The Fear Of Getting Older
People today are so overwhelmed that they rush to accomplish everything as quickly as possible. Many have come to believe that if they fail to achieve certain things by the time they are thirty, it will be too late.
The fear of getting older weakens people faster than age itself ever could. I used to think that entering your thirties meant you were seriously getting older. But I was young and naive. Now I am thirty-six and I no longer subscribe to that view. I do not look at people in their forties with the same naivety.
In fact, I believe that approaching your mid-thirties is when you truly begin to align with your identity. By then, you have enough worldly wisdom and theoretical knowledge to recognize the harmful psychological patterns within you. You also begin to understand the origins of those patterns.
And so the only thing left after that is resolving them. That requires a certain degree of maturity. I do not agree with people who say it becomes difficult to change as you grow older. While there is some merit in that idea, it does not apply to everyone.
You cannot change because you refuse to believe it will yield any benefit. Why would a sixty-year-old focus on lifting weights or improving his appearance? Naturally, he might say it is futile for him to invest effort there, and in many cases he would be right.
In your mid-thirties, you have a deeper understanding of the world you inhabit, of the qualities you possess or lack, and of your true potential. The next stage of the journey begins with knowledge and accumulated wisdom. You develop an intuitive sense of where your efforts should be directed.
I am in my mid-thirties and I do not feel old yet. I feel as healthy as ever. I pay attention to my diet and workouts as much as I reasonably can. My blood markers are in good order as well. So I have my physical health, I have my mental stability, I have made enough mistakes to learn from them, I have acquired enough knowledge to know what I should continue doing, and enough skills to know how to do it.
And most importantly, I still have enough time left in my life to correct my course if I have gone astray. If you are someone in your thirties, forties, or even twenties, stop planting the fear of age in your mind. I am not saying age is merely a number, but in a literal sense it is. All the meaning and context behind that number come from our experiences.
Why have we decided that certain levels of achievement must correspond to the decade we are living in? Why can we not reinvent the wheel for ourselves? Why can we not simply live while fulfilling our responsibilities to the best of our abilities? After all, isn’t the purpose of living simply to live peacefully and die content?
Do not be afraid of your forties or fifties. It is futile. Age will arrive regardless; that is not the frightening part. The real tragedy would be living for so long and learning nothing from your life. Never introspecting. Never fixing anything within yourself. Building nothing within your mind. Carrying no sense of passion within you.
Although it is still some time away, I do not think I would mind turning forty when the moment arrives. I do not miss my twenties. I have regrets about what I should have done, but I also know that those regrets exist because I possess the clarity of the present and impose it on the past. The proper word for that is presentism.
Knowing what you know today, how would you like your next decade to unfold? That is something we should think about more often, and plan accordingly. It does not matter where we are or what we have achieved. What matters is what we are going to experience next, and how we wish to experience it.