This is the inevitable thread for ILxors in their forties

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