Don’t Lose Track of the Seasons of Life
Brutal honesty about your life stages.
Life is both short and long.
The average American lives to 78.4.
That’s 28,633 days.
4,090 weeks.
941 months.
When you’re in school, sitting in a boring class, trying to stay awake, time can feel like it’s barely moving.
Then, one day, it’ll be, “Wait, I’m 40 years old now? Me? Yesterday, I felt like I was 25, but 1 day later, I feel middle-aged. It seems like it all happened in the blink of an eye.”
As I’ve aged, I’ve gotten to see a lot of this, and it’s a mixture of good and bad.
Have you ever looked at a woman and thought, “She’s so beautiful it feels like evidence of God because only He could make something so gorgeous.” Then see that same woman a couple of decades later and think, “Wow, she looks really old!”
It is absolutely true that the vast majority of women, mostly for genetic reasons they can’t control, do lose their looks much faster than guys do – log into a dating app and look at the 25-and 35-year-old women if you don’t believe me – but guys drop off, too. I have male friends hitting their forties and suddenly, they’re starting to worry about their hairline. They have medical issues starting to kick in. They’re noticing aches they didn’t have before. They’re doing the same workouts they ripped through 10 years earlier, and it’s taking them multiple days to recover from them.
I’ve even started to see all this play out on my Facebook feed over the last 15 years. At one time, there were lots of people getting married and having babies – and there still are some. But now I’m seeing a lot more, “Going into the hospital again tomorrow. Pray for me,” posts, and I’m looking at women I used to crush on in high school and thinking, “Wow, she looks really old. How is that someone I went to high school with? Wait, I’m the same age as her. I don’t look that old… do I?”
Against that backdrop, I saw this video on X:
The general idea is that two women are the same age, and one woman is a mom wearing sweats, spending money and time obsessing over her baby and probably a husband at home. The other is single, dressed in the latest fashion, focused on looking hot, and obsessed with having a good time.
If you want to know which one looks more appealing to people, you have to consider the values our culture pushes.
At one time, those values centered around God, country, taking care of a family, hard work, and proving yourself. That’s why if you asked women in, let’s say, the early sixties, which one of those women was the winner, they’d almost all pick the mom. This is no exaggeration, as you’ll see from this excerpt from Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart, The State of White America”:
(In 1962), Gallup interviewed 1,813 women ages 21-60. “In general, who do you think is happier,” the Gallup interviewer asked, “the girl who is married and has a family to raise, or the unmarried career girl?” Ninety-six percent of the wives said the married girl with a family was happier. Ninety-three percent said they did not, in retrospect, wish they had pursued a career instead of getting married.
After researching it, it doesn’t appear that this question has been asked of modern women. However, my guess is that if we asked women this today, the numbers wouldn’t quite be reversed, but they’d lean heavily in the other direction.
Why?
Because our culture is now pushing different values.
Our cultural values today are much more oriented toward acquiring fame, money, getting attention, impressing other people, being comfortable, and looking out for yourself. Then, with young women in particular, they’re constantly told, “Don’t get married too early. Don’t settle. Sleep around and build your career in your twenties. There’s plenty of time to get married and have kids in your thirties, and if you don’t, you’ll just have more disposable income to spend on yourself anyway.”
Put another way, our culture now pushes a very selfish, youth-centered way of looking at the world.
This can work for people, to a degree at least, until they get older.
It sounds very cool to have a stable of women and be free of commitments so you can go anywhere you want, drink, do drugs, have a “fan base,” and buy extravagant things.
Unfortunately, you’re not going to be young and good-looking forever. You are not going to be 100% healthy forever. You’re not going to keep your looks forever. Your energy level is going to drop. The games, movies, parties, and TV shows might always provide a certain low level of enjoyment, but over time, they’re going to feel increasingly bland.
The older you get, the more the decisions you made when you were younger are going to accumulate and shape your life. That’s when having a spouse, kids, long-time friends, your health, and some money saved up are going to really matter. Not that they didn’t matter before, but the older you get, the more important they all get.
Yet, none of those things are really “sexy.”
You’re not going to see the stay-at-home mom with three kids or the guy socking away cash for when he’s older praised in a YouTube video.
