It’s been a while since I last blogged. I just had the ultimate realization that there is no escaping getting older. Sure, you can mentally keep yourself young, but it sure takes a ton of effort to maintain. Over the last few months, I’ve been going through a major contemplative phase – thinking about what I want from life and all that shit – in short, a mid-life crisis. I know I’m the last person in the world to be thinking this way, but whatever the reasons, I was thinking about it.
There are several circumstances that force you to this realisation, some of them being:
1. You can mentally be prepared but your body doesn’t support it anymore. Working all day in a chair made me realise that I just couldn’t move the way I used to while swimming. I’m gaining my agility back, but it’s a realisation that your body won’t fix itself without some hard work on your part. A friend of mine suffered a severe stroke of carpal tunnel too, which reinforced this realization.
2. You start caring about “grown up” stuff. When I moved out of my parents’ I would pay anything that a vendor would ask. Now I negotiate rates with the house maid, I find best deals on groceries and I survery three or four LPG agencies before I book a connection. I keep updates on shares of various companies, I invest carefully, I followed up on this year’s budget, etc.
3. You start feeling lonely and cling on to stuff. Mostly I miss my dog! He passed away a couple of months ago at my parents’ house in Pune. I plan to get a new pup the minute I find an apartment that will allow it.
4. When with friends, you discuss increasing rates of cooking oil and such stuff! All the stuff we teased parents for discussing, we began discussing ourselves recently. What’s more wierd is that we were actually interested in the discussion.
5. When you reach a plateau in your career. Up until now, it was a constant struggle upwards. To find fun and exciting work! Once you’ve found it, you lose focus of what you want in life. There’s nothing to look forward to. No major challenge to be overcome. No major hurdle to be crossed. Life becomes slightly mundane and boring.
6. You don’t know any single people any more – this one comes as a shock overnight if you’re like me. I always locked myself up in my robotics and signal processing and stuff. Then one day, I wake up and find that almost all my friends are either married, or about to be married, or committed. You stop knowing any single people anymore. You miss making fun of married/committed people since you don’t have a circle to joke about them anymore. This one shocks you more than anything else! It means you’ve “grown up” now! Marriage is the ultimate realization of getting old!
So trust me people – if you’re young, enjoy it. You’ll wake up one day and realise you wasted your life building robots or analysing wierd EEG signals, and all for what? You spend your like thinking marriage is like a hundred years into the future – something only grown ups think about – you’ll think about it in a few decades. The real kicker is when you get that first wedding invite from a friend – then you know you’ve reached your middle ages.
I’m signing out now to continue through my mid-life crisis. If anyone has tips on how to get over it, don’t hesitate to leave a comment!
