25 Things I Learned the Year I Turned 50
Musings on a milestone birthday — and yes, it really is all about love, health, and buying that lip gloss.
Health is wealth. Would I immediately walk away from any listicle that kicked itself off with such a stupendously hoary cliché? Yes. In the past year, however, I lost two people I loved very much, and in the wake of those losses it seems imperative to cherish the reserves of mobility and energy I am currently lucky enough to possess. Especially with climate change limiting the number of days it’s safe enough to go outside and exercise. Actual and disgusting amounts of wealth plus this health would be the best scenario, of course, but until then….
It may be okay to say that our music is better than their music, for it may not be nostalgia talking but rather an objective truth brought to us by the advent of social media, which requires conformity to run and perpetuates the same.
I laughed at Lloyd Dobler when I was 16, and now it seems I am Lloyd Dobler.
Women don’t necessarily poof-gone! turn invisible in their 40s and 50s.
The 30s are a real compare-and-despair decade, and when I look back on them, I want to say they were more bewildering and trying than my teenage years. In your 30s you’re just old enough to have amassed some of what you wanted through your own wits and hustle, and just young enough to still think you can absolutely change your reality through hard work. Just young enough to have more energy than wisdom, and more blind faith in yourself than perspective or experience. Being caught in those in-between states can make you think everyone who’s not you must have the answers. Would this be the case if we lived in an agrarian non-capitalist society with community-affirming rituals and tradition? Probably not, but here we are. I may be sadder than I was in my 30s, but I’m no longer as snarled up in confusion.
Phones are the new cigarettes. And before that, Starbucks beverages were. Bottom line: we find it unbearable to live. I once asked a therapist what she’d learned about people in all her years of practice and she said: People really hate themselves, and they really hate having feelings. I try to remember this when I’m having a hard time liking myself the way a Millennial influencer or a Gen Z TikToker would. The thought is comforting. Which brings me to number 7.
An Amy or a Jennifer may always be more thoughtful, hard-working, considerate, genuine, wise, and effortlessly funny than a Madison. Even when said Madison has become an Amy to the generation below her, she will probably never be able to access the spiritual plane that growing up as essentially feral children in the aftermath of the ‘60s put all of us Amys—and Jennifers and Tracys and Michelles—on.
Considering the sheer number of artists who die in their 90s, I’m getting the idea that creativity equals longevity. Or rather continuing to pursue some art or craft, however you want to define those terms, with curiosity and passion equals longevity.
Walking it off can help.
Talking about it, sadly, may not.
Sometimes buying lip gloss or underwear helps more.
On underwear: when trying to up my lacy underthing game, I have noticed that many women seem to be gravitating toward the same basic, black, decorous-to-almost-somber, non-edible, librarian-who-gave-it-all-up-for-the-bordello numbers. Those are the pieces that are always sold out when I go to buy occasion undergarments, whether in stores or online. This makes me laugh, and comforts me, because it means there’s an idea about how flamboyant and adventurous our sexual self should be, and then there’s what we’re actually willing and able to pull off. Maybe, erotically speaking, we’re all just tubs of vanilla ice cream laced with an enticingly rocky road of Red Hots, and maybe that’s okay. Speaking as a once and future tub of vanilla.
Men and women are more similar than our culture allows any of us to admit, and the war of the sexes we seem to get into every couple of decades is starting to seem like a pointless and harmful waste of time.
That being said: men may suffer more from romantic delusion than women do.
The fact that young people are making Fran Lebowitz an icon once again means several things, and one of them might be that the young are secretly (or not-so-secretly) dying for someone to call bullshit on the world we live in. The young can’t do it for themselves without looking like reactionary assholes who’d rather be Civil War reenactors for the rest of their lives, so they need an unassailably cosmopolitan figure—a Fran—to do it for them.
We may all be more scared than we’re willing to admit.
Don’t trust anyone under 40. (I’m kidding! Am I kidding?)
Going to see the musicians of your youth can sometimes feel less like attending a wake and more like attending the best kind of class reunion.
Taylor Swift may be doing all the things we mistakenly gave Madonna credit for.
The Grateful Dead have more than one good song.
Vanity is dignity.
I am enough.
Another thing I’ve learned over these years is that I’ll probably never be able to say “I am enough” with a straight face. Knowledge of your limits (and honoring those limits) is power.
I might have read enough. That I can say with a straight face. And news diets, while scary for a person who prides herself on Keeping Up, do bring calm.
I don’t know that I’ve loved enough—I mean I don’t know that I’ve loved as selflessly as I could have—but learning how is perhaps what the next few decades are for.
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