By 
AS A KID growing up in the ’80s, I always looked ahead to the future and wondered what it might be like. A friend and I conceived of flying cars and monorails (those were big in the ’80s) running through the streets of our country town. Our nine-year-old selves would probably be a little disappointed with what’s transpired.
Back to the Future II gave us a futuristic template for our imaginations – in 2015 we could expect hoverboards, holographic billboards (those actually exist, thanks Japan), and power-lacing kicks (Nike made a version of these in 2011, the Nike Mag). Perhaps most presciently, in the film’s parallel timeline, there was a hell-scaped vision of America run by a wannabe dictator with a penchant for gaudy, grandiose excess and totemic self-aggrandising corporate motifs – rich Biff is clearly a Trump stand-in and the Biffco headquarters an analogue for Trump Tower as a lair for an unbridled egoist.
It is perhaps typical of a Gen-Xer like me to invoke a pop-cultural reference to illustrate a point. Our generation grew up with the VCR, embedding movies into our psyche by taping them off TV, removing the ads and watching on repeat. We’re often cited as the bridge generation, one that enjoyed a free-range, latch-key childhood while revelling in the onset of rudimentary digital entertainment in arcade and console gaming.
What I seldom thought about as a kid was turning 50 and what that might look like. Personally, I was always looking forward to 2035, if only because when I was 10 my school buried a time capsule in its grounds that would be unearthed that year. My brother and I vowed to return for the capsule’s retrieval, so I was saddened when I learnt that the school has since been demolished and the time capsule dug up. Life, as they say, but neglect to tell nine-year-olds, is what happens when you’re busy making plans.
If I had been troubled to conceive of myself as a 50-year-old back then, I would likely have envisioned a decrepit, hobbling scarecrow-in-tracksuit pants, which is admittedly what I may resemble to a nine-year-old today.
But I don’t feel like one. In our minds, we remain untouched by the passing of time. I don’t feel like someone hitting the half-century, until I make the often day-wrecking mistake of looking at photos of my younger self. Truly, to see yourself looking impossibly youthful at 37 can be discombobulating, particularly as you can recall that you already felt ancient when that photo was taken.
As a middle-aged employee, you can spend a lot of time thinking about how you must appear to young colleagues, remembering that when you were their age you viewed fellow workers not 15 years older than you as fossils. You tell these young colleagues this and they politely insist they don’t see you this way, but you don’t believe them, because you’ve been them. Then you worry that by sharing your anxieties you’ve revealed a preoccupation with ageing and appearance that means that as well as old they now view you as neurotic and vain.
A number of high-profile Xers turned 50 this year – David Beckham, Bradley Cooper, Angelina Jolie, Drew Barrymore, 50 Cent, Charlize Theron, Eva Longoria – among them. Few of them look 50, or at least not the 50 that was collectively agreed upon a decade or two ago. Whether through supreme fitness or cosmetic enhancement, or both, most of these Xers are managing to land some haymakers against Father Time. Gen X was labelled the slacker generation, yet we seem to be as energetic and as conscientious in our fight against ageing as previous generations were.
On that point, my relative physical fitness would be something of a wonder to my nine-year-old self. Much has been made of how ancient people in their 40s and 50s in the ’80s looked compared to people that age today – and it’s not just the big hair and shoulder pads of the era that date them. But perhaps this is largely a celebrity affliction, for it’s also frequently pointed out that most Australians and Americans are more overweight or obese now than they were 50 years ago. Two things can be true.
Of course, today’s 50-year-olds have the option of seeking a little help in their quest to remain youthful. Cosmetic surgery, if not yet fully de-stigmatised, has certainly gone mainstream. I have yet to go under the knife or dye my hair or go to Turkey to get a hair transplant, all of which still seem a little too drastic to me and would court scrutiny of my vanity that I’m too neurotic to bear – I was hoping to care less about what others think by now; perhaps that joyous freedom is a gift bestowed to 70-year-olds.
Forgive me if I’m giving the impression that growing old means being consumed entirely by vanity and the desperate battle to resist the forces of physical degradation. There is no denying that, at 50, you do feel a little wiser. You have learned from painful experience that there are mental rabbit holes best avoided. After having a quarter or early mid-life crisis in my 30s – I went through a couple of painful break-ups and took up the drums – right now, I feel relatively free from identity-crippling angst, though, I’m also conscious it would only take a slight shift in my circumstances to upend my mental equilibrium. I must also confess (or flex) that I exercise six days a week, play pick-up basketball with guys half my age and ran two half-marathons this year (okay, it was a flex), so it’s probably easy to make the case that I’m running away from something.
But while I will cop to doing my best to age as slowly as I can, I feel the world around me is racing forward – yes, this is probably a clear sign of getting older. But seriously, the rise of AI and the prospect of superintelligence deposing human beings from the top of the food chain, precipitating Terminator-style annihilation or Matrix-style subjugation (again, as an Xer, I can’t help but use pop-cultural shorthand to make sense of the world around me) has overtaken climate change as my primary existential concern. The pace of technological change is, finally, starting to catch up to my nine-year-old’s imagination, yet instead of being inspired by it, I feel troubled – again, a sign of getting old.
All these musings are, of course, par for the course as you enter life’s back nine – using two golf metaphors in one sentence is surely a sign that like many 50-year-old men, I should take up the pastime.
At 50, you are inclined to look back on your life with nostalgia and forward with apprehension. It’s difficult to muster optimism and will likely remain so as the years continue to tick by. If only we could live in the present, we might be less troubled by the ghosts and gargoyles of our imaginations.
I doubt few 50-year-olds manage that and I shan’t trouble myself too much for failing to achieve inner peace and contentment in midlife. I’m certain that, as there always has been for my generation, there’s a movie or TV show that might serve as an uplifting allegory for my predicament – quick Google-search – of course, there’s a rumour This is 50 is in development.
