Coping With Life After 50
If there’s one thing that’s certain about life after 50, it’s that good, old fashioned uncertainty. It’s said that nothing in life is certain, but that takes on a whole new meaning after a certain age
. You have to consider what it means at each point in your life to really get a good sense of what’s in store for you. If you can just sit back and think about life in your 20s, its likely feeling very different to you now than it did back then.
Maybe you wish you had taken more chances, or maybe you had taken fewer. The fact is that it’s all immaterial. Your life at 20 was vastly different than your life at 50 and you have uncertainty to thank for that. It’s a much different animal now than it was back then.
When you’re in your 20s and 30s, all of your stresses are about your future and where your life is headed. You have no idea what it’s all about and you always have this nagging notion that one false move could have drastic negative effects on the rest of your life.
That’s completely normal and you now probably realize the things you were stressing about back then just have a way of being worked out as you progress through your life.
Your 40s are the sweet spot
According to Johns Hopkins geriatric medicine physician Alicia Arbaje, M.D., M.P.H., your mid-40s are pretty much the sweet spot in your life. That’s because you’ve already worked a whole lot of things out and it seems like you just might be on Easy Street for the remainder of your life.
Of course, in your 40s, the remainder of your life is a lot longer than it may seem. Given that the average lifespan is currently sitting around 78-79 years old, you’re not hitting mid-life until the middle or end of your 40s.
That’s a whole lot of life that you still have to live, even though you feel like you’ve just found all of the cheat codes. The reality of your 40s is a career that you can enjoy, a family that you’re still raising, and a future that’s not as scary as it used to be. Still, there’s a reason that this isn’t the decade of life that people like to refer to as their Golden Years.
Life after 50
Living your life after your 40s can be a real challenge. That’s because everything you’ve been focused on for the bigger part of your life has now changed. So what can you expect from life after 50?
You’re likely not raising a family anymore. The kids are grown and they’re out of the house and out of school. You don’t have this major part of your existence taking up the majority of your time anymore and it can be scary. You have to figure out something new that you can focus on.
You have to find a brand new way of identifying yourself and that’s not easy – it’s what makes life after 50 a challenge, but also exciting. It’s a perfect recipe to feel lost and lonely in the world, even if your partner is right there with you. We all like to believe that we deal with our stresses as a group, but that’s just not real.
Stress is a desperately personal thing and we all have to deal with it on our own. Family may be able to alleviate some of the mitigating factors, but the stress is always firmly on your shoulders. It can make a person question whether or not they’ve actually figured it all out or and just leveled up to a much stronger world of bosses to fight against.
Stop living from crisis to crisis
So, how do you get past all of this to truly enjoy your life? Well, all it takes is a reshaping of how you think about being alive. You can’t keep living from crisis to crisis. That’s a sad drudgery that no person on this Earth could ever possibly deserve.
That means that you have to stop looking at things as self-contained problems that you have to surmount in order to flourish. There are always going to be problems, regardless of whether you’re looking at life after 50 or 20.
There are always going to be issues. It’s just the way that it is and the only escape is whatever comes after life has been totally lived out. If you’re imagining a later life that’s free of strife then you’re just setting yourself up for failure. It’s never going to come.
All you can do is change your perception and focus on all of the good in your life. You have a family that you’ve raised and you still have a major part to play in society.
That’s never something that you should be taking lightly. Stop lamenting the rocky soil and learn to appreciate the delicate weeds that have managed to sprout out of it. That’s really the key to enjoying your life at any age.
