This was nice. It wasn't a great piece, but it was well-done. Great voice and cogent flow. Far too often that's not the case any more, sadly. I liked it. I jus

This was nice. It wasn't a great piece, but it was well-done. Great voice and cogent flow. Far too often that's not the case any more, sadly. I liked it. I just turned 53, and the thesis the author finally makes resonates with me. In your 40s, you are "done". You aren't finished. It's not that you can't change your life and do wonderful things. It's that a great degree of mystery and worrying about your future has now concluded. When you're 20 and think about doing some incredible thing, it's almost like it's a different person, perhaps some super-cool version of yourself. When you're 50 and think about doing an incredible thing, it's you. You know who you are. It's much better at 50 than it was at 30, oddly enough. For me, my mid-20s through my late 30s was a bit of a struggle. There is one major downside to pushing past 40: prejudice and patronizing by young people. It's natural in your teens to turn to your peers for validation and for it to start being terribly important who the cool kids are. For a lot of people in their teens, twenties, and beyond, they look at older folks and the major feeling that comes across their face is "You're not really hitting on much, are you grandpa?" You can see it in their looks, you can hear it in their voice. It's not everybody, mind you, but it's enough to notice. My stepdad was a WWII vet, a cranky old guy. I loved him. But I realized after getting to know him for many years that he avoided younger people. It wasn't that he didn't like them. He liked sharing ideas and discussing things with everybody. He just had better things to do than put up with their patronizing prejudicial bullshit. When I finally figured it out, it didn't make sense to me. Now that I'm on "the other side", so to speak, I can see where he's coming from. I don't agree with his decision, but it's understandable. Still, overall, after 40 life sort of opens up again, like it did in your teenage years, only this time you don't have all the psychological baggage you had back in the day. I'm looking forward to seeing where all of this goes!