Category: life

When your body gets too old

I read about this former pro skateboarder, considered the best in the world by many. Born in the 60s he can no longer perform the tricks of his youth, his body just won’t allow it. He also gets funny looks when he’s on his skateboard, so he only goes out at night. Street cleaners and the homeless are the only ones that see him. An old man just skating the streets performing the occasional trick.

It’s sad when your passion in life is tied to your body’s abilities. As you get older your body just can’t perform the same movements that it could in its youth. And if you suffer an injury it takes a lot longer to heal.

Take Speedway riders for example. Due to the nature of the sport and the possibility of serious injury, it is considered a young man’s sport. Retirement age is around 40. Pushing that limit can have consequences. One rider pushed that boundary into his early 50s. He was past his prime and struggled to compete with the younger riders, but his passion for his profession kept him going as long as he could. He wasn’t ready to retire and become a commentator just yet. He felt he had a few more rides left in him.

Some keep their bikes, their skateboards, and ride just for fun. Limiting the risks. Embracing the feeling they get from doing what they love. For as long as they can.

Settle down

I overheard someone giving advice to another person the other day. They were telling them to settle down and have kids.

Settle down. What a weird expression. As if we are all manic living our lives and that at some point we should give up all the excitement and activity and settle down, and while we are at it have some kids. It’s an old expression used a lot and I get it. At some point in your life you should pause on the career aspirations and focus on building a family, if that’s what you want. I just found it an amusing thing to say. To settle down. To pause the flurry of activity that is your life to date and to live a calmer more family-oriented life.

The progress bar

Sometimes it feels like we live our lives by the progress bar, just one pixel at a time. Just endless waiting for digital completion. In my youth it was watching D-copy or X-copy slowly copy an 880MB or 1.44HD floppy. Later, when I started testing software for a living it was animated progress bars of all kinds. One developer thought it would be fun to add an animated gif as a progress bar to keep us testers entertained. It just looped forever until the activity was complete. Its only job was to let you know that something was happening, unless the software had crashed in the background of course, then you would be watching that animation forever.

We can waste our life just watching progress bars.

The art of walking and talking

I haven’t yet mastered the art of walking and talking. It sounds strange to say that out loud but it’s true. When I’m out and about, especially in crowds, I tend to focus my attention on my surroundings and who is near me. When I receive a phone call that all goes to pot. My situational awareness is reduced. I try to find a place to the side, an alley or alcove, somewhere I can focus on the phone call while remaining aware of who is around me and who is listening.

Somehow both my attention to the caller and my surroundings is reduced. It’s worse if I continue talking. You shouldn’t use the phone while driving, and I definitely shouldn’t use one while walking. I lose half the conversation and get in peoples’ way.

The exception to this rule is when I’m in the countryside. With no one around I can enjoy both the walk and the conversation. With a hands-free kit the experience is even better.

I’m sure there is an art to walking and talking but I have yet to master it.

Political music in minutes

You can now create professional sounding music in minutes thanks to AI.

You can write a country song for your girlfriend on your anniversary with careful written lyrics with meaning only to the both of you. And it can sound like a professional singer and band recorded it. All from the comfort of your own home, and laptop.

A new trend is political music. Music with a political message or bias complete with propaganda lyrics designed to resonate with your target audience. Available in all musical genres and styles. Rock, metal, jazz, classical, pop, you name it, whatever you want. Type in your message and the AI will create the track for you faster than you can make a cup of coffee. Fine-tune it and release. Voila! Your political message or viewpoint is injected into the music streams of your choice ready for the masses to consume.

I wish I knew

When I was younger I wish I’d understood finance more. I wish I knew how pensions worked, and taxes. I wish I’d understood how I could have made up years towards the state pension, how I could have reduced taxes with self assessments, paid off a mortgage faster, and benefited from tax-free investments.

I learned all of the above the hard way. By being overly taxed and having a rubbish pension. By learning what I should have done after-the-fact from others.

They should have taught this stuff in school, but they didn’t. Instead we are taught maths that we will never use. Why not teach us how to balance an account, how bank accounts work, about loans, pensions, and investing? Teach us something that will be useful when we enter the world of adulthood and financial obligations. Or at least point us in the right direction.

Problem empathy

I suffer from problem empathy.

It’s where you worry and stress about problems that are not your own, but those of friends or family.

When catching up with a friend or family member and they tell you about their woes, something that happened to them recently, maybe they were ripped off, scammed, or threatened, and are obviously upset. You begin to feel angry as if the problem has befallen you and not them. That you were the person that was wronged or threatened and you need to sort it, to make things right.

This is problem empathy.

You get worked up about this thing that has not happened to you, yet somehow feels as if it has. It can be really frustrating. Your loved ones may not even understand, telling you that you are worrying and stressing over nothing.

The power of knowing your rights

There is power in knowing your rights. Not many bother. Or they think they know them already. They purchase goods or services believing that certain protections are in place, only facing reality when they try to enforce them later.

There’s a lack of education in schools around consumer rights, or even human rights. If we are being honest there isn’t really much education around finance. Most school leavers don’t know the difference between a debit and credit card, or how to balance a bank account. Mathematics, reading and writing, a partial second language if you are lucky, and some science is all most leave school with.

You can educate yourself. The likes of Martin Lewis and Rob Moore offer free education on finance and your rights as a consumer. It’s worth taking the time to learn all you can. If nothing else you’ll learn how to make better purchases and how to look after your own financial health.

Knowing your rights is a very powerful tool that we should all acquire.

Peter Pan Syndrome

Men can suffer from Peter Pan Syndrome. It’s a thing.

You are forever a big kid. You never grow up. You don’t do adult. Toys just get more expensive.

One day you realise that you are as old as your dad was when you looked up to him as a grown-up. Yet you don’t feel like a grown-up. Not yet anyway. If you were to look in the mirror then you would realise how old you are, on the outside. But on the inside? You still feel like a big kid, but with responsibilities and bills to pay. You fake adult as best as you can hoping that one day you’ll get there, but not yet, not today. Today there’s a new Lego set to build, or an online campaign to look forward to, or maybe a movie marathon with your mates and pizza.

Tomorrow, tomorrow you’ll do adult. Today you are still a lost boy.

After ambition burnout

Ambition burnout. It’s a weird combination of words implying that it is possible to burn-out from ambition. But it is real and something that I’ve personally experienced.

I’ve always been driven by ambition. As a child I wrote a list of things I wanted to achieve by the time I was 18. I completed the list well before my 18th birthday. I wrote another to achieve by the time I was 30. It included things like to live in a nice home, have a nice car, a great job, and to travel around the world. I completed it by age 29.I wrote a few more, which I achieved. Then I hit the aforementioned burn-out. I ran out of things that I wanted to achieve. So I idled. With no more drive or goals I coasted along. I embraced mindfulness, journalling, meditation, and long walks. They kept me sane but barely.

Those of us driven by ambition can feel a real sense of loss when we no longer have ambition to steer us forwards. We merely exist like everyone else. With no measurement of progress, no sense of achievement. Just being.

It can lead to depression, and bad health. Ambition burnout can leave you hollow. A loss of drive, no mojo, no spirit.

So what comes after ambition burnout?