On aging, and fear.

To begin with, I’m not sure you’re aware of it, but I’m middle aged. Oh? What gave it away? Using a blog as my primary literary medium?¹ Hm. But in fact, the APA defines 35 years as the end of “young adulthood.” Yeah. I found out via some shitpost on twitter when I was already 35, so it didn’t sit well with me then either.

But my worries about aging began much sooner than that. See, even in my 20s, I feared I’d been wasting my life. I’d struggled with school and life and everything since graduating high school, arguably sooner, and nothing seemed to be going anywhere meaningful. I felt I had a limited social life, a dead-end job, no money, no great travels, a limping love life; I was, generally, a loser, wasting away... There were none of the usual hallmarks of success or happiness. And that scared me. Would my life have been worth it if I continued in this direction? Would it have been a “life well lived” by the end?

So, this is my existential struggle. Even now, as I lurch ever nearer my late 30s, I still worry about wasting my life; I still want a total do-over, now and then. (If I’d just known this or done that better... If I hadn’t wasted all that time or gotten myself stuck in that... If I could just... try all over again...) It’s a bad headspace to find oneself, and it’s hard to elude.

About 10 years ago, I read a collection of essays by Delia Ephron called Sister Mother Husband Dog: Etc. I recall in one how she described having spent her 20s in a truly awful marriage, and how, after she broke free, she found writing, and it changed everything. Maybe I’m messing up the context—it’s been a while—but what struck me was when she wrote: “you can waste an entire decade and still have a life.”

That quote has always stuck with me; some days, I can feel the hope in it better than others. But as I focus on it now, I can see two things it brings to the surface. Firstly, it challenges us regarding what we mean by “wasting” a decade—what counts as “wasting” time? And even: Why do we worry about it? Because, secondly, it asks us to consider: What does it mean to “have a life”?

I think we too flippantly regard things as failures or wastes of time. Not being rich AF is one of them, an easy one to spot, but other things are trickier: Having the perfect job, traveling plentifully and broadly, going to lots of wild parties, finding one’s soulmate—generally, feeling like a “success.” Failing these and other hallmarks of classical success can seem like wasting one’s life. But that really depends on how much weight you give those metrics during the assessment; our culture seems to give them a lot of weight, but how much weight do they really deserve?

I think the second piece helps there. Life is more than material, popularly emphasized success. Having a good life should be measured by how meaningful it is to you, not culture at large. Perhaps, if finding your soulmate (whatever that looks like to you) defines a good life for you, then the quality of that companionship could define your life as “good,” perhaps even “well lived.” Same with finding a great job, partying, travel, etc. But something still feels off here—what if you still don’t measure up? What if you spend 20 years without that soulmate, without the parties, or job, or travel, or whatever else? What about that time? So, maybe there really is such a thing as a wasted life, and the only way forward is to do better, somehow. Those 20 years without a soulmate or wild parties may in fact be “wasted,” if we’re measuring things.

But that seems to be because these sorts of metrics are too stiff, too austere, for defining a good life, especially if it’s already feeling “too late” or “wasted.” In fact, measuring may not be the right way to assess how good a life is; maybe it’s the way it feels in the doing and the living, and not how we reckon the balances and accounts at the end; maybe it’s about lived experiences during and not the existential profit at the end. Maybe, in the spirit of Susan Wolf in The Meaning of Life and Why It Matters,² it’s about finding things you love doing and giving yourself the room to do and enjoy them, however well you’re able, and that a “life well lived” is really just one in which you gave yourself permission to pursue your passions.

One benefit here is flexibility, I think. Maybe finding companionship isn’t working out, so you focus on a hobby and do something fun with that while you figure out your love life (or don’t, no judgment). One lingering issue, however, is when you don’t or can’t do this either—when you can’t even do things you care about—and how this might still leave one with a “wasted life.” Perhaps you really did get stuck in a dead-end job when your passion was traveling, and you never had money or time for it. What then?

The issue I see there is, partly, that we’re still stuck in quantitative measurements of a life instead of qualitative enjoyments. We’re also being, perhaps, stubborn; we’ve forgone flexibility for myopia: We’ve zoomed in on one, big, singular source of meaning and happiness instead of looking for meaningfulness that’s within our means. And there is “waste” in that—we’re missing out on littler joys and smaller pleasures that would be within our reach. Any time spent on one’s own joyous journey or pleasureful purpose is better than none; it may not “amount” to much, it may not be grandiose or sublime or mind blowing, but it’s something. Cultivating myriad little moments of joy from day to day might even bring greater meaning in one’s experience than chasing bigger but less frequent, less continual spikes. 

I did raise another question, in passing, based on the Ephron quote: Why do we care if we waste our lives? Maybe it’s obvious by now, but it’s scary to feel that way; we only get one life after all—there are no “do-overs.” But I think this question does bridge the other two questions: We’ve misplaced the emphasis in worrying about that. A need to succeed has been inculcated in us, but those measures of success were explained at best opaquely. Perhaps, the less we can worry about wasting life and the more we can focus on living life well, the better that life will probably feel. Perhaps, in the spirit of Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus,” we can shrug off the dread in favor of something lighter.³

I feel that I don’t really have many good answers here, reader, but hopefully I’ve managed to rule out a few of the nastier questions, for both of us. I still struggle with this, a lot, and it’s my biggest fear about aging—that I’ll run out of time, and my life will have been wasted. Perhaps writing this will help me shift my focus. Maybe blogging itself will help some; writing and philosophy, if we can call it that, are meaningful to me; perhaps allowing myself time to blog will give me pleasure and purpose and abate those worries about living a wasted life. Only time, and consistency, will tell.

Image by Peggychoucair from Pixabay

End notes:

1. Truly, I was blogging in high school and college during the early aughts. Here’s hoping nobody finds that rough nonsense. But it was so satisfying to share my thoughts and explore my feelings. I’m hoping resuming it, to whatever extent I can, will be good for me. Of course, with less teenage hyperbole and angst, hopefully.
2. I’m perhaps not being fair or charitable to her case in that book; arguably, she’s interested in countering bigger existential problems of life not having meaning and the resulting despair. I’m cherry picking, perhaps, from that, which is why I said “in the spirit of.” In fairness, I do fully intend to reread it, so maybe I’ll do it better justice next time.
3. Yet again, “in the spirit of” is doing a lot of work here... This time I at least looked up the referenced work on Wikipedia first to double check: “Camus claims that when Sisyphus acknowledges the futility of his task and the certainty of his fate, he is freed to realize the absurdity of his situation and to reach a state of contented acceptance."