“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.”
- Henry David Thoreau
I have often wondered why they say ‘life begins at 40’. I had always assumed that it begins the day you’re born, but that seems not to be the way things work. But still, why 40?
Before we can even ask why life apparently begins at 40, we must first ask what we even mean when we talk of life ‘beginning’. It seems to me that having all the biological signs of life doesn’t qualify as being ‘alive’ in some metaphorical sense. There’s an ‘alive’ that is beyond just eating and breathing, one that we’re not all given at birth, but must be attained. Contrary to what we’d like to believe, in this world, life is earned.
I believe that, from early childhood, we are taught to live our lives constantly delaying gratification. We’re told that there will be a time (and place) for certain things that *most* kids are curious about. “Finish school first, then you’ll have time for boys/girls,” they say, or “when you graduate, then you’ll be able to do whatever you want with your life”. It is during this phase that we learn to put things off. We start to believe that the present is not sufficient; that there will be a point somewhere in the future when things will be just right, one that must be striven towards.
I find this to be a very life-negating mentality. We spend most of our lives just waiting to live, hoping that someday things will fall perfectly into place so we can go beyond the mundane. We hardly ever live in the present, but always in postponement, chasing a future that always seems to promise much more than the present can offer. There’s always an obstacle between us and happiness — some river that needs to be crossed or some mountain that must be climbed.
It seems to me that the only time we are ever truly free is before the age of 5. This is before we’re thrown into the world of ever-moving targets where everything you do is accompanied by the mandatory ‘what’s next?’. As soon as you start school, it’s one grade after another, and, when you finally think you’re done, you’re thrown into the workforce, or ‘rat race’, as it’s so aptly called. Grades are replaced by quarterly reviews and promotions — it’s still the same jig to a different tune. Beyond that, this is the time you have to start building a life for yourself — buying a house, a car, starting a family. If there was ever a predefined point at which life is supposed to start, that certainly can’t be it.
But back to the question that we began with: why 40? The saying itself originated at a time when life expectancy was rapidly rising, having been in the 20s and 30s for most of human history. It seems to me that today it’s the age at which most people realize that they’ve been stuck in a hamster wheel for their entire lives. We have somehow conspired to put ourselves on this conveyor belt that takes us from the cradle to the classroom, to the office, and finally to the grave. Yet, realistically speaking, it’s not what most people would choose given the choice in earnest. Sadly, we go through a lengthy process of being taught ‘how the world works’. We’re told that we have to ‘earn a living’, or earn our place in the world by giving to it, oftentimes more than it gives to us, and then, when its milked us dry, we’re shuffled off into retirement, and the next generation takes our places on the conveyor belt.
The funny thing is that most people recognize the nature of the cage that we’re born into. For this hamster wheel existence to be even remotely palatable to us, we must be constantly under the impression that our targets are within our reach. If there was no hope of escape you’d eventually run out of steam, but the illusion of a finish line just over the horizon is what keeps us going. I got this impression recently when I came across a YouTube video talking about 6G networks. Most places that have 5G network coverage have barely had it for a year, now, and people are already thinking about the next generation? It’s not that 5G is, in any way, insufficient for most people’s needs (as far as I know, anyway). The same thing happened when 4G first rolled out, too. It doesn’t seem to matter how good the milestone we’ve reached is — we’ve been conditioned to always expect the next thing. That is how most of us live our lives — as if we’re jumping through an endless sequence of hoops of which there’s always a next one.
We don’t even need to look at the grand scheme of our lives to see this constant delaying of gratification at play. We do it every day. When we snooze our alarm clocks in the morning, for example. No one, realistically speaking, thinks those additional 5 minutes of sleep will make a difference, yet we do it anyway. It’s one of the subtle ways in which we program ourselves. “Not yet,” we tell ourselves, “now is not the right time,” until it’s too late, then all we can do is try to rush through it all. Beyond that, we’re constantly postponing and procrastinating — “I can always do this tomorrow,”, and we assume that tomorrow there will be nothing holding us back, but there’s always something. If today was your last day on Earth, would you spend it scrolling aimlessly through social media or binge-watching mindless entertainment? I cannot presume to know what anyone would or would not do with their last day, but I doubt anyone would want to be staring at a tiny, glass screen.
Carpe Diem!
- Horace
Modern life has convinced us that we are guaranteed long, healthy lives and that what you don’t feel like doing today can always be done tomorrow, but that could not be further from the truth. Far from being terrifying, acknowledging this can be liberating. It can be a reminder that if you live your life only ever striving towards some perfect day when things will fall perfectly into place for you to embrace existence, you may be surprised to find that that day can be quite elusive. For most, that day only ever rolls around when they are too weak and frail to put it to good use — at least not without the aid of a re-energizing nap.
The ancients knew this well. That’s why practices such as keeping a ‘memento mori’ (which literally translates to ‘remember you must die’) were popular. This was a symbolic object, often a skull, that served as a constant reminder of the specter of death that looms over us all. There’s nothing morbid about this practice. It served many purposes (still does for many people), one of which was to curb the urge to procrastinate. Admittedly, life then was, as Thomas Hobbes said, ‘nasty, brutish, and short’, but the same was true then as is true now — you can’t live your life perpetually waiting for the future.
There’s still the specter of the second of our initial questions looming large over us. What does it mean to be truly alive? Now, this is a very subjective question, and any answer I give could be easily countered by the first person to read this. I still do, however, believe that we’re only ever truly alive when we’re not living for other people — when we’re not bricks in a wall or cogs in a machine. There’s a sense in which our lives aren’t ever truly ours — not in any real sense. Our lives are characterized by time — the time we spend doing the things we love; the things we do for no other reason except that they bring us joy. I believe that is the final stretch that most people spend their lives striving towards — a time when we can finally stop jumping through society’s hoops and just do something for ourselves.
Now, this is not me trying to say YOLO — it’s more nuanced than that. YOLO has been used to justify the dumbest, most reckless, and life-shortening behaviors (in my experience, at least). For most people, truly living is doing what everyone around us is doing — drinking, partying, or whatever else pop-culture and the media have popularized. How can we even call it living if all we’re doing is re-enacting an ideal that somebody else has manufactured? If that is living, then maybe Shakespeare was right about all the world being a stage filled with players.
The way I see it, to embrace life on our terms is, in itself, an act of radical rebellion. It involves a refusal to accept all of society’s limits and constraints. It’s the refusal to wait when society tells you to wait — when they say ‘your time will come’, you say, ‘my time is now!’. This moment — right here and right now — the only thing stopping you from doing anything is you. If the caterpillar waited for the perfect day to become a butterfly, it would die in its cocoon. So, stop waiting to live and, maybe, just live — that, for me, is a much better motto.
