Month: November 2019

50 Sucks…

Alright, here it is. This is the post I was hoping to avoid. I started this stupid blog a few months before I turned 40 in an attempt to… I don’t know… find meaning in crap and avoid a mid-life crisis and find some direction or level of success in early mid-life. I started this blog to avoid this post. Here I am, 10 years later, and the blog hasn’t helped one bit. I’m not quite 50 yet, but I know it’s going to suck. I turn 50 in a few days. I will officially be old.

I’m in a different job now than I was 10 years ago, but I’m making about the same money. It seems that my prime-income earning years are meant to be a slap in the face. Career-wise, I have accomplished nothing. I never was, nor will I ever be, upwardly-mobile. When I graduated high school, I thought that I would go to college, get a good job, get raises and promotions, and retire making a six-figure income. I’m not even close. And not only am I not even close, when you take into account inflation, I’m a horrible failure. $100,000 in 1988 money (the year I graduated from high school… and the money I thought I would be making) is about $217,536 in today’s money. In 1988 money, I’m making less than $23,000/year… with a bachelors degree and almost 30 years in the workforce. My first crappy-paying job out of college with Sherwin-Williams was salaried at $18,000 per year in 1992 money. In 1992 money, I’m making about $9,000 more per year than I did at that crappy-paying job. And what I’m making now is the most I will ever make. The average college graduate makes more money in his or her first year out of college than I am making after what feels like a lifetime of work.

I like my current job, or at least I like the people I work around, but there is not a single thing I can do in my current position to increase my wealth. There is no promotion waiting for the guy running the bookstore. The business of education is one of the few institutions in the US where more education is the only way to more money. And education is too expensive for me. And I can’t seem to win the Powerball. And my basement isn’t conducive to a meth lab… I don’t think… maybe I need to research that more…

People say you’re only as old as you feel. If that’s true, I’m screwed… but don’t worry, it’s not true. You can lie to yourself, but a lie is a lie and your aging body won’t listen to your lies.

There are those who say 50 isn’t old. These people are deluded… and usually over 50. Maybe 50 isn’t as old as the people who say 50 isn’t old, but it’s still old.

At 50, the vast majority of people are well over half-way through with their lives. If they are lucky (if you think of it as lucky), they have another 20 to 30 years to watch their health decline , their earning power disappear, their friends and family start to die off, and their bodies and minds wither away to the point of being unrecognizable. With a few exceptions, most people start to look old once they hit 50. I don’t want to look 50… but really, I’m already there, and it sucks. The dude who looks back at me from the mirror makes me want to remove all mirrors from my house in between bouts of crying hysterically. Being younger and unsightly is bad enough… add in looking old and you’ve got a look that would score screams in a horror movie.

My birthday falls around the festive family holiday of Thanksgiving. I’d really love to just spend the entire day in bed, but my wife won’t go for that. However, knowing how much I am dreading this day, my wife has scheduled a trip to Denver in lieu of the more traditional surrounded-by-family, stress-filled extravaganza that is typically the Thanksgiving weekend. When my house is filled with people, I get uber-stressed, and this year it would have been more than I could handle. My side of the family wanted us to visit Montana, and they would have promised not to do crap for my birthday, but they would have been lying. I spent my 40th birthday with my family and they had a cake and presents wrapped in black (hahaha, “over-the-hill”, that’s hilarious) even though they promised they wouldn’t. Fool me once, shame on you… So, just me and my wife and my sons will be spending a quality couple of days quietly enjoying a Thanksgiving from afar and me officially becoming old.

I’ve read different writings from different people who say that “mid-life” is a great transitional period. You come to the realization that all of those hopes and dreams you had in your youth aren’t going to happen and you become okay with that. It’s a great release of stress not having to worry about accomplishing anything anymore. I suppose there may be some truth in that. I’ve given up on a lot of stuff because I didn’t have the skills to accomplish it, and I can see how being okay with being a quitter would lead to less stress… I’m just not there yet. Maybe that’s what I have to look forward to in the years to come: coming to terms with and accepting my lack of accomplishment and menial lot in life and finding a way to be okay with it.. Sounds fun, right? OK, Boomer…

Was I Almost an Incel?!?

I think I was. I think I was almost an incel, and I was almost an incel before “incel” was even a thing! I was almost an incel before “online communities” really even existed. I am, after all, old.

