Me, At 44, Trying To Be Less Of A Piece Of Trash

I turned 44 around 1:18am this morning. Numbers are weird. They go up and other things seem to go down. Age is confusing. America, collectively, just had a dance with it this summer around Trump and Biden. On that one, it turns out that a semi-incoherent old man did win the Presidency, but it just wasn’t the one we thought had a shot last May. I digress.

Writing birthday posts about yourself is inherently self-aggrandizing and stupid, so I will keep this one pretty short, as I have written probably 2,000+ posts on Medium thus far and most of my generalized thinking about the world and adulthood and how I intersect with all of it is already available somewhere.

My goals at 40 were a little more robust and potentially coherent than they are four years later. In fact, the day I turned 40 was the day the 2020 election was called for Biden. The main thing I personally remember about that day is that I thought “40” should be some big thing that people recognize, but I heard from basically no one, and ended up hanging out with my wife’s friends and their conservative husbands. It was OK, fun even, but I wondered why I seemed so irrelevant to others that came before. Then I realized: I had gotten divorced about 3.5 years prior and lost a ton of people through that process. And such is life. I own that failure.

I’ve written a bunch about infertility and its discontents. I make some money and hear from some people writing about those things, but I’m trying to lessen those narratives in my writing so that people don’t just see it as complaining. I was not a healthy person and I drank a lot in my 20s and 30s and I dealt myself a specific hand around fertility, and that's something I have to own too. It is hard sometimes to see loser-y guys who cannot form sentences and don’t seem to even want to be dads or value their partners get over that hump, but again, such is life. You don’t always win or win in the avenues you thought you might.

Basically, my main things are:

1. Try to be sober.
2. Try to be healthy.
3. Try to be nice to people.
4. Try to write where I can about topics in different ways.
5. Try to be consistent around work.
6. Try to compare less.
7. Try to generally care less.
8. Just try to live life and be content and deal with whatever comes at me.

That’s basically it. No flowery bullshit or big speech or proclamations or anything else. Just chasing a normal, mostly-content, productive, consistent day-to-day existence.

I wish you all the best too.