In the song, 'Ironic' (2004) by Alanis Morissette one lyric is 'It's the good advice that you just didn't take'. I have not really been aware of anything like that in my life. It is possibly because my parents went out of their way not to advise me one way or another. When I was deciding which university to study at they gave no positive advice, simply whenever I had made a choice they would undermine it with criticisms of the option I had taken. They would make no positive suggestions want to entirely avoid giving me anything that I could blame them for. Ironically I blame them for not giving me any advice and leaving me at as loss as what to do and sure, because of all their undermining, that any option I took would turn out to be the wrong one.
When I see graduates coming into jobs now and people claim they are directionless and lacking knowledge of their options, I laugh. When I was a pupil and then a student I received no guidance. The best I got was a leaflet from the careers centre about the possibility of teaching, no other support. These days students have fully equipped centres with banks of staff whether in school, university or even high street advice centres (though I know funding is being cut back), they can get placements and internships even during their school and university holidays and advice and practice in everything from completing CVs to doing interviews. People say it is now more competitive now, but still, unemployment is nowhere near the level it was in the 1980s, it is just now that young people can draw upon. Consequently, I had to work out where I was going with my life very much for myself in an almost vacuum of advice. It did lead to me making grave errors such as the first flat I bought and not taking up the offer to buy the flat I had been renting because I was unaware of the money I could have been loaned. It meant me making tens of useless job applications which took me many hours and quite a lot of money (these were the days when employers demanded 4-8 copies of your application), but the style of CV had changed. Even when employer I was working for part-time told me my CV was no good, they could offer no advice on how I should alter it in order to secure a full-time job. At least these days you can turn to the internet for advice on this kind of thing.
Thus, in my life, I received very little advice. I suppose a lot of people, especially employers, simply assume that the 'right' people 'just know' this stuff. To a great degree that is where my parents let me down and, as I have noted before, I had quite a lot of useless teachers, some to whom it seemed offering advice to young people was an anathema. I remember one teacher in particular who seemed to think we should all get the worst because we would not comply with her 1950s view of the world. She laughed when tens of people at my sixth form college got caught out by a scam offering reduced prices trips to Russia, which had been promoted through the college itself. She could not contain herself in class, cackling over the misfortune of those who had lost money, saying it had been entirely obvious that it was a scam from the start. She seemed to delight in the fact that more of the undeserving youth who she deigned to teach had been punished for their apparent fecklessness.
Anyway, in my nearly advice-free life there were just a few pieces of advice which were advocated strongly to me that I regret having taking. I guess if I had received more advice, perhaps all or a large portion of it would have been as bad as this lot and I may have suffered more. These were enough that now, on the rare occasions when I receive advice, I tend to ignore it, suspecting it will cost me time, effort or money and leave me worse off than before. These are in chronological order:
An ISIC card is only useful if you are booking flights
I see that the ISIC (International Student Identity Card) is still in existence. Back in the 1980s when at university I decided to travel around West Germany and Austria in order to improve my German. That, of course, was a wasted exercise given that I can hardly speak a word of German these days, but that was a mistake I made for myself. I went to buy my Inter-Rail ticket (I see these still exist too), which allowed you to travel all over Europe for free in those days, if you were under the age of 26, the continental age at which you stop being deemed a student, in the UK it was either 21 or 24, but you still could travel up to 26 across mainland Europe, even through the Iron Curtain still in existence at the time.
I asked about getting hold of an ISIC, which in those days you got through travel agencies as you could not buy stuff online. I asked for the various forms, but the young woman in the travel agency, which was one based on a university campus, said to me that I had no need for it because I was not buying aeroplane tickets. Foolishly I took her word for it, partly because she made me feel such an idiot even requesting the forms. Almost immediately when I arrived in Aachen, the first stop on my tour, I realised what a mistake it had been not to press her for the forms. Everywhere I went especially museums and other sights asked for an ISIC card to get reduced entrance. I do not know how much more money I spent not having one. It also opened me up to ridicule in Heidelberg when going into the museum with a couple of students I had met, when I had to pay full price. For the sake of some ill-informed person at the campus travel agency, I ended up spending a lot more. I never used that travel agency again.
