What To Do Now I’m 64?

Birthdays are probably exactly the wrong time to take a look at my life and figure out how to change it for the better, but that’s what I started to do. So here’s part of the inventory.

For a few years after about 2008, I had a picture of myself as an older man fighting to get out of the trough of a long relationship that ended badly, needed to get back into and then stay in shape so my blood sugar got back into sensible levels and I would not walk around in a brain fog. That’s why I started back at the gym in autumn of 2010. In 2014 I got my Over-60 Oystercard, and for the next many months, every time I used it I thought about my age and not wanting anyone to see I had the card. In 2015 I decided to get my teeth fixed, and took the braces off towards the end of 2016. While the braces were on, eating nice food in pleasant restaurants was sometimes actually painful, and every other activity was accompanied by a low-level non-stop irritation from the braces. I stopped going out for about the last eight months. When the braces came off, It took a while to get used to eating with unencumbered teeth. Which takes me to 2017.

I didn’t think of it at the time, but the orthodontic treatment gave me a picture of myself as an older man struggling with a problem of age. Wonky, misplaced teeth is not, I grant, a stroke, or a heart attack, or a broken hip bone, and that’s what makes my reaction worse thank you very much. Those would be Real Serious Events, not just teeth. However, you get your teeth straightened out at sixty-one and let me know how you handle it. That compounded with A Man Working Past Retirement (or Up To State Retirement Age), which I became in 2014. These are not good looks.

Start with the fundamentals.

I’m a long-term sober alcoholic. If I get to sleep sober, that’s a good day. Living sober gets easier but it never gets easy. Emotional sobriety is like a strict diet: it keeps me out of trouble, but people were designed to live with occasional dramatic episodes.

I have to watch my blood-sugar. So I have to be the older guy who still looks good (as one with anterior pelvic tilt can) in a tee-shirt. Sure, there’s a tinge of vanity-as-motive in there, but it’s mostly about the blood-sugar. Visits to the gym are necessary, not some indulgence.

I am in my mid-sixties working with ambitious people twenty or thirty years younger. Call my nephew when you’re doing that and keeping up. Even showing up for work every day is an achievement at this age. That’s where almost all my energy is going now, but it’s also where all of my money comes from. So. Prioirities. I don’t give myself enough credit for it, and I’m going to start now.

I’m not going to go on complaining about the iPhone zombies, Millennials, Boomers or any other darn group. They don’t behave as my generation did when we were their age, but then the precise conditions of really-existing post-modern capitalism at this exact moment in time are very different from the conditions prevailing when I was their age. Their responses to those really-existing conditions are exactly the ones Capitalism needs at this stage of its evolution. Anyone who complains is on the wrong side of the inexorable evolution of capitalism. (This doesn’t mean that the evolution of Capitalism is morally acceptable, just that it is inexorable, like the tides and volcanos.)

I’m going to stop trying to track the way the world is going. It’s a way of pretending to be involved in what’s going on when I’m not involved at all. And I figure I’ll be gone before whatever catastrophic social circumstances occur, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it, so why bother? Old people tend to be left alone by social revolutionaries anyway.

However, Brexit is Brexit, the EU is the EU, and the market is the market. I need to take a view on whether investments are the best place for my money. This is where I have to remember I’m supposed to be a strategist, or was, once.

I am a life-time bachelor. That isn't changing, and nor do I want it to.

I waste a lot of time on the Internet. This is to do with being frazzled at the end of a day: too tired to focus on a plot, or a book, or a project, not tired enough to crawl into bed at eight-thirty. Plus the feeling that out there somewhere in Internet land is someone who will say something that will give me a new direction. Nah. This means the hard work of shaking off an old bad habit and getting into some new ones. Or going to bed really early, as I was doing at the start of the year.

I know. It sounds like more of the same. Fine-tuning. The sign of a life that’s fundamentally sound. Not exciting, not fun, but sound. Which, given that I’m an alcoholic, is pretty good.

I have three behaviours that may or may not be symptoms of something I need to change. I don’t go on holidays; I can barely remember to do anything about the few social events that happen; and I have little to no enthusiasm for movies, shows and theatre. I’m not going to examine those in this post.