This is the inevitable thread for ILxors in their forties

Exactly… I had this experience in my 20s … it definitely isn’t middle age

I had this experience once, in an airport Dunkin Donuts, when absolutely no one else was in line or being served. I gave it a minute, then left and just got coffee and OJ somewhere else.

(I’m 47 - this happened maybe two years ago)

This can reflect the invisibility of the single person - rather than the older person, ime.

A younger coworker started a coed recreational kickball team a few years ago, I was already in my forties and said to myself, I used to play lots of kickball when I was young, I’ll join and show these kids how it’s done. Well pretty early on in the season I kicked as hard as I could and pulled my quad so badly I thought I tore something. My leg swelled up and I could barely walk for weeks. I finally recovered in time for the playoffs, so of course I joined back up, and of course in my first at-bat I re-pulled my quad just as badly as the first time. I gave up on sports after that, I guess I’m too old. Nowadays I am getting ready to buy a pair of readers because I am sick of goggling blindly at fine print.

Not to be a dick, but some pretty
simple stretching can go a long way in that regard. I am 39– I stretch for 15 minutes every morning, and intend on doing so until I die

This can reflect the invisibility of the single person - rather than the older person, ime.

― Dr Drudge (Bob Six)

there are _so many different kinds_ of invisibility haha

it's something i struggle a lot with. am i being treated worse than the other people around me? am i being ignored? if so, _why_?

the whole phenomenon of the "karen" - to me it's kind of one response to not being _acknowledged_. it's one of the things that makes "passing" so hard for me - the way women of a certain age tend to be treated. there are _very much_ gendered differences here, ime.

women, like... we gotta learn to not take being ignored personally, even if there are, you know... even if we are being ignored _because_ we're women in our '40s. cuz if we don't that's when we get called "karens".

The invisibility experience for me was more surreal than anything else, a “am I on Candid Camera?” feeling.

(I didn’t throw a fit or anything - just stood there for a minute or two accepting that this was happening, or not happening, before floating away to another business.)

“Am I really alive? Am I a ghost?”

And while I haven’t worked in the service industry for many, many years, I get that these are repetitive, demanding jobs, and that the 6-7 people working at the combination DD/Baskin Robbins had been grinding since 5 am and were likely burnt to the point that I, a 6’4 black man, just might not have registered in the moment

i had my ear surgery last week. it was a big deal and i assume there are lots of people out there who have the same issue, but live in a place where the diagnosis would not have happened and the surgeon wouldn't live in their town. kind of got mad at him because right when i woke up post surgery he tells me for the first time that i'm not allowed to blow my nose for 10 days. mfer, it's mid April and pollen is everywhere. i have literal scabs on my nose from blowing it so much. not sure if it's a 40s thing, but my allergies have gone from 0 to 100 in the last few years

how's ya hearing?

I hope your surgery went well, Heez. Rather frequently, my right ear gets completely clogged up and I also cannot pick out individual speakers or tell where sounds are coming from. It really struck me how having even just a marginally difficult time hearing can immediately feel isolating.

Getting old is so f’in weird

Seconded.

Hope I don’t die soon!

Planning to live to 90 like my grandparents done did

Every time I get carded I’m like, “this is the last time I’m gonna get carded”

/romero

last got ID'd in Morrisons of all places when I was 40. I assume that will be the last time unless I go back to the USA at some point or somewhere else where they card OAPs

I get that they think I’m a narc…I guess

fell in the bathtub this morning. cut my chin open. i wouldn't call it a serious fall, but at my age i can't just brush off falls like i could when i was younger. scariest thing is that i live by myself. i mean i don't feel like i'm the age where i'd want a lifealert bracelet or something but yeah, if i seriously hurt myself by accident it'd be a while before anybody came to check. had a pretty bad fall last december... was on my way out to an event, it was icy, forgot something upstairs, went up the outside stairs too quickly and banged myself up. still went to the event, though, without even so much as cleaning myself up. i guess i can say i'm learning - i wouldn't do that today. i think the fall back in december was probably worse. hard to say. it's getting around. my balance has never been good. i had a fall in my garage back in '19 and my ankle stability has been really bad ever since.

anyway my QPP is gonna be over in a bit to check... in the meantime i'm just shook... got a towel in my mouth waiting for the bleeding to stop.

I turned 40 last week. Woof. For some perspective, I started reading ILX as a teenager so not only am I old, we’re all old.

I was 20 at the beginning and now 44, so I feel every year of that comment.

welcome, Allen

Hi!

Did you just turn 40

yes, it's my 40th birthday

Happy birthday : )

happy birthday!

Thank you!

Hb!

I will be bang on 45 in August.

I used to sneeze in twos and threes, now its fours and fives

Welcome fellow kids!

Don't you mean welcome in?