You should read a good quality newspaper every day
This was a strong piece of advice given to me on a number of occasions by a lecturer who I believed was trustworthy, though as time passed, I quickly found was an idiot. It is ironic that he gave this advice, which I have heard that Oxford dons typically give to their students, because he was one of these revolutionary left-wing men who seemed to believe that the harshness of the Thatcherite regime was going to trigger a genuine revolution in the UK and so they wrecked the Labour Party and pressed policies intended to make the ordinary people suffer more so that they would be compelled to rise up. I realised how deluded he was eventually when I heard him speaking about the Baader-Meinhof Gang as being genuine revolutionaries, whereas it is apparent to everyone that they were spoilt, wealthy psychopaths with no real political agenda, simply an enjoyment of being terrorists and the luxury trappings which came with it. I was surprised to find eight years later that he was still working as a lecturer, though from what I can find now he seems to have disappeared into deserved obscurity.
I think I feel angered by this advice as it also highlights how I misjudged the man who was not as intelligent or insightful as I believed, so I feel doubly the fool for having heeded his words. I did precisely what he had advised and in my 3rd year of university, every day would buy 'The Guardian' newspaper and sit reading it until it was finished. Not only must this have cost a lot of money that could have been spent more wisely, but it used up a lot of time as I was simply sat reading right through each morning, so stripping me of 3-4 hours each day, so at least 15-20 hours per week, every week, that I could have spent studying, or at least, doing some activity such as being in a club, that would have got me contacts and/or experience that would have been useful for getting a job. I was too stupid to see the damage I was doing to my degree by following this advice and with hindsight, it is unsurprising, that having lost so much study time in my final year, my grades were far worse than predicted. There is no consolation. I cannot recount a single story that I read in all those newspapers and even a slightly better view of the news was of no benefit to my study of history. One lesson I learnt too late, is that with any habit you develop, you need to stop at times and really think about whether it is in your best interests no matter who advised you to do it.
You should try to go to the works cafe each day
This useless piece of advice came from my father over the last 15 years and he still repeats it every time I start a new job. These days I ignore him, but back in the 2000s, partly because I received so little advice from him, I paid attention to him. Consequently, every day I would go down to the cafe and buy a coffee and a biscuit and sit there staring out of the window. My father seems convinced that useful networking opportunities arise if you are in the works cafe and are seen to be out and about by colleagues, but this never happened. I also tried some of the smaller outlets at the site, to no avail. Perhaps it is my unusual personal appearance that makes that fail. I never got to talk to anyone apart from the cafe staff and even that became harder the longer I was there as the middle-aged English people were replaced by young Polish women whose grasp of English was insufficient to chat with customers. The habit I developed was detrimental for my job, as I tried going at different times in an attempt to run into different people with whom I might network. I always seemed to be away from my desk at the time some senior colleague or my manager would come to see me. My line manager's opinion of me deteriorated from him holding me in high esteem when I started to the extent he saw me as a liability and advised me to leave the industry by the end. Obviously a lot of that had to do with personality clashes, but me being off drinking coffee and eating biscuits when he 'dropped by' did not help.
The main issue was how much money I spent engaging in this wasted activity. I calculated how much I spent over the 4 years I was at a particular company and it came to over £2000 (€2280; US$3220) which whilst it did not mean I was rich, but if I had not spent that money it could have put me in a stronger position, given that my redundancy pay after 4 years was only £1700. Saving £500 per year would have been enough to pay for a short holiday or to buy something for the house, but no, it simply went into the till at the works cafe for absolutely no benefit for me. I guess, charitably, my father's view was shaped by behaviour in an age before email and mobile phones which by providing better connectivity have reduced face-to-face meetings. I do suspect, however, that even in the 1970s, my father was sat in the cafe at his works, alone, hoping that someone of use would come in that he could network with. As regular readers know my father has quite a hostile opinion of me, though it was better back in the early 2000s, yet, I can only think he gave this advice a little to spite me or take me down a peg when I started my new job.
Only buy a car from someone you know
This was another costly mistake. The car I had, a Nissan Micra, proved too small when I also began transporting around the woman in my house and her son. Thus, the woman suggested I bought a Renault Megane Scenic (this was produced before the Megane and the Scenic designations for Renault cars was separated out into two distinct vehicles), in 2006, from a couple we knew quite well, who were about to have a baby and emigrate to Ireland (this was a time when its economy was still thriving). The car was £1500 which seemed a good price as these people carrier vehicles retain their value. I should have been suspicious at that stage: never buy anything which is less than the 'going rate' in newspapers and on websites, even if it is from friends. I drove the car around and it seemed to work well enough. However, I should have checked with someone with more expertise as there were things that needed repairing which are difficult for even a skilled amateur to do, let alone someone with as little expertise as me. Anyway, over the next 11 months before the compressors went in the big end and the car became undrivable, I spent £2300 on repairs to the vehicle. The largest single cost was the heater, which cost £500 to extricate and replace; a new key because only one came with the car cost £139. I tried driving without the heater, but my feet get cold enough as it is and it was very unpleasant. I learnt the lesson that even if you buy a car in the summer you should check all the winter features too.
