This is a thread for ILXORS IN THEIR 50's

yes, so sorry indeed.

and trishy b, i'm certain nobody took your post that way.

shit is as bleak as it can possibly be... I'm frankly in a panic 1/2 of the time and despairing the other half

200% relating with this

also glad for the folks who are sailing through with less angstydrama

reading the chaos of other peoples lives is very humbling.

my 40s were horrid.
my 50s have been a lot less chaotic, so far.

genuinely hoping that things improve for various folks here.

if you guys ever need a hug maria and i are at 275 main street in greenfield ma almost every day of the week. i can also make you a cup of tea. and give you a record or a cd.

jesus i'm listening to the new pj harvey and i think it was made for saddo 50somethings. but in a good way. you need to have gone through some shit to feel it deeply. or maybe not. i would have liked it as a sullen teen. its so autumn!! (love it. go buy it. i'm gonna get a vinyl copy.)

I'm a bit worried about being an old dad though

The youngest of my four is 13. I don't have the energy level I had when the older ones were young, but I think I'm a better parent now. Certainly a lot more even tempered. He and I have a great time.

I have 20 days left in this club before I level up.

Best to all the ilxors in the club.

Yeah , lots of love to all here.

I’ve reached a stage with my work life where I still go through stretches of being in love with it , but I’m also just increasingly drained from the constant grind and stress of it and a feeling of so much yet to be done. I don’t want to retire yet but I would like a sabbatical, and it feels unfair that you have to be a tenured academic to get one.

the thing that is scary at this age is the precarity, if you get the ax at this age finding a good job at similar level (or even any level) is very difficult for most because of age discrimination. i know precarity in general is bad these days for workers of all ages but its more intense at this stage imo.

Depends on your field, I guess. If you work remotely as I do, doing proofreading/editing work, there's a certain amount of "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog" latitude — you can tweak your resume to seem younger than you are (I only have about my last 10-15 years of work available for examination), opt for phone interviews rather than Zoom calls, go through recruiters instead of applying for jobs yourself, etc., etc. I've started in an entirely new field in the past year, and just this week had my contract extended to the end of 2024, when I will be turning 53.

most alarming physical manifestation of my fifties rapidly approaching: massive uptick in the number of records in my collection featuring Robert Fripp… i even listened to Discipline yesterday and forgot to feel annoyed at Belew’s terrible vocals, who even am i anymore??

very conscious of work precarity at this time - working in the crumbling ruin of the brodcast tv industry (in a production rather than executive capacity) means i am stuck in a pincer movement between diminishing audiences/resourdes and (great!) younger players coming up with broader skillsets and lower salary expectations- it is definitely an ongoing calculation about how long i can hang in there, and lots of apprehension about what to do next

I really do like my work! I think I am pretty good at it! But the landscape is what it is

"i even listened to Discipline yesterday and forgot to feel annoyed at Belew’s terrible vocals, who even am i anymore??"

haha! i almost put on the sleepless dance mix promo single today when i closed the store today and then thought better of it when i remembered that i could just go home for the night!

maria has been a dutch translator for 30 years and her work has really dried up. instead of getting good translation work she ended up just proofreading really bad AI translations for agencies for very little money. which is the pits. so now she is my assistant manager. i might even bumo her up to manager this holiday season. i pay her really badly though. the end result is that i am working a TON more in back and we are making more but its still kinda scary because i feel like i can never stop. i'm working for two now. but she has done so much stuff with the store that i never had the time and desire to do so it has been cool. and she is so much nicer to people. i was always trying to be nice while feverishly working online. made me miserable.

Depends on your field, I guess. If you work remotely as I do, doing proofreading/editing work, there's a certain amount of "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog" latitude

This is also the work I do. In our household it's very much gone from two main wage earners to a main wage earner (my husband, who works a big job in big tech) and a subordinate wage earner, me. And my ability and desire to earn have dwindled to the point where every job that comes in now is so poorly paid and poorly organised that I just can't be arsed to deal with the downsides. People not getting back to me for weeks, then popping up with a boatload of edits that all need to be done by tomorrow. Not paying me. Not giving me any kind of visibility into scheduling, so sometimes I might get work steadily, then nothing for a month, but no email saying "hey, stand down for the next month, there's nothing for you in the calendar". It's very wearing. But obviously that puts a lot of pressure on him to not get laid off in a company that's lately proven itself quite trigger happy in the laying-off department. We're just trying to pay down our mortgage as fast as we can. If we end up having to rent out half the house when we're older, well, I'm happy to do that.

and trishy b, i'm certain nobody took your post that way.

Thanks team! I had a funny conversation the other day with an acquaintance of similar age. We hadn't seen each other since before COVID. It was an absolute shitshow of disasters. We were laughing so hard. "My brother died, and I couldn't even go and see him in the hospital when he was dying because my husband had kidney cancer and I had to stay at home and take care of him!" "I got rammed by a shopping trolley and I've had four operations and I'm in constant pain!" Being in your fifties is fun.

I don’t want to retire yet but I would like a sabbatical, and it feels unfair that you have to be a tenured academic to get one.

Husband's place used to let you take six months unpaid leave sometimes, but nobody does that anymore because they're afraid it would count against them in the next round of layoffs.

54 and my 20 year anniversary was a couple of weeks ago.

I've been intrigued watching my slow physical decline and the death of friends (May this year was a 3 funeral month) and am happily comfortable with mortality in a way I've never been. I mean I'm in pretty good health but mobility is what it is. I might try rocking a stick soon.

