This is the inevitable thread for ILxors in their forties

I was born the day after Neanderthal, I think

you’d first have to agree to keep your cos on at all times xp

I mean, yeah, some married people cosplay as singles all the time.

cos play as sin gles indicates tan gles in triangles

-Public Enemy

I remember when this thread started and I was still a year away from 40 — and now I’m a year-plus past them. So that’s my report on the 40s, they go fast.

100 percent endorse the need to stay physically active (but in a smart way, it gets easier to get hurt). I’ve adopted the mantra “Move every day” to get me out of the house. For me that’s most walking and hiking and a lot of stretching. But it makes a huge difference.

Another big feature of my 40s was that suddenly I knew more and more people dying.

I'm not married or a father but at the very least I don't get guff from my moms as I'm (inexplicably) the only one of my siblings currently in a relationship.

I'm closer to 50 than I am to 40 at this point. 40s have been good to me but yeah, the physical annoyances are a thing. The most irritating to me is the eyesight thing. I've always been nearsighted and that has not changed, but now I have to take my glasses *off* for some close-in things, like cutting my fingernails. And I can't see in dim light. My partner can still see in much dimmer light than I, and this leads to light switch wars analogous to the thermostat wars other partners have.

I'm doing OK as far as eyesight goes. That is, I've always had bad eyes and wear contacts, but they're not getting worse and I don't need readers *yet*.

My family can drive me nuts, but I am super thankful to have had my family around these past several months, and super happy that things have gone as smoothly as they have, spending sooooooo much time together. We've got a rhythm going. My life would be totally different without them, but probably not for the better.

Xpost nearsighted and now having trouble seeing stuff up close. I got a pair of glasses with much weaker correction than my distance glasses. Works great for computer screens, books etc.

my vision just get worse and worse over time. when I first began wearing contact lenses (in like, 1994 or 1995), I had an astigmatism in one eye. now I have them in both. one eye doctor freaked me out 5 years ago and said i had the makings of what looked like "tiny cataracts", but no other eye doctor since has found the same thing (I switched due to moving).

oh hey i turned 40 about 6 weeks ago and meant to bump this but forgot

i had a bunch of pulmonary embolisms and a good part of my right lung "died" about 2 months before i turned 40. didn't seem like a good omen! but since I've been able to move about again I've started walking manically (many miles per day) and my feet and knees are killing me but, you know, gotta do something. bein' 40, man! it's not great!

took a selfie the other day and it was the first where i was like "damn, i look old." Just weathered and beaten. I have since shaved the beard. 40! why!

I'm 46 in January and this year feels pretty defining in the tip towards cliched middle-age. Sure, we've all had to stop to some degree, but I've kind of embraced it - got properly into gardening, I'm doing lots of jigsaw puzzles (this is more pensioner than middle-age), playing lots of guitar, watching way more television (and shouting at the telly more). I was fit until I was 40 when I stopped playing football due to fucked knees; my main source of fitness now is walking and I'm trying to maintain 100km a month where possible.

Like most people here, my eyes are failing me and I'm wearing glasses more and more. I've had a varicose vein in my left leg since my late 20s but goddamn it's like something out of Tremors right now. I'm doing my best to ignore it but occasionally, of a morning, my left foot will be a terrifying dead colour so I should probably get that sorted.

I love being in my 40s because my 20s were basically like the Rocky training scenes writ large & my 30s were the first fights, win a few, lose more, but now I'm getting to put all of that experience to use.

Well - I've moved onto the 50s, but I also found that declining eyesight was the main factor that i noticed in my 40s. I have an astigmatism in each eye and increasingly felt cross-eyed as I was reading text. The next development was that anything placed to the side of what I was reading, e.g. an irritating floating text box on a website, would distract one of my eyes towards it and reading would become unbearable.

Sneak preview of main ageing symptom for the 50s is increasing mental fatigue. I used to be able to play blitz chess online for ages - game after game. Now after a couple of games I have to regroup and allow my brain to recover. And that feeling of protecting a sure win from a horrible ripoff when you're exhausted is horrible.

might be a bit early to say as I only turned 40 last month but I feel no different to how I did in my early 30s.if anything I'm slightly fitter as I've made sure I take occasional exercise as opposed to just sitting around eating and smoking all the time

I turned 49 last month and I'm way fitter leaving this decade than I was entering it. Probably look younger than I did then too so it's not all doom and gloom

My parents are 70 and 69 and are more active and probably fitter than they were in the preceding decades when they were stuck raising children.

Fitter...
Happier...

only 38 but feeling older tbh. my hair has gone pretty salt and peppery over the last two years.

49 last month and I'm way fitter leaving this decade than I was entering it.

my forties were similar. entering them I'd been experiencing extreme stress for close to a decade already and I was in fairly dire shape, but I was fortunate enough in my forties that I was gradually able to reduce that stress year by year, retrieve my health, and lay a sound foundation for a fitter, happier fifties. everyone has a different obstacle course to run. I happened to be very lucky, which allowed me to be motivated and diligent. without that good luck, I could have sunk entirely.

Welcome to your forties: https://pitchfork.com/news/bill-callahan-and-bonnie-prince-billy-cover-steely-dans-deacon-blues-listen/

I'm loving this. Bill Callahan's voice is surprisingly well suited for this song.