As with the previous two situations, I should have baled out from the activity and got rid of the car long before it broke down. I doubt I would have got more than a small fraction of my money back if I had sold it in a few months' time, but I certainly should have got rid of it the moment the repair bill began to even come close to the price of the car. I certainly should not have been persuaded to buy from people I know. They have returned from Ireland now it is in economic meltdown and one owns a shop in my town. I have to hold back from going around there and bawling at them for having cheated me so badly. Clearly both me and the woman who lives in my house liked the couple more than they liked us and it seems that they only developed the connection so that they could foist their heap of a car on us that they knew they could not get rid of, so this was an extended confidence trick. I knew enough about cars to spot a bad one, but this had a whole host of issues that I could not spot immediately. If I had held onto the Micra for six months more and saved my money, I could have had a £1000 or so more and bought a better quality second hand car that would ultimately have cost me less. When it comes to car sales, the one piece of advice someone could have given me, was do not even trust your friends.
Showing posts with label maturity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label maturity. Show all posts
Sunday, 11 September 2011
Saturday, 20 September 2008
Being 'Past It'
I have commented before about how having become 40 in the past year, I realised that all the things people said about this phase of your life were lies. Life does not 'begin' at 40, in fact so many things that had been open to you in previous years are now shut off. In the UK it becomes far harder to get a job when you pass 40 and you are more likely to be the one who is made redundant when there are cutbacks. Unlike in some cultures, experience is not valued in UK business, rather low salaries and malleability are those things that are the most rated.
As you are growing up you soon learn that the doors close behind you pretty quickly as you age. A school-aged child soon learns that they are now unable to go in the part of the park reserved for toddlers or sit around all day watching CBeebies and having a snooze in the afternoon. This is particularly the case in the UK where children now typically start school at 4 (compared to 5 when I began and 6 even now in Sweden and South Africa) and by the time they are 7 they are sitting their first exams. It is ironic that maturation of children is now accelerated in the UK by this country's (or certainly its government's) desperate need to monitor everything and yet, juvenalisation of adults continues.
We sort of freeze our children at 11-14 constantly sitting exams but never taking on any responsibility and being ferried around by their parents. Hence people in their 20s and 30s take on minimal responsibility for their health or their behaviour, so we have binge drinking and an unwillingness to recognise the consequences of your actions or make any effort to change them or society. This is a society in which our parents now take responsibility for us until they die.
Anyway, as we pass through life the doors are always closing behind us, but in exchange we get given new things. Okay, so now I have to go to school but I have a big group of friends and find out new things and go on trips and so on. So now school has finished and my life lacks structure and direction, but I can drink alcohol and take drugs and have sex without too much hassle and so on.
People are very aware of these stages, despite the fact that in the UK we have long lacked proper rites of passage which make it difficult to see these change. I think we should have a civil version of the Jewish Bar Mitzvah/Bat Mitzvah (the female equivalent) which comes around 13 and there is a recognition that the child is coming into adulthood and importantly, that they now put aside childish things. Such rhetoric is part of Christianity but the British Christian churches (despite the increase in popularity of their schools) seem to wash their hands even more of the role of maturing young people than they have in the past. Sorry, we are moving off into a whole new topic.
Back to the point, despite the British lack of rites of passage people are quite sharply aware of these steps, as I am here with being 40. When you become 30 you look around at/think back to how many of your contemporaries got married. I attended 6 weddings the year I turned 30. I felt it was like the party game musical chairs, i.e. when the music stops drop down on the nearest chair or you miss out. In many cases people marrying at that stage just seemed to have plumped for whoever was convenient, because otherwise they would miss the vital date. No-one saw me as a suitable candidate, perhaps because at that stage I was dating women either 2 years older than me or 7 years younger and I never anticipated being married myself even if they had been willing. In the former case she wanted a husband taller than her, rather than the same height (6'0") which I am; she did find him.
When you turn 40 you lose so much, as I outline in this posting, but there is nothing you are offered in exchange, there is nothing new that you are able to do or access. You have the same worries as you had at 35 but fewer opportunities to counter-balance them, no wonder we hit 'mid-life crisis'. The only thing to look forward in my life now is retirement. At a minimum that is 25 years away and more likely given population changes and economic needs, 30 years away. In addition, retirement is no longer the time when you can sit back and relax and enjoy hobbies. Instead the financial restraints, the number of pension funds that have been raided by companies, means, actually, it is the time when you drop into poverty.