That’s why you have to internalize these messages, recognize the importance of those old values our culture has largely abandoned, and accept that you’re not going to be young forever. You can’t just think, “How do I want my life to be today?” You need to think, “What do I want my life to look like at 30? 40? 50? 60? What if I’m 80? Do I want to have a broken-down body, work at a job I hate to keep some money coming in, and come back to an empty house every night with no kids, no husband, and nothing for three weeks but a “you’re fired” message on the answering machine if I drop dead on my couch?
What you will do in each season of your life WILL change, and you can enjoy all of them, but you need to do a little planning and thinking ahead to get the most out of each stage. It’s doable, and you have armies of smart, older people who have already gone down the same path. Enjoy yourself now but do think about how things are going to change and what you will need to do to keep your life moving forward as you move from spring to summer, to fall, and then winter.
Well, John, you've sure set me to thinking about the stages of my life over the past 8 decades. And there was a time when I was a working single mother who wished to be a stay-at-home mom with a husband who worked to support us--but, alas, I had to put my head down and stay the course. I don't have any serious regrets, although I've outlived all those in my immediate family, including two of my three precious sons. I'm in the twilight stage of my life, trying to enjoy what's left for another bit. Keep up your thought-provoking posts on issues that need to be in the public arena. You do it well, John.
Another splendid and wiise essay by Mr. Hawkns.
Here's some lowly and respectful input:
1. Hawkns said: "The older you get, the more the decisions you made when you were younger are going to accumulate and shape your life. That’s when having a spouse, kids, long-time friends, your health, and some money saved up are going to really matter."
Exactly so. I regret that at 78 I have no wife or children and that most of my family are either dead or remote and out of touch. I accept that I will die alone and no one will mourn my death. So be it.
On the brighter side, at age 78 I am so grateful that I realized in my 20s that financal resources did not grow on trees, did not fall from the heavens like manna and diidn't just come along with the gray hair.
I know so many frends of mne who are boomers and never seemed to grasp this. If I were in their siituation, I think I would be suicidal.
See comments 2 and 3 below on this thread.
2. The factor that most strongly predicts ultimate success in life is not intelligence, not hard work and not even living below one's means...although all of these are virtues.
The most important factor for success is LONG TERM PLANNING. Ths is true both for individuals and institutions and movements. I adhere to a much despised and margnalized faction in our society variously labelled "the far riight" (although I'm a liberal on more iissues than I am a "conservatiive" on), "White racists", "zenophones" and so on. I have spent almost all of my life working in these vineyards. And I note that there is zero long term planning among us. (What a relief this will be to "progressive", "well-informed" people who get their information and ideas from "authoritative sources" like NPR and The NY Times!)
Even a person of lower and moderate intelligence, not so great industriousness, etc. will find that his life will turn out better than people more intelligent and harder working than he is.
3. A WARNNG that Mr. Hawkins might include in the future:
If you reach old age (early 60s and above) and have planned, invested, etc. and are financially successful, be prepared for an unpleasant aspect of old age.
Most of your friends and relatives will NOT have taken care of their finances. Most of them will be paupers....maybe genteel paupers but paupers all the same.
Prepare yourself. You will have friends and relatives who will approach you because they seem to expect that they are entitled to have you solve their problems.
They will want "loans" (that will never be repaid), hand outs., etc.
You must steel yourself. You will want to help out.
But you CANNOT.
You will not have sufficient resources to be the substitute for the pension or the stock portfolio they did not acquire because they they made a voluntary choice to spend their lives indulging themselves in expensive cars, skiing trips to Vail, trips to Europe and so on.
And when you refuse, they will be unashamedly angry that you are so "selfiish."
Accept it.
When a friend or relative comes to you to hit you up for a bail out "because you are rich" and you refuse, you will lose that friend or relative.
A biitter pill but one you must man it up about and take your medicine.
4. One last point...about women:
[I am not a misogynist. My father taught us gallantry and chivalry toward women to whom we were told to be loving and protective. This is the bright side of being a male chauvinist pig.]
I'm sorry if it insults women but it's a fact of life that women as a group are more obedient to authority than guys are.
Even when women rebel, they do so as directed by authority figures...it's just that the authority figures have changed and in my generation were Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug who poisoned the lives of tens of millions of women with their nasty, destructive advice.
My grandmother gave my female cousins good advice about finding a husband while you were young and goodlooking, having him get you will child and getting HIM with child.
Very few women in my generation got good advice from someone like my grandmother.
Instead, they got advice that could only lead to a life of loneliness and a bitter end.
Here endeth the lesson!