I was just wondering, is everyone's else's forties just endless misery, cancer and death, or is it just me? does this ever end?

why do people even try

I feel that way a lot. Then I remember people in their 50s and 60s are putting up with shit way worse.
So I have that to look forward to.

i dont have answers to any of those questions but im glad you're here all the same.

are they? I wonder in what way they are putting up with worse shit.

this I suppose is kind of a drawback but also a safety cushion. I wouldn't want to kill myself because it would hurt my mum, but my mum was only 17 when she had me, so I have to put up with existence until she dies

that's going to take fucking years. but at least the rate it's going everyone I have every loved will be dead within a couple of years so fuck it anyway

I think the reason I was thinking about this and what is the actual point in continuing to live. I will be 45 this year. My life has been relentless misery and death since I was 39. Just wondering what a reasonable amount of years would be before I just go you know what, you win god, fuck you, fuck humanity, can I just go and party with Satan now?

is everyone's else's forties just endless misery, cancer and death, or is it just me? does this ever end?

― CP Radio Gorgeous (Colonel Poo), Friday, February 19, 2021 10:00 PM (one hour ago)

i feel like my 40s have had less misery than previous decades, a little bit more cancer and definitely more death ... and most likely the cancer and death stuff will increase in future decades.

my 40s are approaching their end, and i can think of essentially nothing to say about them other than that i've survived

i did at least raid daddino's series of 1971 mixes so as to make my own version

My 40s were fine. It's now, in my 50s, when the misery, death and cancer is kicking in.

I suppose now I've woken up the cancer and death can't actually increase because there will be no-one left in my life to die within a few years.

I should make some new friends so they can die too.

My 30s were a nightmare. I'm now 41-and-a-half. So far my 40s have shown themselves to be lonelier, sicklier, and happier

A person on twitter I am mutuals with has said he knows nearly 20 people who have died of covid, and has been unable to attend a single funeral in all that time.

My father died when I was 36, that marked the start of a psychological shift for me to thinking of life as a preparation for dying. Several aunts and an uncle lived to their 90s, I may have a long wait.

my 40s are approaching their end, and i can think of essentially nothing to say about them other than that i've survived

This
I hated my forties, I am a worse, weaker, more useless person coming out of them

i feel like a broken record here but -- when I was 42, there was a fire at a show that killed 36 people in my community, 6 of whom were friends of mine, and 35 of the 36 were younger than me. Only the "token old guy" was older than me. It gave me a major jab in terms of thinking long and hard about my assumptions and expectations about life, and what I should be doing with mine, and the various stages of life based on physical age.

I suppose now I've woken up the cancer and death can't actually increase because there will be no-one left in my life to die within a few years.

I should make some new friends so they can die too.

― CP Radio Gorgeous (Colonel Poo), Saturday, February 20, 2021 7:40 AM bookmarkflaglink

don't know the words to say other than "I'm so sorry" :(

I'm not saying I've done it, but it's necessary to come up with a perspective on life that includes rather than ignores the inevitability of death.

I should make some new friends so they can die too.

I can definitely relate to that ...

only a few months into my 40s, my brain feels like it has transitioned to knowing my freewheeling, do whatever I feel like days are over, and I have more confidence in my ability to do things for myself and others.

but after the latter half of my 30s, I'm hoping the only way to look is up. the first half of my 30s were amazing, second half were bits of light sprinkled amongst lots of despair that I papered over with traveling the country, drinking, and excess concert-going.

Hey, if anyone else who is not "eligible" to post in the no boys thread wants to confront me for having started a discussion about how non-cis-men tend to view their 40s as more positive than cis-men and how that was insensitive or potentially related to the shitty cancer and death context of Colonel Poo's post in this thread ... please do so here. I don't have to work today, and I will personally apologize to anyone who was hurt.

I'm not really looking for a confrontation, but will just note that it came dangerously close to implying that grief and depression are an unsightly symptom of being a 40-something cis het male. There may or may not be a gendered element to when or how people experience these things, but it feels a lot like trivializing people's pain and vulnerability to muse upon it while they are obviously hurting.

just to be clear I know people are talking about this and I want to say that yes I found the discussion insensitive and a bit hurtful, but I also recognised that it wasn't really about me. I am not wanting to confront anyone over this, frankly I'm embarrassed about the whole thing.

Ugh and I am super sorry about that. I was mostly responding to the posts that followed that seemed to speak more to general malaise. I didn't intend to trivialize anyone's pain. As a middle-aged white woman, I end up seeing/reading a lot of posts and articles by other middle-aged white women and there is a tendency to actually speak more positively about one's 40s vs. being younger, so I wanted to talk about how gender relates to that.

I can't speak to experiencing this manifestation of grief at this time--the most intense grief I've experienced wrt aging was in my early 30s when I felt I had a lifetime of love to give a partner and a child, and no partner and no child in my present or future. Ten years later I could have chosen differently but I felt that time had passed for me. I no longer wanted to give up my body and the next 20 years of my life to center around something that would need so much of everything from me.

But in my mid 40s that's behind me now and the grieving feels a bit distant and a lot of other things I was laboring under have disappeared? I haven't been street harassed in this decade, which is A MIRACLE. Or I guess on the rare occasions that I am, I feel fine giving the finger and keeping it moving. A facet of my personal growth that I really appreciate.