So, the next big milestone for me, like millions of other Britons, is going to be even worse than this one. My father, now 70 himself, once mooted why more pensioners do not take hard drugs. They have nothing to live for except dying when they can no longer afford to pay the fuel bills, so, he suggested, why now go out in a heroin-induced haze at 66? He is of the generation with good pensions and good health so is enjoying travel and exercising, reading, eating out, all those things that will be denied my generation as we fight each other to try to secure that job collecting up the shopping trolleys at Tescos so we can afford to have a single heater on in our homes.This is jumping forward in time a bit, let us come back to the situation for me now. In recent weeks other things have re-emphasised to me how I have passed a point of no return. Two colleagues in the wider business that I have tried contacting, have turned out to be on maternity leave, one with her first child, one with her second. Both of them are in their late twenties, but with lots of time to produce the three children which seems to be the standard number for middle class British families these days. I know, as a man, I can keep on producing children until I am in my 70s, but female contemporaries of mine are very unlikely to be able to do so. So, if I entered a long-term relationship now then there would be no children out of it.
As it is, for me, the age of relationships seems passed. This was re-emphasised by another colleague, a newcomer to the company, working as a PA. Initially she dressed in a low-key almost, dour way, but in the past week her wardrobe has changed to over-the-knee boots, shrugs and short dresses and her hairstyle from a simple ponytail to elaborate tresses. The mumbled conversations on the telephone in the office, with her back turned to the door, suggest that a relationship is afoot which has provoked her changed style. There is no way I can envisage, at my age, provoking such a reaction in a woman these days, let alone actually starting a new relationship. From men I know, a decade or so older than me, I am aware that even if you can get a woman to go out with you she is simply interesed in a platonic relationship and any steps towards anything physical, however mild, ends the relationship immediately.
Of course, the women out there of my age are unlikely to be particularly enthralling. Recently I stumbled across an online discussion about making Easter gardens, by a woman I had known at university. At that time I knew her, she had been incredibly sweet but also sexy. As I have recounted before, I completely bungled any relationship with her, something I had regretted up until now. However, reading the discussion about such a mundane issue on a website group for Christian mothers, I did think, well, even if we had hit it off, then no doubt this would be the kind of woman I would be married to now, and my life would be no better than it is for me anyway.
I suppose we all turn into our parents. For me that is a particularly unpleasant phenomenon and I shudder when I hear my father's expressions in things I say as I would loath to be ever as mean spirited and have such a violent temper as him. However, what I am saying here, is maybe we cannot escape that development. At best, we can only be incrementally different to our parents, despite how we may appear in our 20s. To discover the sweet and sexy woman has mutated into a Christian mother and an expert on Easter gardens reveals that it can even happen to those you do not expect it from.
The other thing is health. Compared to even just five years ago when I would spring from bed and cycle to work I am now in a situation in which getting up in the mornings is a long and painful process. My joints seem to hurt constantly and lethargy is also a constant companion. It does not matter how early I go to bed, I still wake exhausted. Even a light meal leaves me bloated and without appetite; nothing seems to have flavour. All my faculties seem to be crumbling away rapidly. I already take seven medicines each day and a varying number to counter their side effects. I still have 25 years of working life, if not more, as the working age is liable to rise in that time, what is it going to be like trying to get ready for work when I am 65 if it is already so tough now?
Life does seem incredibly tedious. By the time you reach 40 there is nothing unexpected left. You have a very jaded attitude to things. Nothing is stimulating, it is simply tedious. I suppose we know too well how expensive everything costs. Travel and holidays are too expensive to consider and anyway, you know all the things that are going to go wrong at the airport, with your luggage, with the hotel, with the food, with thieves, etc., etc. Exotic places seem simply to hold hazard, expense and trouble and prove to be more of a burden than if you simply sat at home. Even going to Belgium and to Bath, hardly exotic in anyone's view, proved to be a series of problems and expense. It is not that I am jaded from having seen and done too much, in fact the reverse.
The 1990s were probably my decade of opportunity, I was aged between 23-33. However, I earned £5408 (€6,814; US$9,626) per year at the start of the decade and £9500 (€12,065; US$16,910) at the end and, of course, that was with UK high prices on food, clothes and rent. I had three holidays in the 1990s: one week on a canal boat in the Midlands, one week in a house in France and two weeks cycling between cheap hotels in France, that was it. I did not experience any of the changes in Eastern Europe or go to India or anything. Of course if I had tried, no doubt I would have had all my belongings stolen or I would have been killed or caught some terrible disease. This sort of thing is going to be very common for people who have just left university this year and have thousands of pounds of debt.