One year and a summer left on my ticket

how much is being old supposed to hurt?
not physically
in my soul
it hurts in my soul

i was never _young_
i never will be _young_

i feel _wrong_. i feel like something... that there's something i need and i don't have, can't have
all of those years that were taken from me
there's nothing in their place. half my life is just _missing_ and i'm supposed to act like it's ok and it's _not ok_
is it _ok_ for y'all? do you ever want to vomit digital artifacts and scream and cry for nothing, for no reason at all? is it just me?

i don't know
47
hitting 47 was _hard_

Tired: leaving a party early due to limb pain

Wired: leaving it due to severe constipation

Though I blamed my knees

I’ll take all those woes and raise you one perimenopause.

Just got reading glasses (1.5x).
When I look at my phone it feels like a pro max and my monitor looks like a fuckin’ Vision Pro

Purely by coincidence I recently passed my motorcycle test. That's not a middle-aged thing. Not at all. But it does mean that I now have a legitimate reason to own a pair of leather trousers. And one of those Arab-style scarves that Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman wore in Long Way Round. The melancholic thing is that McGregor and Boorman were in their thirties in 2004. They were a decade ahead of me. It pains me to think that 2004 was twenty years ago.

NB I do actually own a pair of leather trousers. They have a zip around the waist that zips into a compatible motorcycle jacket, thus making an all-in-one zipped-up suit, and yes this sentence is a reference to Alan Partridge's monologue about buying surround speakers for his miniature hi-fi. I do not however own a BMW 1250GS but there is still time.

It's odd re-watching Long Way Round in 2024. It was shot with early-2000s digital video. Even the crappest Youtube motorcycle people have hi-def headcams and drones nowadays. But only a few of them have any charisma. There's a great Youtube motorcyclist called Itchy Boots, who recently broke her collarbone in Tanzania, but she's ace. And another one called Doodle on a Motorcycle who is tiny, but has no trouble riding larger bikes.

Motorcycles are a triumph of hope over reality. Every time I hop on my motorcycle I think about the sad people in their cars. I have to put on a bunch of safety gear, while they just get in their cars. How sad is that? When I arrive at my destination I take off my gloves and helmet and unzip my jacket and chain up the bike, while sad people in their cars just sort of get out of their car. Who has the last laugh? It's them, isn't it. Semi-detatched suburban Mr Jones. They have the last laugh.

To date I have been waved at by a small boy in a Spiderman suit. I have had a middle-aged man ask me about parking charges. I have not yet had any luck with women. And although I'm 100% heterosexual, not a single man has offered to tie me up in my leather gear while spanking my testicles with a fly swatter. I would politely decline, but it would be gratifying if someone asked.

Behind all of this light banter is the realisation that, yes, I'm half-way through life. Except that the first few years didn't count, because I was a kid, and the last few years aren't going to be much fun, so I'm actually two-thirds of the way through life. And death is a permanent black abyss of nothingness, an unavoidable black abyss of nothingness that I can only avoid by drinking myself into oblivion. But on the other hand one of my uncles never left the county of Wiltshire in his whole life, so I've faced with the horrible suspicion that I have actually achieved more in my life - despite struggling constantly with poverty - than most of my immediate family, and that millions of desperate refugees would kill and die to swap places with me, so perhaps I should keep my existential crises to myself.

And although I'm 100% heterosexual, not a single man has offered to tie me up in my leather gear while spanking my testicles with a fly swatter. I would politely decline, but it would be gratifying if someone asked.

consider yourself officially asked, lmao.

i feel like i've been in a mid-life crisis for the last 5 years, and i'm only 41 - still time to do the motorcycle thing but not the money, sadly, and idk i'm more scared about the crash statistics than i used to be. anyway i support any and all mid-life motorcycle flings.

I guess this is a midlife crisis mindset, just really thinking a lot about how there are a finite number of times I will do certain things again, how I’m running out of time to accelerate my career, thinkin about how much older
I am than other people, listening to the offspring… prob some depression mixed in

This weekend I got a sickness bug that has left me feeling sick to the very pit of my being and while trying to sleep it off I sneezed in bed and fucked my back. I'm ready for Charon, tbh.

now look

im in my forties saying it so thats got to be factored in

but

theres colds and flus and whatnot out there atm that 100% are coming with a side order of muscles getting wrecked for whatever reason

You might well be right, darragh. I stretch every morning, do yoga and swim and still my back is wrecked. It's a bastard.

Bartender asked how old I am and I wasn’t about to lie

I keep thinking today is Easter

Eye test this morning, first one in three years due to my uselessness. While I still don't need glasses, they would help with reading and screen work, so I'm tempted, as both of those feel like they require some additional concentration nowadays. Going to think about it...

“These out of touch 35 year olds”