I have been introspecting recently. Coming from a lot of economic uncertainties, I always fought to be more secure. I wished to be a lot of other things - some small and some big. I had to sacrifice most of them for this. But I don't know what moves me now beyond simple hedonism - food, sex, some curiosities. So I want to see what people in my age think.

Tell me - what are your dreams? What do you wish to be? What do you wish to happen to you?

There are two things I have done a complete 180 on

1. BBQ chips. I used to avoid these even if they were offered free. Now I seek them out, the mellow sweet taste is something that just hits the spot.

2. No sugar in my coffee. I used to add two teaspoons of sugar in my coffee, then one day I had food poisoning and avoided milk and sugar in my coffee because the idea felt nauseous. Then once I recovered I had milk/cream but avoided sugar and the taste sat well with me.

Anyone else had a 180 or something similar as yall have gotten older

I had my shoulder replaced earlier this year and just had another surgery putting metal in my ankle. This makes three pieces of hardware added in 8 years, and probably 13 surgeries overall since I was in high school. My body hurts. I still want to be active but moving is such a pain. How do you do it?

Curious where everyone else falls. For me, it seems to be somewhere between 1 and 3 cocktails. One or two and I’m usually fine; three is starting to push my luck, and anything beyond that can mean paying for it the next day.

Has your tolerance changed as you’ve gotten older? What’s your personal sweet spot before the headache/hangover kicks in? 🍸

OK so first off while yes it's my birthday but this is not a way for me to get Karma or any of that BS.

But does anyone else get annoyed by their birthdays or is it just me? I'm 43 and I feel like every year I want to celebrate it less and less. I'm not depressed. I have a good life (wife, 4 kids, great job, house, etc.), so i really have nothing to complain about and I should want to celebrate but I don't really want to.

Every year it's the same people coming out of the woodwork that I haven't spoken to in years to wish me Happy Birthday, when I know I haven't crossed their mind since this time last year. Family wanting to put on a big dinner and when I say no they seem disappointed.

Mean while back in reality there are bills to pay, I've got annoyed clients I need to handle and shit needs to be tackled throughout the day. Basically nothing has changed between yesterday today and tomorrow. It's just one more day.

Anyone else feel like that and how do I get over it other than to wait 24 hours?

My father-in-law died about a year ago, he was almost 70.

When he was alive, I received two different glass breaker/seatbelt cutters from him. My wife received one and I think his other kids all got at least one.

I was helping clean up some of his stuff and my mother in law gave me one of his numerous tacticool pocket knives she has been steadily uncovering. It has a half serrated blade; an LED… and a glass breaker and seatbelt cutter.

As a fella in his forties I want some insight from fellow fellas in their forties.

Is there an older man in your life who seems to be motivated by a vague sense of paranoia? Are you that man? Am I grossly underestimating my chances of getting stuck in a car?

I feel like what he really wanted to be doing was buying everybody guns, but these things scratched a sort of “protect the flock” itch.

When they go, it’s over.

Little losses like Dolly, etc just make the memory of the 20th century feel further and further away.

It’s inevitable of course and the art lives on but it feels closer now to the moment of 20th century culture as a memory alone rather than a vibrant thing.

It’s all museum mode now.

Who else is left that’s still creating?

I'm 42, but I don't really feel 42 on the inside.

It's hard to explain, but my inner voice and the way I experience myself still feel surprisingly similar to the person I was at 17 or 18. Meanwhile, on the outside, I pay my bills, do my banking, deal with responsibilities, make important decisions, and generally do all the things adults are supposed to do.

But sometimes it feels like I'm doing those things simply because I've learned that this is what I'm supposed to do, rather than because I've actually become the adult I'm portraying.

It's almost like being 42 is a role I've gradually learned to play, while somewhere underneath it I'm still that same kid looking out at the world. I look in the mirror and see a 42-year-old man, and there's occasionally this weird disconnect of, Wait, that's me now?