Due to the difficulty of finding work, I was a little ahead of my time. British young people today are being constrained into the kind of dull life that I experienced even before they turn 40 and they will envy their European counterparts who at least have a little more ability to experience something different. My brother's wife is about to have a baby in Belgium and I can tell now that his/her life will be far more interesting than that of the 6-year old living in my house who will never go to university and will probably be shot dead in Iran or Syria as part of a British invasion force 12 years from now. The same applies to that boy's cousin just about to be born, though, given how repressive his parents already are, his grim life will start from the moment he sees daylight.
I know I am 'past it' as the popular British phrase says. I have got as far in my career as I will ever get. I have had all the relationships and all the travel that I will ever have. My income will decline from now on and my life will be grey and plagued by ill-health. Of course, anyone over 40 knows all this. However, this message is to anyone who is under 40, even if you are 35: get out there, spend and travel as much as you can, have as much sex and alcohol as you can get. There is no future. You have another forty or fifty years once you turn 40 and the greyness of those years will seek to erase any excitement that you might have had up to then, so you must build up an excellent resource of thrilling memories.
Do not believe the lie, life does not begin at 40, it begins its agonisingly slow descent to death. I suppose I am fortunate. I was told back in the 1980s that I had a life expectacy of 51. I have had premonitions, surprisingly precise ones, that I will die in a car fire in Spain in 2024 when I am 57. The premonitions suggest my father will die in 2020 at the age of 83 and my mother, 8 years later, at the age of 90. So they will have had a good 'innings' as us Britons describe it and I should only have to bear the next 11-17 years. Looking at it that way, however, it seems like ages. So, anyway, do not be like me, heed my warning, and live an interesting life before the greyness subsumes you.
As you are growing up you soon learn that the doors close behind you pretty quickly as you age. A school-aged child soon learns that they are now unable to go in the part of the park reserved for toddlers or sit around all day watching CBeebies and having a snooze in the afternoon. This is particularly the case in the UK where children now typically start school at 4 (compared to 5 when I began and 6 even now in Sweden and South Africa) and by the time they are 7 they are sitting their first exams. It is ironic that maturation of children is now accelerated in the UK by this country's (or certainly its government's) desperate need to monitor everything and yet, juvenalisation of adults continues.
We sort of freeze our children at 11-14 constantly sitting exams but never taking on any responsibility and being ferried around by their parents. Hence people in their 20s and 30s take on minimal responsibility for their health or their behaviour, so we have binge drinking and an unwillingness to recognise the consequences of your actions or make any effort to change them or society. This is a society in which our parents now take responsibility for us until they die.
Anyway, as we pass through life the doors are always closing behind us, but in exchange we get given new things. Okay, so now I have to go to school but I have a big group of friends and find out new things and go on trips and so on. So now school has finished and my life lacks structure and direction, but I can drink alcohol and take drugs and have sex without too much hassle and so on.
People are very aware of these stages, despite the fact that in the UK we have long lacked proper rites of passage which make it difficult to see these change. I think we should have a civil version of the Jewish Bar Mitzvah/Bat Mitzvah (the female equivalent) which comes around 13 and there is a recognition that the child is coming into adulthood and importantly, that they now put aside childish things. Such rhetoric is part of Christianity but the British Christian churches (despite the increase in popularity of their schools) seem to wash their hands even more of the role of maturing young people than they have in the past. Sorry, we are moving off into a whole new topic.
Back to the point, despite the British lack of rites of passage people are quite sharply aware of these steps, as I am here with being 40. When you become 30 you look around at/think back to how many of your contemporaries got married. I attended 6 weddings the year I turned 30. I felt it was like the party game musical chairs, i.e. when the music stops drop down on the nearest chair or you miss out. In many cases people marrying at that stage just seemed to have plumped for whoever was convenient, because otherwise they would miss the vital date. No-one saw me as a suitable candidate, perhaps because at that stage I was dating women either 2 years older than me or 7 years younger and I never anticipated being married myself even if they had been willing. In the former case she wanted a husband taller than her, rather than the same height (6'0") which I am; she did find him.
When you turn 40 you lose so much, as I outline in this posting, but there is nothing you are offered in exchange, there is nothing new that you are able to do or access. You have the same worries as you had at 35 but fewer opportunities to counter-balance them, no wonder we hit 'mid-life crisis'. The only thing to look forward in my life now is retirement. At a minimum that is 25 years away and more likely given population changes and economic needs, 30 years away. In addition, retirement is no longer the time when you can sit back and relax and enjoy hobbies. Instead the financial restraints, the number of pension funds that have been raided by companies, means, actually, it is the time when you drop into poverty.