For those not in the know, Wikipedia defines “incels” as: members of an online subculture who define themselves as unable to find a romantic partner despite desiring one, a state they describe as inceldom.

I had never even heard the term “incel” until a few weeks ago. I came across an article mentioning that military leaders had issued a warning to members of the military about the opening of the movie Joker. Apparently the online incel community had issued a series of threats in relation to the opening of Joker. In fact, some of the recent mass killings have been tied to men with ties to these incel communities.

Okay, so, no, I never had any plans of committing egregeous crimes against humanity. People who commit those crimes are monsters. I know I was never a full-on incel, because it wasn’t even a thing thirty years ago. I can’t imagine that, had I not met my wife, I would have ever turned into the kind of violent incel whose self-imposed misery leads to a total disregard for human life. What I could relate to when reading about incels is the mindset that leads to inceldom, and it’s not all about sex. It’s about feeling desirable to someone you find desirable. It’s about the fear of growing old alone because you will never meet the expectations of a desirable mate.

I always viewed myself as a social inept (and, really, I still do). People seemed, for the most part, to like me (or at least tolerate me). I was relatively nice to everyone, and I was funny, but I never felt like I really fit in. I didn’t date in high school. I didn’t date in college. The small handful of times I found the courage to ask a female I was attracted to out, I was rejected. When you have no confidence in yourself, and you find nothing but rejection in your earliest attempts at those things that are extremely difficult in the first place, one of two things will happen:

You let the rejection make you stronger and more determined, you will work to improve yourself, and you continue on until you find success…

… or…

… you give up.

I’m guessing anyone who has read this blog before knows how I responded.

By the age of twenty-two, I had completely given up on the thought of ever having a romantic relationship. I had completely given up on the idea of even going on a date. “Love” was a foreign concept meant for other people better than myself. Looking back, I remember thinking that I had “given up on women”, but in reality, I had given up on myself. “Women,” in my head, were just a construct that I could blame for my misery. “Women” only liked physically attractive men, and I was not one. “Women” only liked tall men, and I was not one. “Women” only liked men with money, and I was scraping by on a crappy assistant manager salary at Sherwin-Williams.

I was even to the point of blaming other guys for my misery. Guys who were taller than me (which was most of them) were not my friends. Guys who were better looking than me (which, in my head, was almost all of them) were genetically blessed creatures that weren’t of the same species as me; I couldn’t be friends with them.

In my day-to-day life, I was still just as friendly and funny as I had always been with coworkers, customers, and the general public, but I really built up a resentment toward people and was building internal walls between myself and… well… everyone else. Trump would have been proud. I was “Making Rich Great Again” with walls.

The first incel community was created online in 1993. It was a much milder, less full-of-hate version of the current communities (it was started by a woman… in Canada… how mean could it really be?), but I was only an Internet connection away (which were just starting to become common through dial-up) from discovering a world of other socially-inept people like myself and letting the anger build. I was extremely lucky that, after dozens of interviews failed and mailed-resumes not responded to, I found a job after college. Were it not for that crappy, low-paying job with Sherwin-Williams, I would have literally been living in my parents’ basement… which I’ve come to discover isn’t exactly a good place for a borderline incel to be.

And then I met my wife. Actually, we were “set-up” by mutual acquaintances. I would never have asked her out on my own. I had, after all, given up on “women.” Over twenty-six years later, and we’re still together. I don’t really have much more self-confidence than I did twenty-six years ago… but I have someone to lovingly tell me to stop complaining all the time.

I still carry many of the negative thoughts and attitudes toward my fellow man and woman (and self) that were developed during that time when I was in that dark place. I wish I had never allowed myself to go there. I wish I could have seen some sort of light. I believed that God was out there and had a plan for me, I just believed that I was going to hate His plan.

I’m sure there are people who go through long periods of self-doubt, self-hate and depression and they emerge better from the experience. I emerged, for the most part and with only slight relapses, but I emerged kind of broken. I’m full of mistrust, I take offense at the stupidest things, I often feel completely incompetent in areas where I’m not, I can’t let go of things from the past that still try to crush me, and, to this day, I have a hard time liking people in general.

And I turn fifty this month…

… but at least I’m not an incel…

… so, yay me?