Since writing 4000s by 40, one of the comments I get a lot—which I never anticipated—is that forty is not middle age. During the AMC Awards night, where I had a table selling my book, a number of fifty-, sixty-, and even seventy-year-olds pointed at my display, nudged a friend, and laughed. “Look—forty is middle age,” they quipped. One woman walked by and said, “Forty? Come back to us when you’re sixty.” At the AMC Awards, recipients tend to be in their sixties or much younger, like in their twenties, so it wasn’t a complete shock that the title didn’t connect with some. Still, I was surprised how many clearly felt that forty wasn’t an age of significance.
I suppose this was because I was in a room full of retirees who took on a monstrous challenge in the mountains and were feeling pretty youthful as a result, but I’ve heard similar comments online. Fifty and sixty-year-olds have said things like, “Middle age at forty? You’re too early.” A recent comment suggested that I had the subtitle of my book wrong because I must have done my climbs in my thirties and therefore wasn’t tackling the 4000-footers during middle age. (I guess he’ll have to read the book to find out.)
By the Numbers
What is this aversion to forty as middle age? When did this start happening? Is this some sort of fallout from the “fifty is the new forty” mantra? How are so many people in denial? The average life expectancy in the United States is 78.4 years for men and 81.1 years for women. According to those numbers, I couldn’t have been any more exact about the “middle age” point in life when I did the climbing in 4000s by 40. But again and again, I hear from people in their late fifties say they “just entered middle age.” This article from the BBC, going back to 2012, suggests that people in England think middle age starts at 55. That means a nation of men are walking around thinking they are at the halfway point in their lives when national statistics show they only have about twenty-two years left to live. What is going on here?
Is it fear? Wishful thinking? A mindset people are embracing so they continue to live youthfully even though they know in their guts, the game will eventually come to an end? Is something else going on? An epidemic due to a rise in atheism? That without a belief in the afterlife, people clutch to the idea that the current life is (and can be) longer than it actually is? I’m forty-eight now and by real math, I’ve got thirty years left. If I go by what other folks keep telling me, middle age isn’t coming for another ten years and my lifetime age will be 116. Wouldn’t that be something? Seeing that there is a .0001% chance of that happening, it certainly would.
Meeting the Unknown
But whatever is causing this dissociation from reality, we shouldn’t be afraid. I’m not going to pump religion on you, or put one religion above the other, but I firmly believe that energy doesn’t die, and that wherever we go when it’s all over, it’s not actually over. With continuity of spirit in mind, the only way I choose to live then is with a full embrace of the now, not worrying about the reality of age, but delighting in the fact I get to live whatever moment I’m in. An unknown brought us here and we will meet it again on the other side. That’s all I know.
I’m not saying I’m always successful in this approach. There are certainly days where I fret about the waning time. But when I regroup, it’s my faith in the unknown powers of the universe that allows me to take a breath, accept the things I can’t change, and step back into my body. And each time I take that step, I get a little stronger. A little more present. And who knows—maybe I push the needle of middle age a little further over the forty-year line.