So, the next big milestone for me, like millions of other Britons, is going to be even worse than this one. My father, now 70 himself, once mooted why more pensioners do not take hard drugs. They have nothing to live for except dying when they can no longer afford to pay the fuel bills, so, he suggested, why now go out in a heroin-induced haze at 66? He is of the generation with good pensions and good health so is enjoying travel and exercising, reading, eating out, all those things that will be denied my generation as we fight each other to try to secure that job collecting up the shopping trolleys at Tescos so we can afford to have a single heater on in our homes.This is jumping forward in time a bit, let us come back to the situation for me now. In recent weeks other things have re-emphasised to me how I have passed a point of no return. Two colleagues in the wider business that I have tried contacting, have turned out to be on maternity leave, one with her first child, one with her second. Both of them are in their late twenties, but with lots of time to produce the three children which seems to be the standard number for middle class British families these days. I know, as a man, I can keep on producing children until I am in my 70s, but female contemporaries of mine are very unlikely to be able to do so. So, if I entered a long-term relationship now then there would be no children out of it.
As it is, for me, the age of relationships seems passed. This was re-emphasised by another colleague, a newcomer to the company, working as a PA. Initially she dressed in a low-key almost, dour way, but in the past week her wardrobe has changed to over-the-knee boots, shrugs and short dresses and her hairstyle from a simple ponytail to elaborate tresses. The mumbled conversations on the telephone in the office, with her back turned to the door, suggest that a relationship is afoot which has provoked her changed style. There is no way I can envisage, at my age, provoking such a reaction in a woman these days, let alone actually starting a new relationship. From men I know, a decade or so older than me, I am aware that even if you can get a woman to go out with you she is simply interesed in a platonic relationship and any steps towards anything physical, however mild, ends the relationship immediately.
Of course, the women out there of my age are unlikely to be particularly enthralling. Recently I stumbled across an online discussion about making Easter gardens, by a woman I had known at university. At that time I knew her, she had been incredibly sweet but also sexy. As I have recounted before, I completely bungled any relationship with her, something I had regretted up until now. However, reading the discussion about such a mundane issue on a website group for Christian mothers, I did think, well, even if we had hit it off, then no doubt this would be the kind of woman I would be married to now, and my life would be no better than it is for me anyway.
I suppose we all turn into our parents. For me that is a particularly unpleasant phenomenon and I shudder when I hear my father's expressions in things I say as I would loath to be ever as mean spirited and have such a violent temper as him. However, what I am saying here, is maybe we cannot escape that development. At best, we can only be incrementally different to our parents, despite how we may appear in our 20s. To discover the sweet and sexy woman has mutated into a Christian mother and an expert on Easter gardens reveals that it can even happen to those you do not expect it from.
The other thing is health. Compared to even just five years ago when I would spring from bed and cycle to work I am now in a situation in which getting up in the mornings is a long and painful process. My joints seem to hurt constantly and lethargy is also a constant companion. It does not matter how early I go to bed, I still wake exhausted. Even a light meal leaves me bloated and without appetite; nothing seems to have flavour. All my faculties seem to be crumbling away rapidly. I already take seven medicines each day and a varying number to counter their side effects. I still have 25 years of working life, if not more, as the working age is liable to rise in that time, what is it going to be like trying to get ready for work when I am 65 if it is already so tough now?
Life does seem incredibly tedious. By the time you reach 40 there is nothing unexpected left. You have a very jaded attitude to things. Nothing is stimulating, it is simply tedious. I suppose we know too well how expensive everything costs. Travel and holidays are too expensive to consider and anyway, you know all the things that are going to go wrong at the airport, with your luggage, with the hotel, with the food, with thieves, etc., etc. Exotic places seem simply to hold hazard, expense and trouble and prove to be more of a burden than if you simply sat at home. Even going to Belgium and to Bath, hardly exotic in anyone's view, proved to be a series of problems and expense. It is not that I am jaded from having seen and done too much, in fact the reverse.
The 1990s were probably my decade of opportunity, I was aged between 23-33. However, I earned £5408 (€6,814; US$9,626) per year at the start of the decade and £9500 (€12,065; US$16,910) at the end and, of course, that was with UK high prices on food, clothes and rent. I had three holidays in the 1990s: one week on a canal boat in the Midlands, one week in a house in France and two weeks cycling between cheap hotels in France, that was it. I did not experience any of the changes in Eastern Europe or go to India or anything. Of course if I had tried, no doubt I would have had all my belongings stolen or I would have been killed or caught some terrible disease. This sort of thing is going to be very common for people who have just left university this year and have thousands of pounds of debt.
