Birthday Reflections 2026: Contemplating the Half-Century Mark

 

The Orion Nebula (from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, also my favorite Metallica song)

When I was a kid, I loved The Cosby Show. I hesitate to mention this, lest I give the criminally immoral creator of that show any attention, yet it was a huge part of my childhood. Such are the incongruities of life (but on the other hand: RIP Malcolm-Jamal Warner). I remember an episode when the main character is turning 50. His kids make an amusing presentation of “things that are older than Dad” to commemorate their father for “reaching the half-century mark.” 

A half-century!? My young mind reeled! Intellectually, of course, I knew people that old or older, but something about stating it as a “half-century” reconceptualized for me just how long that might be—if only I could conceive of an expanse of time five times longer than I had been alive at that point! What would life be like for me at that age? It was unimaginable. 

The unimaginable, dear reader, has a way of becoming reality. I reach my own half-century mark this week. That it is real makes it no easier to imagine, although now it feels unimaginably short rather than unimaginably long. 

That’s not quite right. A weird thing about aging is that stuff just keeps happening and you just keep on keepin’ on. Perhaps this is more obvious to those of us who spend a lot of time with young adults; we keep transforming into older adults while they stay the same age. 

Time feels both short and long. I remember things that happened “a few years ago” when the math informs me it was actually a few decades, but I also feel the distance of my past. My childhood is somehow simultaneously yesterday and an eon past. 

I’m the first to say that nostalgia can be bad for us (too much of our politics and culture these days is fueled by false nostalgia). But I have a nostalgic streak myself. I like to drive by places I lived when I was a kid when I’m in those areas. Earlier this year, I revisited some places in India I had not seen since my early 20’s. My exercises in nostalgia always reveal how things are the same, but different. You can never go back, but you also never left. You are the same, but different. 

The last decade has shown me what it means to feel my age. When I was a kid, I was confused about why the adults around me were always tired and complaining about aches and pains—the answer to came to me in my mid-40’s. Yet I also discovered the necessity of taking care of one’s body lest these aches and pains become worse than they have to be; this hasn’t been an easy lesson for someone who lives in their head and carries the emotional scars of having been the fat kid in gym class. 

As I always remark in my birthday reflections, birthdays are also deathdays; they remind us that none of us are here forever. This entropic universe demands a payment of one death from each of us. And a half-century mark reminds me that it’s extremely unlikely I will get the full second half of that century. Indeed, in my first birthday post on this blog, I realized that, actuarially speaking, middle age for me was in my late 30’s. I’ve been on the statistical downslide ever since. Losing dear friends in recent years also reminds me that death is not defeated by averages. None of us know how much time we have left. 

I recently reached a career milestone in my promotion to the rank of Professor (or “Full Professor” as we academics call it, or “the last raise my institution will ever give me” as I call it). In terms of employment, this means it’s harder to fire me. It also means more responsibility. In wondering what to do now, I thought of the bit from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia where the character Frank (played by another icon from my childhood) says, “I don’t know how many years on this Earth I got left. I’m gonna get real weird with it.” 

This seems like good advice for my career; I care far less about meeting someone else’s standards of “good scholarship” or “worthwhile teaching” and I’m having more fun than ever even as my energy to do all this wanes a bit (the pandemic and old age hit me around the same time with the lesson that I do need rest). Why not rethink my own previous work, expanding it to weirder places (I plan to write about Yogācāra Buddhism and Star Wars: The Last Jedi in a forthcoming project). I’m loving teaching a class on AI in science fiction and philosophy where students will make their own science fiction films. I hope even weirder things are on the horizon. 

Getting weird also works for my life. When I turned 40, I wondered which midlife crisis is right for me, brainstorming several ideas. I did start writing fiction again. I even attended a workshop and briefly served as a slush reader for a fiction magazine/podcast. But the last two years the energy or whim or whatever to write fiction seems harder to find. Maybe it will come back. I miss it. 

I have done more travel, although there’s still a lot more of the world to see. It was amazing to get back to India a few months ago (a place that changed the course of my life). I recently found an old drawing, which reminded me that I used to draw. I have a few instruments I rarely play, and I should get ahold of those I used to play (I miss the electric bass most of all). Maybe I’ll learn a new instrument. Or a new language. I recently bought an AMC A-List membership, so I can see more movies. I’m glad the pandemic didn’t kill movie theaters. If anything, movie theaters seem to be doing better (I see actual young people there!). 

I continue to be active in my union and I do some mild activism, which of course can never be enough, but is worth doing all the same. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difference between optimism (things will get better) and hope (things could get better). I’m leaning more into hope as of late (see my post on Star Trek’s 60th anniversary). 

I’m getting to the age where hope extends beyond however many years I have left, which gets easier with the larger temporal scope afforded by both my study of history of philosophy and my love of science fiction. Things have changed in the past, and they will surely change in the future. It’s up to us to shape that change, as activists of the past has shown us and as Octavia Butler counseled us in her fiction about possible futures. 

Age, bolstered by decades of philosophy, has also extended my metaphysical scope. The end of my life seems less tragic the more I think of myself (as I increasingly do) as a little node of the universe that for a brief moment comes to contemplate itself and then merges back into a vast ineffable reality. 

Still, I am sad about all the books I will never read, but at least those books are out there and they will be read. I am but a short sentence in the great book of reality, but that’s not so bad. All my memories will be lost in time like tears in rain, but there is, for all that, the rain. 

It’s a privilege just to be… well, to be, and to be part of a whole that is vaster and more connected than I could ever touch imprisoned within the delusion of selfhood. I am not an “I” separated from the universe for several decades before obliteration, but a sliver of an unfathomable cosmic “we” unbounded by human conceptual constructions. 

It seems I have already mastered one habit of old age—rambling on. So, let me wrap this up. A half-century is far too short, but also long enough (longer, in any case, than many people more deserving than I have had). 

In the grand scheme of things, of course, a 50th birthday doesn’t matter much. But in this half-century I have learned something else: it doesn’t really matter whether things matter in the grand scheme of things. It’s okay to just be part of that scheme of all things, and to grasp a birthday as an excuse to celebrate the beautiful and terrible mystery of being here at all. If you can’t do that once in a while, what really is the point?

PS: Weird Al's "Happy Birthday" has guided my reflections on birthdays for almost four decades. In a couple weeks, I'm going to see him in concert for at least the 15th time since the early 90's, so I have at least that to look forward to! Weird Al puts on an amazing show. Enjoy!