Reflections on Turning 40
Three Things #69: May 21, 2023
I turned 40 recently. I know that 40 trips around the sun is a totally arbitrary milestone for a bunch of reasons (as a software developer I realize how complex time is and therefore how arbitrary these numbers are). But it’s important to pause and reflect from time to time, and this time is as good an opportunity as any. I spend very little time thinking about my age—none at all, to be honest. Sometimes I even forget my own age and have to do the math to remind myself how old I am. So it takes a big milestone like this one to make me pay attention and realize that I’m not as young as I used to be, and what that means, and what it doesn’t.
Thing #1: Age is Relative
“At age twenty, you worry about what others think about you; at forty, you don’t care what others think about you; and at sixty, you realize that nobody was thinking about you in the first place.” - the 20-40-60 Rule
I don’t have many distinct memories from childhood, but one that’s quite clear is a summer day at the local pool where my family and I spent a lot of time. I remember seeing an older girl on the diving board and thinking to myself, “She looks totally grown up. I wonder when I’ll be grown up like her, so I can use the diving board too.” I think she was 12 years old and thought to myself, “Wow, 12 is really all grown up!” (I don’t know how old I was at the time but I must’ve been something like seven or eight.)
I also remember sitting at the front of the school bus on my way to elementary school, feeling jealous of the “big kids” (who were 13 or 14) at the back of the bus. In high school I remember being jealous of the seniors when I was a freshman, and the same thing happening again in college, and I remember being jealous of the second-year students in grad school when I was a first-year. Each of these occasions seems absurd, tiny, and insignificant in retrospect, but each felt real at the time and the pattern always repeats itself no matter how “big” I get. Today I suppose it’s the friends who are just a little further along in their careers, or who have older kids, that feel like the real “grown ups” to me.
That’s the remarkable thing about growing up: it doesn’t stop. Pick any age, any point that feels infinitely distant (as 12 did at 7), and sure enough, you’ll be there pretty soon. Probably sooner than you expect.
40 feels something like that to me. It felt infinitely distant (and very, very old) until it was imminent, and then it happened very suddenly. I sort of have a split mind about turning 40. On the one hand I feel nothing special at all about it. I don’t feel my age per se, not yet at least. Physically I’m in better shape than I’ve ever been in before. I have tons of energy and, thankfully, no major ailments. But at the same time it feels remarkable that I’m 40. After all, my mom was only 30 when I was born. I’m ten years older than she was when I was born. That thought absolutely blows my mind. If that 12 year old at the pool felt grown up, Mom felt… I don’t know, like an immovable force of the universe that had always been there. She felt timeless. (That seems to be a universal part of childhood, not considering our parents in the context of their own lives, and not being able to because we don’t have that context ourselves.)
At 40 my father was a full professor and owned his own apartment in New York. He had a wife and a son. Upon reflection I realize that I’m in a similar point in both my personal and professional life, but the thought still sort of blows my mind. I haven’t updated my identity or my image of myself, which honestly hasn’t progressed too far beyond the teenager drinking a lot of Coke and staying up late playing video games, not caring much about the wider world and certainly not feeling a lot of responsibility.
When I do on occasion become cognizant of my age it’s usually in a positive light: I’m sort of amazed that people will rent cars to me (that’s been true for a while but it still surprises me), and the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve noticed that, other things equal (i.e., while still saying the same silly things), more people pay attention to what I say and seem to take me seriously. The other place I’ve noticed my age is indirectly, in the people around me: watching friends and peers progress in their careers and family lives.
Anyway, if it wasn’t already obvious, the point is the following, and I know it’s cliche but it’s so true: age is relative and we only really begin to feel old when we begin to think and act old. I try very hard to live every day with the sheer excitement, joy, and sense of wonder of a child, and so far it’s working pretty well (having a one year old in the house helps considerably). People are generally shocked when they find out my age, as they usually guess I’m 5-10 years younger, which I find hilarious (for one thing, it means they haven’t noticed the gray hair!).
If there’s one surefire recipe for unhappiness it’s fighting against your age or the time you have left. I recommend embracing it. I can say with confidence that I’ve enjoyed each successive decade and each successive year more and more. That may change at some point but I don’t foresee it changing for quite some time, and I’ll make the most of every moment until then.
Thing #2: Slow Down
“Why can’t we go backwards, for once? Backwards, really fast, fast as we can. Really put the pedal to the metal, you know?” - James Halliday, Ready Player One
This may sound like counterintuitive advice. As we age, we by definition have less time left, so if anything shouldn’t we speed up? Shouldn’t we work harder and move faster to secure our legacy and accomplish the things we planned to accomplish?
On the contrary. To me, youth is characterized by reckless speed: by chasing after things that feel important in a naive fashion. Age, by contrast, is characterized by wisdom, which involves knowing which goals to pick and how to pursue them intelligently.
Wisdom is important because progress isn’t linear. If it were simply a matter of picking ambitious goals and relentlessly pursuing them, we wouldn’t need wisdom. But it’s not this simple. For one thing, one reason progress isn’t linear is that our goals naturally change as we age. Even if we’ve been making linear progress towards a goal or a set of goals, it’s almost inevitable that we eventually realize our initial goals were wrong and we need to change course. And rushing towards those goals is often counterproductive since it’s precisely the act of slowing down and paying more attention that allows us to realize we’re pursuing the wrong goals (or that we’re after the right goals in the wrong manner).