Due to the difficulty of finding work, I was a little ahead of my time. British young people today are being constrained into the kind of dull life that I experienced even before they turn 40 and they will envy their European counterparts who at least have a little more ability to experience something different. My brother's wife is about to have a baby in Belgium and I can tell now that his/her life will be far more interesting than that of the 6-year old living in my house who will never go to university and will probably be shot dead in Iran or Syria as part of a British invasion force 12 years from now. The same applies to that boy's cousin just about to be born, though, given how repressive his parents already are, his grim life will start from the moment he sees daylight.
I know I am 'past it' as the popular British phrase says. I have got as far in my career as I will ever get. I have had all the relationships and all the travel that I will ever have. My income will decline from now on and my life will be grey and plagued by ill-health. Of course, anyone over 40 knows all this. However, this message is to anyone who is under 40, even if you are 35: get out there, spend and travel as much as you can, have as much sex and alcohol as you can get. There is no future. You have another forty or fifty years once you turn 40 and the greyness of those years will seek to erase any excitement that you might have had up to then, so you must build up an excellent resource of thrilling memories.
Do not believe the lie, life does not begin at 40, it begins its agonisingly slow descent to death. I suppose I am fortunate. I was told back in the 1980s that I had a life expectacy of 51. I have had premonitions, surprisingly precise ones, that I will die in a car fire in Spain in 2024 when I am 57. The premonitions suggest my father will die in 2020 at the age of 83 and my mother, 8 years later, at the age of 90. So they will have had a good 'innings' as us Britons describe it and I should only have to bear the next 11-17 years. Looking at it that way, however, it seems like ages. So, anyway, do not be like me, heed my warning, and live an interesting life before the greyness subsumes you.
Thursday, 19 June 2008
What Would I Do Differently If I Lived My Life Again
I remember back in the 1980s in a Sunday magazine there would be a column about 'What I Wish I Knew When I Was Eighteen' and this post is similar though for me it goes back before that age. To some extent it was also influenced by the movie 'The Butterfly Effect' (2004) an incredibly bleak movie (though it is now on to its second sequel). In contrast to the Catholic-orientated focus of Hollywood movies since the 1960s which I have commented on before, it has a more Calvinist, predestination approach that harks back to the Film Noir genre of the 1940s. It is a counterpoint to 'Groundhog Day' (1993). 'Groundhog Day' argues that if you work hard and keep persisting you can turn around a grim existence into something better. In 'The Butterfly Effect' in contrast, the main character has the chance to go back and alter parts of his past and tries to improve things for the people around him and in fact makes it worse and worse on each occasion, more get abused and injured and he is increasingly disabled. Ultimately he goes back to being in the womb and strangles himself with his umbilical cord and then it shows removing himself from the equation actually makes loads of people's lives better. Many of us feel that we are actually a discomfort to the world. However, that perception that your whole life from birth is not only a waste but actually damaging is pretty hard to swallow. I tend more to the 'Groundhog Day' approach and feel that with greater insight or even simply taking more time to consider things then I could have led a much better life.
The factor that confuses the issue is that the key way I would have lived my life differently is probably have to have killed myself when I was a teenager. I did not have a happy childhood but it just got worse afterwards. I know it would have upset my parents but given how they went on to humiliate me utterly and cause me to be ill in the subsequent years, I doubt they would have missed me long. Of course with me out of the way my younger brother may have suffered more such damage, but given his more laid-back attitude maybe it would have impacted on him less. I would hope that with my death my parents would have realised that they had been making my life unhappy and would have felt remorse, it is the least they deserve, though I doubt it would have affected them much or for long.
Of course, as has been proven in recent months, I lack the courage for suicide. I think that given the high rate of suicides among teenage boys in the UK, if I was going to be able to do it, I would have done it and so it would have happened for real by now anyway. If I cannot bring myself to do it as an adult with access to so many more means, then I was unlikely to do it when I was 12. So, assuming I bottled out then and stayed alive. What things would I have done differently. One thing is I would hope to have quite a lot more courage. I have noted before how fear has stopped me going to and seeing so many places and certainly stopped me having success with women. Even if I was courageous on say one out of ten occasions that I lacked courage, then I think my life would have been a lot richer and a lot happier. I never seemed to lack courage in standing up to my parents and that simply led to more condemnation from them and greater humiliation at their hands, but standing up for what I believed in at school and elsewhere would probably have helped me, it may though, have led to even more bullying. Given that I got bullying at all levels of my school life right up to when I was 18, I guess it could not have been any worse and appearing tougher may have scared off other bullies.