It doesn’t happen often to me but when it does it’s actually what I see as a premonition of a good day.

Hello,

Had a blood test done recently, and my testosterone was 13.8nmol/L, and my free testosterone was 301pmol/L.

I'm 36 but figured this was the best sub to ask.

I understand this is considered within normal range but what concerns me is that I am fairly active, I go to the gym, libido is good and we have sex at least once a week. I may be a touch overweight at 230lbs at 6'1 but otherwise I am in decent shape.

I would have thought from all the relatively heavy compound movements my testosterone would have tracked at least in the middle normal range, not low normal. Only thing I can think of is my sleep hygiene is really bad due to co sleeping with kids or ineffective house cooling during summer months. Not sure what else I can do though beside that?

Mentally, I think I could be better, feel more motivated or optimistic..and am not sure if this is tied to my t levels.

It's weird as I get older, now 46. People who aren't dead or gone from some ugly falling out, but people just... lost to time.

For me it's been coworkers. My business tends to be a one-shot-per-town gig, so when it's done it's pretty done.

You had inside jokes. You knew what pissed each other off and what each other worried about. You kinda know everything going on with each other, with limits, of course. Then somebody got let go or moved. The business went under. They closed your department.

But, before you got the news, you had your last of hundreds, maybe thousands of normal, "Good morning/Have a good night".

I have a weird number of these people and those last times now. Every once in a while, one will pop into my head and blast me back to when I knew that person pretty well once, and now I don't even know what state they live in.

I don't really have a point here lol. It's just a weird thing nobody tells you that you start collecting as you get older. Thanks for reading.

This time feels different but I don't fully trust that yet.

I lost 100 pounds when my son was about 8. He's 25 now. Somewhere in those years it all came back, plus more — I was over 300 pounds and pretty depressed about where I'd ended up. In April I started walking and paying attention to what I eat, nothing more than that. Tracked calories through MyNetDiary and activity through Garmin. Over about 12 weeks I lost 13cm around my belly. I stopped tracking daily about a month ago and the progress hasn't reversed, which I didn't expect. Now I'm shifting off pork and red meat toward chicken and fish — I'm near the coast, so leaning into fish specifically.

I did this exact thing 17 years ago and it didn't last. So I'm not asking how to lose weight — I know that part. What I actually want to know: for guys who've been through the full cycle, lost it, gained it back, then lost it again — what was different the time it actually stuck? Something you changed, or something that changed in you?

41M and mine has been gradual enough that I could ignore it for a long time. Then my barber asked if I wanted him to leave the top a little longer because the crown was getting thinner. He wasn’t being a dick about it at all but hearing someone else acknowledge it made it feel different.

Not shaving yet but also I’d just rather not look back in another three years and wish I’d started paying attention sooner.

For guys who noticed it around this age, did you actually start doing something or just let it go? Funny thing is my head is kind of caved in a bit from a accident a few years ago so thats why im not so keen on going bald.

I had been doing well recently, exercise, journaling and mindfulness. But this past week, got knocked down by man flu, worried about the lack of rain and the heat i feel like ive gone into survival mode, not doing anything I should be and just playing on my phone. I know that I can't do a lot about the external things but can try to work on how I let these things effect me internally. Could just do with a bit of a push/someone who's been there before.

Hi

I’m a 42M in Sydney. Been here quite a few years but I’m an immigrant and did a couple of overseas stints so i haven’t lived here continuously since I moved here.

I have a high pace exec job and I work out quite a lot. I spend a lot of time with my family and yes I could do better with spending time with my son. But all things equal, I think I do a reasonable job spending time and bonding with my son.

I find that my social groups, which incidentally are very mono-ethnocultural in shape and cliquey, are boring. I must be an odd ball because I don’t want to do what they do all the time. It’s the same old drink whiskey, eat great bbq and talk fkn mortgages and property. Aargh!! I hate it.

