Time marches forward, and while Patrick might still get carded when he orders a beer, let the record show that he has, in fact, been on this planet for 40 years, as of this week. Though birthdays take on less importance as you leave your 30s, the major decade milestones are still a chance to sit, reflect, and consider small but undeniably existential questions, such as "what is happiness?"
You know, the easy stuff. What Remap is all about.
Patrick: My wife recently went on a trip to celebrate someone’s 40th. Beaches, drinks, days in the sun. It looked like a great time. (My wife told me she avoided sending me photos because she felt bad lol). With the exception of my wife, it was a collection of couples without kids. Solo in a different way! I was, of course, at home. I love extra time with my kids, so I was happy to take on the burden, but I was also humorously waiting with great curiosity when, at some point, I would publish a quintessential half-staged, half-naturalistic “this is 40” photo. It always happens.
I feel like this is a millennial thing, because we grew up in the age of Instagram? These photos try to capture a kind of rebel attitude that says “40 is the new 30! I’m still out here having fun!”
Eventually, it dropped. Drink in hand. Beach in the background. No eye contact with the camera.
This is 40.
I laughed, gave it a like, and moved on. They seem happy, and I am happy for them.
It’s obviously worth hanging onto the pieces of your life experience that have brought you joy in younger years, whether that’s spending time with specific friends, visiting specific places—whatever, it’s going to mean different things to different people. I am a big nostalgia head when it comes to revisiting old haunts like bars and restaurants! But as I turn 40 years old myself later this week—please, hold your applause for the teenager-looking person turning 40—and realize I’ll turn the clock quietly with a familiar group of friends who will take the great trek of [checks notes] walking down the street, I’m tempted to take my own “this is 40” photo.
Me, IPA in hand, two children and my wife by my side. This is 40. Not quite the beach.
There is no real difference between turning 39 and 40, but the milestone years do feel like check-ins with yourself. Is this where you wanted to be? Probably not, but are you happy where you ended up? If you’re not, are there ways you can change that? Maybe, maybe not. There is a different scale to the conversation around “change” when you’re suddenly now middle-aged.
I am, thankfully, exactly where I wanted to be. I was totally ready to drop going out and other every-single-weekend irresponsible behavior and have kids. I always wanted to make it out to the suburbs and have friends we hung out with down the street, our kids growing up together.
Is it perfect? No. My house is so damn cold! But if you asked me to sketch out where I’d want to be at 40 when I was 20 years old, I really do think it would’ve been something similar to all this.
I even got a pool. I gotta be honest: I wish that pool was up. That’s where I’d take my photo.
Rob: My parents had a habit, endearing when I was young and grating as I got older, of turning everything into a tradition. I realized later it was their way of trying to bottle happiness, of trying to re-create magical moments in their lives by repeating steps. As the years went on, some of it started to feel more obligatory and burdensome, and I’ve let a lot of those little family traditions lapse, especially because so many of them meant absolutely nothing to MK. But one of them stuck, which is that every Thanksgiving we watch You Can’t Take It With You, which PBS filmed at the end of its revival run on Broadway with Jason Robards in the lead role. It’s a sweet play (and a less good Frank Capra film, which is unfortunately how most people know it) but toward the end Robards asks a question of another character, also in the twilight of his life:
How many of us would settle, when we are young, for what we eventually get? All those plans, what happened to them? It’s only a handful of the lucky ones who can say they even got close.
It’s a strange thing to watch a thing every year, from the time you are about seven years old, that builds toward a question about the hopes of youth and the disappointments and resignations of age. At some point as an adult, it became a moment of annual reflection about where I was at with my life. “Have I settled yet? Is it time to give up on the stuff I wanted?”
But at some point I had to admit that if anything, I was one of the “handful of the lucky ones.”
I managed to continue doing the work I loved, with people whose company I enjoy. I get to spend most of my time on things I’m passionate about, and probably the closest thing I have to a job I hate is the parts of this that involve interfacing with state agencies. My day begins and ends with dogs chasing each other through the house and using my sleeping form as the turnbuckle in their private wrestling match. I have very, very few regrets.
I don’t think most people hit 40 in the place you and I are in. I was not in this place, or anywhere near it, when I turned 30. I remember the rising sense of panic that I needed to figure out how to reinvent myself, change careers, abandon all my intentions just to find something stable. 40 would feel very differently if I were facing all the same stuff (helping care for elderly family members, dealing with other family medical issues, a series of unexpected home repair costs) but I was struggling to get established in a job I had taken mostly for the sake of expediency and survival. More than getting to do what I love, I think I’m aware of the incredible good fortune it represents just to be this age and finding that most of the major things in your life are stable. It’s way better than hitting a milestone birthday and wondering, “How the hell am I supposed to fix this?”
Patrick: Part of my ease with letting go of my 20s and 30s, I think, comes back to finding what I wanted to do at such a young age. It’s why I always tell this version of a joke when someone younger asks me how to get a job writing and talking about video games: “Look, simply grow up 20 minutes from where the most popular video game magazine (EGM) is made, accidentally pick the same online chat room where they all hang out, and turn them into lifelong friends.”