I'm trying to map out the rest of my working life with an eye to packing it in full time at 60 but there's a lot of IFS and buts to get there. Not least of which is a work ethic that is undoubtedly burning me up too fast.

I have turned into a cranky old man when it comes to the entertainment industry, and am fairly oblivious to anything that's happened in the past 10 years - which probably explains the descent into boutique Blu-ray labels and 60s tv. Haven't bought any music in years though I still watch and make, and have started running build workshops at festivals for kids to make synths etc.

My eldest wanted to go and see Mick Harvey the other week and I realised they were born in the years when Pink Elephants and Intoxicated Man came out. Mick seemed either appalled or impressed when I told him, it was hard to tell (given he had introduced Bonnie And Clyde that night as a song from a very long time ago).

this is how i know i'm not young. i've got this on deck at home:

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/HgsAAOSwGWxk6pKs/s-l225.jpg

ha! i watched a few Petrocelli episodes too recently. So long, Barry.

Once you get into any of the NBC Mystery Movie series that aren't Columbo the end is in sight

Yay colonoscopy time again! It was fine, tho the prep pills this time made me throw up in addition to their intended effects, so that wasn't fun. The propofol remains pretty amazing to me, just like "OK you're going to take a nap ..." and then you wake up in a different room with the thing all done.

So many of my friends have gotten divorced in the last five years. I somehow thought if their marriage made it this far, it was for good, but ... no, the 50s (or late 40s) is when it's happening.

See it all around you, good lovin' gone bad

.38 Special tried to warn us.

Among a not-very-large group of friends, I've seen long-term relationships of 23, 18 and 8 years break up over the last few years. The two longest seemed to be solid from the outside.

There was a MAD cartoon when i was a kid in the 70s with an old married pair grumpily adjacent to each other which went like “we only stayed together for the kids, now we have no one but each other,” and well— my generation doesn’t want to settle for that maaaan

Went Outside for a work social lunch (and worked in the office) today and my Everthing is giving me Jip. Owwww.

this is like the platonic ideal of (australian?) sentences i do not understand

Sounds like you're quankers in the kulabaroo, mate!

keep it civil, nick!

I still have hair on my head whilst others of my batch are nake-headed - this is something to gratefully nod

I can take being a hunky, balding sex symbol. Life throws much harsher shit at you than a receding hairline.

I went way too long between colonoscopies, but the prep is now a lot better than it used to be--two cups of an undrinkable fluid as opposed to two whole Gatorade-sized bottles about 15 years ago. But yeah, the anesthetic is amazing. One minute they were telling me to lie on my side, the next they were shaking me awake.

When I had mine I woke up on the table, so could watch my colon being probed live. No discomfort, and the doctor didn't seem alarmed that I was awake.

if I can avoid this stuff by living on a diet of All-Bran and rabbit food - I will do to spare me this body-horror indignity, at least until I finally manage to drink myself to death!

may I recommen d Metamucil?

I put Benefiber in all water that I drink. I’m not in my 50’s, but I may be one day. I’ll be ready.

I'm not either but I'm observing a colonoscopy in 2 weeks and I'm so excited.

I guess there is a point where you have to overcome the awkwardness of being trapped inside an ape-like body with a point where stuff that goes in takes a route through your body and has to go out for the sake of functional bodily health. I'm not that squeamish these days, but that would be very testing for me.

this is like the platonic ideal of (australian?) sentences i do not understand

Wait, what bit was weird/unclear? My everything - all me joints - are giving me jip! Its not an australian saying btw, I cadged that from Granny on Metal Mickey. Now I think about it, its probably vaguely racist, I dunno.

yeah, 'jip' by any spelling has probably fallen out of favor

My late father used to say 'niggardly' which is a real word that he used correctly, but it always made me feel uncomfortable

wasn't sure what Your Everything was

no idea what Giving Me Jip meant

(i've heard of 'being gypped' -- yes, racist -- but my sense of it is 'being robbed' which doesn't quite match up to Your Everything)

never heard of Metal Mickey

it's cool though! honestly i encourage you to confuse me a la grunge speak!

Yeah gyyped is from gypsy but I take it what T is saying means pain.

Gyp is sometimes spelled jip. 'Gyp pain' or 'jip pain' might be caused by an uncomfortable but not serious ailment, usually described as 'a bit of gyp/jip'. It might also be severe and ongoing, as in 'that hip replacement is giving me gyp/jip'.

In other news, my shoulder hurts for no reason

In other words, welcome to the 50s.

re: T pain, yes "giving me gyp" is oldstyle Aus slang for "acting up", UK derived, apparently not from the derogatory term for Romani / travellers, but from the notion of having "Egyptian tummy" when unused to foreign food, hence pain.
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/gyp.html

also my shoulder is giving me gyp as well

Metal Mickey was uk kids TV series about a robot. Mickey dolenz from the Monkees was involved. it'll be on YouTube.

(also a suede single iirc)

I'm intrigued by all the colonoscopies in this thread. In the US do you all get regular colonoscopies once you hit 50? Definitely not the case in Australia, unless you have some specific reason. Here they offer you a kit where you have to scrape off some of your poo and stick it in a tube to get tested in a lab

yeah the only way i know the term is from the first suede album and i was mystified by it i wondered if it was some rhyme slang thing xp

oh no they open a tv studio up yer a hole and have a good long look behind the scenes to make sure theres no polyps hanging out in there

aaand i will add for XYs who are 50+ or any age: if you ever need a prostate biopsy— same venue, same prep as colonoscopy, but in addition to a video studio they bring in heavy demolition equipment— you may be longing for the oppty to get high and zonk out that is a colonoscopy. /oldsoversharing