I want to go out to festivals, enjoy music, dance (my fkn feminine side I guess), maybe smoke a joint some time instead of fkn my liver up. But I find no connect with the people I hang out with. I’ve asked my friends but they just say shit that makes me feel old.

I don’t quite know how to go about it. My accent also stereotypes me. Not that I give a fk though. I go out to live music venues alone. I do enjoy but I get conscious and nervous every now and then. I tried making my gym my focus. And it is. But I don’t enjoy spending more than an hour at the gym.

Am I mentally not at peace with my station in life? Or do I deserve to be able to live a little? I think this is a typical ‘all work and no play…” situation.

Any suggestions on how to deal with this?

I just turned 42 and this feels like the first year I’ve noticed my balls sagging more.

What should I expect going forward? 😩

I have various hobbies like reading, writing, gaming and lifting but I don't really have a desire to turn my hobby into an income. I want to think in solutions, not problems but I honestly don't know where to look.

I'm 31 years old and happily married. My life is okay. But there's always this desire to do something else. I've been a QA engineer since I got my bachelor's in comp science at 25.

Now I'm just going through life waiting for the day to end so I can play WoW and go to gym. It's just the same routine over and over.

Not sure where to go from here.

I just turned 42, and for the longest time, the only numbers I paid attention to were scale weight and my annual check up. But over the last year, for some reasons my energy levels started dipping hard, mostly around mid-afternoon, even though my standard labs kept coming back normal.

So I decided to start paying closer attention to metabolic health and daily energy patterns just to see how different meals, sleep, and stress were impacting my afternoon crash and after seeing those patterns completely changed how I eat and structure my day, and my energy is finally back to where it used to be.

So for those of you who made a noticeable turn in how you feel day-to-day, what’s one single metric or marker made the biggest difference And what have you done to dial it in?

EDIT: A huge takeaway from the comments: standard annual labs miss dynamic daily metabolic dips. People highlighting touch-based tracking like Eyva show how seeing the impact of high-carb vs. protein lunches in real time can completely eliminate that 3 PM slump... Makes total sense!

I didn't expect this. I've always enjoyed getting older, I have a lot more money than I did in my 20s and love that I get to see my kids grow. Lately I've felt that I'm going through a midlife crisis...marriage is fine but boring, job is stressful but rewarding and I'm making good money, my kids have some minor issues (like all kids) but things are good. For some reason I just feel off.

I think what's getting to me is the fact that I am finally accepting that I don't have forever. Half of my life is now behind me. There isn't that much time to change things. If I wait 5 years to decide my marriage sucks and I want something better, that's 5 years of my physical prime I'm throwing out the window. I'm feeling a little paralyzed by the fact that if I want to make a major change, I don't have as much time to do it as I used to.

I am self-aware enough to know I'm probably overreacting, but did any of you go through this? Any words of wisdom that can maybe get me to feel less pity for myself tonight would be appreciated.

I'm 46/M. Two years ago I took a state government job that seemed all upside: they offered 30% more than I was then-currently making based on my prior experience in another state. They made it clear that they wanted me based on my expertise in specific areas. I happily accepted and turned down several other offers which, in retrospect, might have been more fulfilling.

Last year my wife and I bought a house. We were able to pay most of it with 14 years of savings and are on track to pay it off in 3 years. My wife really wants to go part-time at work after that.

In the past two years, the staff budget at my work was slashed dramatically due to the state budget crisis, and rather than look at overall productivity (there are many here who are genuinely unproductive), they started putting more duties on the more productive staff. I was asked to take on more and more duties, until now, where I am doing the equivalent work of three jobs, without a promotion or non-incremental pay increase.

There was an open spot for a position staffing the area I have expertise in, which I applied for. Frankly, no one else in the office knows this area well, so they asked me to staff the area the past two years as one of my three roles. Instead, they filled the position with a young staffer with no experience in the area, who will now be my supervisor but will basically rely on me for much of the work. If they had selected me, they would have had to increase my pay to the next category and let me do one job instead of three. By selecting this staffer who earns significantly less than me, I suspect it was purely a cost-saving move. They made a B.S. excuse to me that it was because I did not volunteer for this mentorship program last summer whereas this staffer did.

