Reflections on turning 35

I turn 35 today. Feels like a significant birthday. Kind of rough, to be honest. I was having some thoughts, and felt that perhaps others would find them interesting or useful (maybe that's just vanity; whatever, it's a personal blog), so I wrote them down. 

"Salad Days" - Ballerina Tanaquil de Clercq, novellists Donald Windham, Tennessee Williams, and Gore Vidal, and artist Buffee Johnson. This photo is my main inspiration in life, but it feels like I need to start letting go.  

35 feels like the beginning of middle age. If you do a Google image search for 'middle age' you mostly see pictures of people in their 50s, or older, so maybe not, but hear me out. The thing that hits me about my new age is that I have to close some doors now. The limitless potential and open horizons of youth seem to be narrowing. Regardless of how comfortable I am with the path I've chosen, and regardless of how great my life is, that still feels painful. There is a story attributed to Warren Buffet, perhaps apocryphal, that goes something like this: You write down your top 25 life goals, then separate them into 2 lists - your top 5 goals, and the rest. The second list becomes you "avoid at all costs lists", because they are the things most likely to derail your top 5 goals. Turning 35 really brings that advice home. My priorities in life are applying my intellectual gifts for the benefit of others, having children, and maybe achieving some athletic goals if I have the time and my body can last long enough (I'd like to climb a 9a sport route and a V13 boulder before I die). There are a few hundred other things I'd very much like to do, but I really have to start making some trade offs now. 

I discovered this quote at about 20 and took is very seriously

In some ways, my work life is where this feels most acute. I take great pride in reading very widely, but I have less and less time for it nowadays. I need to read more deliberately, and often don't have the time to read things carefully. I'd love to be able to take a deep dive into the AI literature, spend six months properly digesting the social contract tradition, and do a degree in biology, but alas. I barely have enough time to keep up with the literature in my own field, especially if I want to maintain a reputation as someone who really does read across multiple disciplines. Chris Blattman once tweeted or blogged or something that life after PhD is just a slow slide into being hopelessly out of date. I didn't think that observation would hit home quite so quickly. Part of why I started a podcast was to force myself to keep my mind open and by library growing laterally. 

Outside of work, there's still so many things I'd like to do slowly. See North Africa and the Middle East and take another 12 trips to Japan, learn how to cook with off-cuts (this will happen dammit!), live a polyamorous lifestyle among the artists of London, volunteer at the coalface for a charity or development org, etc. Instead, I can barely find the capacity to go away for weekend hikes, in part because of the otherwise very enjoyable time sink of reinvesting into existing relationships. The more connections you have that you value, the less scope you have to make new ones.    

Relatedly, the greater your platform for influencing one discourse, the higher the opportunity cost of branching out into other ones. I have been crushing it professionally for the past couple of years. I've written 7 papers a year for the past two, while working on books that will hit presses soon. I've gone from a Fulbright Scholarship at Brookings to a postdoc at Cambridge, and now I'm about to start as a senior lecturer at the University of Tasmania leading a rather large project, having skipped the lecturer grade completely. My ability to influence debates that I care about is rising exponentially. I could not be happier with how things are going. But at the same time, I can no longer justify projects even though I feel quite committed to them, at least not in the short term. Wellbeing public policy is where I have the clout, so I can't be fucking round with metamodernity, or how wellbeing could integrate the behavioural sciences, or meta-ethics for nihilists. I've reached the point where I have good and valuable paper ideas that I have to shelve if not abandon completely. Doesn't feel good. 

A casualty of all these rising opportunity costs is a growing sense that you've wasted time. It seems to me that no matter how hard you live your youth, you'll still feel like you've squandered it. I went through high school largely unconscious. Round about when my friends started dating I was just noticing that girls existed. Peer effects, being 'cool', all that completely passed me by because I was too busy playing Magic the Gathering. I tried very hard to make up for lost time at university and beyond. I travelled constantly, lived eyes wide open, aggressively pursued new experiences (often with trepidation, but that disappeared after a while too), read voraciously. As a result, I have almost 0 regrets from the last 15 years or so, certainly very few regrets about how I spent my time. And yet at my 35th birthday I'm suddenly feeling like maybe I could have done more. I couldn't have, it's just opportunity cost making its presence known. In youth, you make choices around what to prioritise, but those choices never feel consequential. When you turn 35, you must accept that from now on, things that you down-prioritised can't be reprioritised; they just disappear into the void of 'could have been'.

Some of these thoughts might just be down to testosterone. As I've gotten older, I've noticed a growing drive to, I don't know, conquer? Feels like the right word. Just be better. Better than myself yesterday, that's mostly healthy, but also better than my peers, and even not my peers, just random strangers, everybody. And this drive is definitely sexual at its roots. It's about procreation. The quest to attract a mate (the fact that my girlfriend of 8 years is ridiculously attractive in all ways doesn't seem to register in the reptilian parts of my brain). And it's a bit toxic frankly. It's made me more competitive than is healthy, more tightly wound, prone to burnout, and concerningly lecherous. Testosterone is a hell of a drug. It just slowly saps your sanity until you're one of these idiot men who blow up easily, beat their chests unnecessarily, and constantly preen. I believe there's a phrase for it. Ah yes, toxic masculinity. Not a great feeling to sense yourself sliding into it.   

Testosterone is a hell of a drug

I should be very satisfied with my life, and I am, rationally. I can fight my genes and my hormones. This is important: I can get out of the rat race, circumstantially and, more importantly, mentally. Young adulthood is a time to create the conditions for your thriving, and you need to hustle to make that happen. I've done it, I think. Now I need to ignore these silly urges in my bloodstream and stop behaving as though more will fix anything. I know, from science and from my observations, that the majority of people who are fuelled by ambition through mid life, rather than self-actualization and values fulfilment, end up twisted and ultimately a bit miserable. There are never enough accolades, always too many idiots in the way, endless papers and grant applications to write. What I want from mid-life is to spend time with family, deliver boss lectures to the next generation, and have an audience for the papers I care enough about to write. I want to get into a sort of steady state where I can do that and derive a lovely stream of uninterrupted utility. And that's what middle age is about really - not settling down, but settling in.      

Deleuze with his son - new inspiration?

I think I'm ready for middle age. I've wanted kids for years. I'm counting down the days until I can get pets. I want property that I can hammer nails into. I want projects in the garden. And I feel a strong desire to nurture the next generation. So testosterone be damned, I'm going to bite that opportunity cost bullet.