How does the 40s feel?

Definitely more intentional. And maybe a bit free.

I turn 43 today. It’s still early days (in the 40s) but I wanted to think aloud a bit on how the 40s feels so far.

Stock Photo by Valerie Blanchett

When I was approaching my late 30s and heading towards my forties, I found the whole prospect gloomy. It seemed like I had lived in a kind of temporal haze in my twenties and thirties, with some event or milestone to keep me occupied, but also with a sense of flatness of being young. The time between my teens, twenties, and thirties didn’t feel like an age gradient. I lived it with the innocence of young people who think that everything serious and old is a long time away and that time is near infinite.

So when I crossed 35, the looming four-O felt like a cold splash. Suddenly, I was a middle-aged man, an identity I just couldn’t wrap my head around. Because in my head I was still insecure and goofy, with a view of the world that was at odds with the seriousness my age seemed to imply. And I barely knew anything.

And yet, I’d already crossed the mean age of a standard human life.

This gloom turned into a sort of panic. Perhaps partly driven by this (and the desperation to get away from the soul—sucking leech of a role with Amazon India), I moved to Thailand in 2020, dragging N with me. It felt like I was pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del on life, examining the processes, and rebooting myself.

The surreal 2 years of COVID made everything feel like a bigger reset. I started working for a travel company right when the entire world shut down due to the pandemic, and people started baking bread and hoarding toilet paper. And then, suddenly, I was approaching 40, with a cocktail of new vaccinations and a large bucket list of things left untouched.

Of course, it’s connecting the dots on hind sight, but these were the dots that formed the pattern that eventually led me to quit my corporate life a month before I turned 40 in 2023. Those three years feel like an intermission in a movie, separating the before and after.

I wrote on LinkedIn about how it’s been three years outside corporate life.

---

Strangely, in my 40s, I have felt less anxious and more liberated. A consequence of the ticking clock was that I became more intentional about my own life (making choices for myself and aligning actions with my thoughts). Many other things changed as a consequence:

1. It allowed me to be way kinder to people, with the sense of everyone being on the same messy, finite journey heading to the same place eventually.

2. I became more secure in myself. I was always socially anxious and stressed about ‘performing,’ but I could finally mostly just be.

3. Related to the previous point, I got more invested in having a social life than ever before. I stopped being cynical about people or pretending that I am so unique that I ‘get along’ with only a few.

4. I did not care too much about what other people thought about my choices or opinions. I still care more than I should.

5. I became extra cautious not to sound like the old man ranting at the clouds. Every now and then, I check myself for sounding like the exact kind of middle-aged man I would snigger at when young.

6. I became extra eager to experience new things. When I thought back on the 40ish years, the moments I remember are either a) uniquely social with family or friends, b) involve a new experience, or c) travel. I can’t remember the hours or years I’ve spent poring over a spreadsheet or working. They are all a single blur. Even at work, I remember the specific moments of bonding with colleagues or doing something together.

7. I appreciated being ‘real’ more. I do not want to use the word authenticity because it’s so overused and nauseating. Performatism, signaling, etc., began to feel increasingly annoying to me. At the same time, I remind myself of point 5, though, not to end up becoming the annoying man ranting at everything.

8. I have grown less religious but more spiritual.

The ticking clock that felt ominous in my late thirties has turned (for now) into a source of agency. I know that time is running out. I know that I would be in this phase for even less time, perhaps, and I could almost imagine myself at 60 (if it were to happen), thinking back on my 40s and 50s fondly, when I still had the energy, drive, and health to do the things I wanted to do.

All this gave me a kind of eagerness for life. I wanted to live it, rather than go with the flow and hope for the weekend and next vacation.

Could be worse,

Tyag