What is a grown-up?

There is a view that 49 going on 50 is too old to be listening to the likes of this:

Or this:

Alternately, I could claim that I’m just paying attention.

I’m struggling with my life at the moment. I have a responsible, well-paid job by my standards. We have a nice flat (though we could do with a bigger one). We have two lovely children, even if they do occasionally behave like monsters).

It’s not enough – or it’s too much – and I’ve still got no idea what I’m going to do about it.

Douglas Adams was my age when he unexpectedly collapsed on that treadmill (surely a symbol in direct opposition to everything he stood for). Joe Strummer had just turned 50  when a  heart condition that could have taken him at pretty much any point in his previous life finally called time. I’m clearly at a dangerous age for a man, an age men die or make stupid choices or both.

My whole dilemma, of course, is a product of too much privilege and education. If I lived in Victorian times, I’d be a clerk or a factory manager or a middling government civil servant in an unimportant department and none of this would be an issue. Would it?

Perhaps I should get religion. Or go to the pub. Or enter a Buddhist monastery. The Japanese nobility of Heian times regarded that as a perfectly valid retirement option once one’s children were grown up and settled. What their wives thought isn’t recorded. Perhaps they were obliged to become Buddhist nuns. Supermum wouldn’t be having any of that.

The question is, what does a grown do? I mean, honestly, what would Strummer do? What would Douglas Adams say? And is it perhaps a not unpromising thing (to, at the very last minute, take a glass-half-full perspective) that I still really have no idea what I want to do with my life? Or perhaps I know – let’s admit that – but getting there. Well’s that’s the tricky bit.

Comments closed because this is a bit silly.

Note: OK, comments opened due to demand. Though the people who demanded it are probably going to be the only people who actually do comment and they left their POV on another post entirely.