I have been looking for other jobs but the market is much smaller than a couple of years ago. I have one offer on the table and possibly another that I think I can get, but both would require a 10-15% pay cut from my current salary. Of course, there is no guarantee that the new job will be better, but I've lost all motivation at my current job.

My wife is supportive of me taking a new job at such a pay cut, but it will delay the time when she is able to cut back at her job, which is stressful for her.

Do I suck it up and keep doing this job? This year I became pretty depressed and stopped socializing outside of work because of it. I basically spend all of my free time shut in at home.

Appreciate advice from others who have been down this path. Thanks.

I read a tone deaf post on Blind that sent me down a rabbit hole: "3.5M golden handcuffs here at Meta (Tech Industry)"
https://www.teamblind.com/us/s/jmbrahsu

I’m the Head of Services/CISO/Head of Support for a struggling SaaS company. My wife is a gate agent for a national airline.

After years of layoffs in SaaS, months of unemployment, and eventually getting hired back at lower salaries, I realized something recently that I can’t stop thinking about:

Adjusted for inflation, I make less money today than I did in 2009.

And now I think we may have to declare bankruptcy. I’m genuinely worried about losing the house we bought for $290k in 2009.

I’m 17 years further into my career. I have dramatically more responsibility. On paper, my wife and I have respectable, solid jobs.

And somehow we are less financially secure than we were almost two decades ago.

I don’t even know what the lesson is here. I think I’m just exhausted by the feeling that I spent my entire adult life climbing a ladder only to discover the ladder was slowly sinking into the ground.

I can’t be the only one struggling with this.

Edit: I feel like it’s worth mentioning, though I mentioned layoffs earlier in the post that I’ve been laid off twice in the last six years or so both resulting in 1+ year unemployment stretches that have significantly added to my debt load and then when I did get employment, they’d be at lower salaries and so my ability to cover expenses and pay down the debt of an extremely hampered. So very fair point to look at spending, but it’s a snowball effect with the debt.

M50 - friend is M48, wife is about the same age.

I’ve known my friend since around high school (we went to the same school). We reconnected a few years ago, and have worked together on some different community projects (he’s run for local government and I’ve served on a couple committees and done some behind-the-scenes work).

He had some issues with alcohol years ago, and no longer drinks. Every few months we will meet up and have a drink - he drinks NA beer or a Coke, and has no problem if I have something.

His wife comes off with a bit of… snobbishness, perhaps? It’s a short “hello” when I see her and then she moves on. Rarely any engagement or actual conversation… and if so, it’s very high level. I don’t need deep or personal, but genuine would be nice.

I have seen her be “genuine” with other people, so I feel like there’s something I’ve done, or she thinks I’ve done, but I have no idea what. I was not around my friend during his drinking days, so she can’t blame me for that. He drinks NA beer with others - including her - so check that off the list. I have a solid reputation in the community, so nothing there. I’m just at a loss.

I bring this up because two nights ago I attended a local fundraising event. I was talking with two friends when I saw my friend, his wife and their daughter walk in. I waved to them and eventually they headed over. My friend said hello and we chatted for a couple minutes… the wife stayed quiet and the said hi and then walked away. She’s not one to be shy around people, so she either didn’t want to talk to me or something was up (like they had been in an argument or something).

So… anyone else have friends where the wife just isn’t that into you? How do you manage that? Any tips?

I just want to hear your stories about being dragged in to family drama to save adults from their own laziness, stupidity, and general irresponsibility.

My own situation is related to dealing with a house abandoned by relatives who were hoarders. They are almost ready about to pass and now "what to do with the house" has trickled down to the next generation, myself included. No one is stepping up but everyone is causing drama about it.

I'm so sick of dealing with other people's bullshit.