In other words, I found a calling that, like magic, turned into a career. It hasn’t been without its ups and downs over the years, not the least of which was never making any money to do anything more than drink cheap beer in San Francisco and ignore what a “savings account” was supposed to do. But it also meant I found a sense of fulfillment and purpose, a thing people often spend their whole lives chasing after beyond a hobby, at an extraordinarily early age.
This feels weird to say, but it can make the magical a little mundane? Like, it just becomes a job, even if you enjoy it. You still need to do the work to remind yourself about the magic. It’s a little bit like meeting your soul mate, or however you want to describe the person you want to spend the rest of your life with. (I mean, shit, I met my wife just before I moved to California. A year after turning 21, I’d already checked two life boxes: figured out my job and figured out my wife.)
Relationships are work, even good ones! Jobs are work, even ones where you’re often having a lot of fun! Which, I think, helps explain why I was always jumping between jobs when I was younger. (Ignoring a desire for slightly higher pay in San Francisco, obviously.) It’s why I started Crossplay. It’s why I had some mild hesitations about Remap. It’s about paths already taken.
Alongside “I’m one of the lucky ones” is the sentiment that it’s okay to be content? Life does not have to be this continual race towards achieving something. It does not mean you cannot have ambitions or new hobbies or whatever, but there can be a cyclical feeling to life at this age that would be easy to describe as boring when, in reality, maybe you’ve quietly achieved a full life!
Rob: Right now I’m watching snow bucketing down outside my window. I put on some Christmas music because I didn’t really do much celebrating of the holiday with all the construction going on around my house, so this is actually the most holiday-ish day I’ve had all winter. MK sent me a picture of Tilly lying by the window upstairs staring at the storm, Mina is curled into a blue-gray donut on her dog bed. Life could be more comfortable. It could have more excitement in it. But I am not sure it can be better than it feels right now, home with my family, with the luxury of staying out of the storm, bills paid with a bit to spare. I haven’t seen an eviction warning in almost ten years, or worried about health insurance for seven.
We should all be so lucky. The standard for what constitutes luck should be higher. But as beautiful as today is, as happy as I find myself right now, I am more aware than ever that we live in a world run by people who want to deny this feeling to others. They want most people to remain in a perpetual state of dread: for their home, for their jobs, for their health, for their money. They don’t want marriages to be held together by bonds of affection and partnership, but by obligation and threat. They don’t want people to have their dream jobs, they dream of a world where their jobs are the ones people are forced to take.
They are broken in a way few of us can truly understand because it’s so foreign to any definition of normal, pro-social behavior and decency. Blessed with much, the value of their happiness is forever diminished by the thought that it is a commodity that other people still have access to. That for all their money and power, the same breeze cools the sweat on the foreheads of people who should always feel lesser, people who can still know the embrace of a loved one, or enjoy a good joke told among friends.
For much of my life, I was told to consider the facade placed in front of this ideology. To consider the value of encouraging competition and hard work, of spurring innovation and creativity, of pivoting jobs and skills with the nimbleness of a Spitfire pilot navigating the skies of a peaceful and prosperous global market. But at 40, looking at what we truly treasure, I appreciate the real modesty of what we have asked for. I had to take out a loan on a house to get a fucking dog, man.
But it’s clear beyond doubt that there are people who want to rule this world who don’t really value or respect hard work, or making things, building things, or improving things. They promote the idea of a world run by the smartest and most capable people, but they hate knowledge, study, and expertise. They hate that people can say things they don’t want to hear, share messages they don’t want others to see, but decry censorship when people decide they shouldn’t have to hear this shit. They claim that the people who make the buses run, keep the water clean, who make sure the nurses taking care of your parents or grandparents keep getting paid are in a conspiracy of freeloaders, but these are people who don’t want to pay anyone their value and who never sold a product without wondering if they could turn it into rent instead.
I wish we could simply spend the next twenty or thirty years puttering around the house, bothering our loved ones, pursuing little projects. But we live in an era where the inconceivable narcissism and violence of the ultra-wealthy reactionary right is on full display and aimed at anyone who presumes that a society is not something to be granted at the whim of billionaires and their Renfields.
I say this without fervor or desire for approval, but simply as someone who can connect his daily economic and practical reality to the structures of governance and business surrounding him: the existence of these people and the power they wield is incompatible with living in peace and comfort. Constraint and compromise is not possible for they do not have it in them to regard any constraint as legitimate, to accept in good faith any bargain that places boundaries on their behavior and power. The levers of wealth, influence, and power that enable such repulsive and malformed personalities to make their obsessions into national crises have to be taken from their hands or otherwise disconnected from civic life.
It’s wonderful to be 40, healthy, happy, and in love with one’s life. I wish you a happy birthday, my friend, and I hope the next decade brings you and your family countless blessings and little grief. I pray when we are 50, we live in a society that fully recognizes the level of selfish cruelty and evil required to wish to deny others these same joys. God willing, when we are 60 we will be discussing the likelihood of a Chicago Bears Super Bowl repeat, and debating whether it is compatible with the principles of Permanent Trans Liberation and Dudes Rock Thought to permit Elon Musk a day’s parole to fly a hobby rocket for his own birthday. Provided his license is in order and he gets the appropriate clearances from the FAA, of course.