In my case, early on my goals were lofty, abstract things like “make the world a better place” and “do as much good as I can.” There’s nothing wrong with those goals on the face of it, but no one could ever hope to achieve them in one lifetime. In fact they’re so abstract that it’s difficult even to imagine what progress towards them might look like. Mine was a case of right goals, wrong approach. I needed to learn to concretize my goals, to bring them down to earth and transform them into something I could realistically plan for and track progress towards. And to find ways in which I’m uniquely capable of realizing those goals. For me, growing older has meant, first of all, getting to know myself better, especially my strengths and limitations. I have a much better, more realistic, more concrete sense of the ways in which I might be able to make the world better through things like products and software, the sort of technologies I’m building today.
Progress also isn’t linear because, even given a fixed set of proper goals, there is no single, straight path to success, no direct path from A to B. Life just doesn’t work that way. It throws us all sorts of curve balls. The right way to achieve success is to be agile: have a bias for action, set out in a roughly correct direction, and course correct as you go. Sometimes we need to get off the linear path entirely in order to make progress: one step back, two steps forward. Sometimes the step back involves working on something totally different for a while, or taking some time off, or focusing on self care. A mindless, incessant, direct pursuit of a goal is the definition of childishness.
Then there’s the related question of happiness. Success and happiness cannot be decoupled. To achieve success, to achieve one’s full potential, is the definition of happiness. It works the other way too: you won’t really be successful if you don’t experience joy and happiness along the way. And slowing down is quite literally the secret of happiness. If you want to set yourself up for success, in the sense of achieving your objectives, first set yourself up for happiness.
One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned is that the only way to really achieve success is to stop trying to achieve it, in the sense that a direct, relentless pursuit of a goal usually fails. It reminds me a great deal of the scene in Ready Player One where the protagonist discovers that the only way to win the car race he’s lost hundreds of times is to drive backwards. This is truly a powerful metaphor for life. If you follow the rules and follow the crowd, if you try to live up to the expectations of society and your family and your colleagues and everyone around you, you may get ahead for a while but you’re ultimately doomed to fail and be unhappy.
The key to success, the only way to win the game, is to stop playing—or at least, to stop playing the game by other people’s rules and start playing your own game by your own rules. And the only way to do this is to slow the heck down, be mindful of what’s going on around you, and enjoy and appreciate every single moment of your life. Once you’re able to do that, the game ends and you’ve already won. It’s not an easy state to achieve but it’s definitely something everyone is capable of. It’s essentially the core message of Zen Buddhism, the idea of enlightenment and achievement through paradox.
Thing #3: Wellness and Family
“Know thyself.” - Ancient Greek aphorism
A friend once suggested half seriously that in your twenties you don’t really need to worry about diet or exercise; in your thirties you need to worry about one or the other, but not both; and starting in your forties you need to worry about both. It may have been tongue in cheek, but it stuck with me and I think this actually does a good job of capturing the relationship between aging and wellness. It’s been my approach and it’s worked rather well for me. I was neither fit nor healthy in my twenties. I didn’t eat well, didn’t exercise much, drank too much, and didn’t sleep enough, but I more or less got away with it. In my thirties I began to exercise seriously. My diet is still sort of crap, but it’s less crappy than it used to be (less unhealthy restaurant food, more Soylent, that sort of thing), and I’ve begun taking vitamins and supplements and getting my levels checked once a year, which is a step in the right direction.
The hardest thing about health is that it’s not one size fits all. Not even close. As a result it’s very difficult to come up with universal guidelines. About the best we can do is Andrew Huberman’s six foundational elements of health: sleep, movement, sunlight, nutrition, social connection, and hydration. But the devil’s in the details and what works for one person with respect to even these basic healthy behaviors may not work at all for someone else. It takes a lot of trial and error to figure out what works for you. Healthy behaviors and habits have to be both functional (as in, are you getting the hydration, sleep, nutrients, etc. that you need?) and tolerable (are you enjoying your life?).
If my twenties was about getting to know the world—studying, traveling, studying abroad, meeting lots of people in lots of places, etc.—my thirties was about getting to know myself through conversation, meditation and other forms of introspection, and a lot of experimentation. Ten years ago I had absolutely no idea how to be healthy or what worked for me. Now I have a pretty good idea.
I wouldn’t have guessed it ten years ago but something else I’ve learned about myself is how much I enjoy time with my family, and how much an important part of my health and well-being this has become. This too has been one of the greatest lessons of the past decade. I grew up and still by and large live in a society that has de-emphasized the role and importance of family relative to things like personal ambition and freedom, friendship, free sex, exploration, experimentation, career, and “impact” in the global (rather than local) sense.
I didn’t reflect much on the importance of family until losing my parents and subsequently starting a family of my own. In retrospect I’ve realized that the way in which we’ve de-emphasized family and community more generally is a huge contributing factor to the social ills we’re facing today. We collectively chose to demote a social institution that’s been central to human society longer than any other in favor of… I’m not quite sure what. Libertinism. Modern liberalism. Young people moving far from home and their families and support networks and the communities that raised them to distant, expensive, cosmopolitan cities to chase dreams and high salaries and have fun—and postpone marriage and childrearing. This has already led to rapidly declining birth rates (especially in urban areas) and my gut feeling is that it won’t end well.
The older I get, the more time I spend with my own family, the more I realize the importance of family and the absolutely essential role it has to play in our holistic well-being. I don’t think any strategy for health is complete without the social and spiritual well-being we get from spending lots of quality time with people we love and trust the most, and I’ve belatedly understood that the folks who made the decision to emphasize family and community were right all along. Family is going to be my new focus in my forties.
If I had it to do all over again, I would’ve started a family ten years earlier. I urge you to consider doing the same. No time feels perfectly right, so other things equal, the sooner you begin the better! It’ll pay dividends in terms of health and well-being.