, so not quite there yet.

Sure but the effectiveness of upcoming years seems much higher. Where I used to toil for 10 hours to do something, I can do the same thing now in 1 hour.

Resources are higher too. For lots of things that used to take time, I can just pay someone.

And lets not forget I spent the first 10 to 15 years being basically useless.

> More realistically, a man who is 35 years old has a life expectancy of another 43 years, so not quite there yet.

It's crazy how much this can vary. I'm 34, but I'm female and from a family where multiple people have lived to be over 110. I've always estimated my 'mid life'/halfway mark to be about 45.

> Yeah I'm 34...and feeling like I'm literally in my prime.

You are. Most people don't realize that until they're in their 40s.

He's not. Assuming he's male, physical peak is near 26, intellectual peak early to mid 20s. This doesn't mean you can't learn new things nor does it mean your body isn't fit anymore, it just means you're already on the way down.

It won't feel that way though, I understand.

With age comes the wisdom on how to best apply the learning.

And the wisdom for deciding what is worth learning. Don't underestimate that effectiveness multiplier.

> Assuming he's male, physical peak is near 26,

My measurable physical stats are much better than they were at 26. Yes I notice junk food a little sooner and can't handle as much alcohol. But I can run a marathon faster, do better in the boxing ring, and can lift more weight with higher volume.

The main physical drawback that I can see are slower reflexes. That comes out in the boxing ring when going against people 10+ years younger.

> intellectual peak early to mid 20s.

Depends what kind of intellectual peak you measure. My focus is better and more intense. My ability to learn new stuff has greatly increased because I have a bigger vaster framework to hang new knowledge onto.

And I am infinitely better at solving difficult problems in a dumb easy way because I no longer care about showing off how smart I am. This not only makes my solutions easier to build, they're also easier to maintain so future me will have less work to do.

What I'm probably less good at these days is waxing poetically about the sort of very deep thoughts that feel deep to a 25 year old. And pointless brain twisty puzzles that I was never good at anyway.

I'd say these days, intellectually speaking, I'm more of a reliable orc that plows through problems with brute force, than an elf fleeting about using dexterity.

+1 on the boxing part. My problem is more about stamina and cardio than it is about reflexes. I do see the reflex problem so when going against a couple of weight classes below myself, heavier people tend to be a tad slower anyways. But then I reached a point where the younger folks tend to go easier on me, not sure if I like that. Not that I train half as much as I wished I did, Covid really put a dent into that...

I wonder if this is the result of being surrounded by so much marketing.

Coincidentally, I read an article in the Economist about male fertility that said 35 is when a man's sperm starts to become less effective. So, slightly less than full of life, I would say.

From about 40, I found myself thinking more in terms of how much time I have left and what I can still realistically hope to achieve, rather than in terms of how long I've lived.

I was 43 when my father was diagnosed with a bad cancer that would kill him two years later (at 69).

Those things together triggered a lot of things that I think made up a mid life crisis, now I'm 48 and it seems to be getting better.

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