Halfway dead

In a very morose frame of mind, I looked up my life expectancy online. There are a bunch of different calculators, but they all generally agreed I’ll live to about 86, which means I have about 41 years to go, which means I’ve crossed over the halfway point. I have more years behind me than ahead.

Just as a quantity, forty one years doesn’t sound so bad. When I think of how my life is so radically different over the last twenty or ten or even five years, then forty years sounds like an amount of time full of potential to do so much.

Qualitatively, though, I feel like I’m already more or less just clocking time until death. If I have a child tomorrow, I won’t live to see my child reach the age I am now. I’m not going to have a child tomorrow, because I just haven’t really been interested in kids up until now, and I’m not sure if I’ve had a change of heart. What I feel isn’t a desire to settle down, to be a parent. I just feel the possibility of making that choice fading away from me.

My beard feels different. It’s not the white hairs that bother me, it’s that in the last year or so, somehow the hairs on my chin have become more scraggly, a little rougher to the touch. I feel like two days of letting my beard grow in ages my appearance by ten years. I feel like the world sees me as an old man now.