Though I think I would have benefited from being more courageous, I think I would have saved a lot of time, discomfort and money by realising what I was not able to do. As I have written before I was useless as judo, canoeing, fencing, go, aikido, ten-pin bowling and Chinese all things I took courses in, sometimes repeatedly for absolutely no benefit. I could have put my efforts into things that I have had more success at, generally nothing sports or language related.
I was unfortunate when a teenager to witness men on at least two different occasions being utterly humiliated when they asked women out. This scared me away from doing this and at least on five occasions I walked away from women who were asking me out. Of course, you are not going to succeed on every occasion and even when I gained some courage I offended one woman so much by asking her to go out with me that she demanded an apology. However, if I actually had had more dates and break-ups and new relationships, then I would a) have become more adept at doing it and b) more immune to the embarrassment it can bring. Of course I could not have removed the scars on my body which made me feel so awkward, but I would have sooner realised that women do not really give a damn about such things if the man treats them properly and seems to have had some confidence. I also think that if I had had sex before I was 34, then I would not have run into the problems with women despising a virgin in his 30s. There were certainly women when I was 18-21 who would have slept with me but I walked away from because I felt so inadequate. If I had more courage I would have also contested other men for them, rather than simply giving up on a woman when I saw another man interested in the vicinity. I also wish I had learnt far quicker to forget about the women I fancied in my youth and not agonise over what might have been. Also I wish I had understood that we are not living in a Jane Austen novel and women pay no attention to little notes of affection, these days they want to be asked directly. I wish I had joined a dating agency in 1994 when I first moved to London rather than waited five years. I had more success by far when I did than before and I could have had a great deal more in that mid-1990s period when okay I was not rich, but I was younger (27-32 in 1994-9), of course if I had had sex earlier and more confidence with women, then it would have increased my chances even more, but as it was I could have had a lot more dates (something I thoroughly enjoy), in a city I love, London, with so much to see and do there that is better with someone than alone. In general I wish I had had the courage just to ask women I fancied out rather than agonising over it until they found someone else. Usually the rejections have not been painful.
I certainly wish I had studied different subjects at school. I would have worked far harder at Chemistry and Physics and taken German rather than Latin, though given my difficulty with languages the outcome would have been little different. I certainly should not have taken English 'A' Level (which I failed first time and only scraped through on retake), I should have gone for Law and then applied for a Law degree and got a job in the law. It is an area which fits my personality and I would not have had the many years (up until I was 33) of earning less than £10,000 or periods of unemployment. Once at university I would have worked a lot less than I did. I worked incredibly hard, in the library most days until 9pm when it closed, and yet I still only got a 2:1 degree. I could have got the same and had more socialising and getting on with women rather than day-dreaming about them.
I wish I had never thought I could be a teacher. Taking a TEFL course was an error, partly done to keep my parents off my back, but it was clear I was useless at it and imagining myself in some remote East European city teaching English filled me with fear. Trying to be a school teacher was even worse. Even if I had not failed the course, the job would have stressed me out so much as to probably have led me to retirement from illness by now. Of course, if I had studied Law, then I would not have ended up in this awkward position. The alternative was to get into the civil service sooner than I did. Of course if that letter from the Inland Revenue had not been disposed of by my useless flatmate, I would have been at the exam and be a tax inspector by now, so even opportunities to get back on track failed.
Housing of course has been a bane of my life throughout. It was always something that alarmed me especially when applying to university. On each occasion I seem to have picked a place with a bad landlord/lady, in Coventry, in Oxford, in Norwich, in Milton Keynes, in all of these places I had to move on. Maybe it is simply that such a high percentage of landlords/ladies are bad and that I could not escape having troublesome ones. In recent years it has got worse as outlined on this blog, but in those cases there was little property to choose between. Of course I should have sold my London flat before they started dumping £14,000 charges on me, but that would have been counter to all the advice I had been receiving about renting out property up until then. Certainly in terms of flatmates I would have been far, far more careful, particularly in terms of the complete nightmare in London a man who stole and broke almost everything he came into contact, sub-let the living room and threw litter at our neighbours. I just wished I had waited for the woman who was coming to see me after him. I am very bad at picking people. Every removal company I have ever used has been terrible, even though in Milton Keynes, there is a large selection of decent ones. I always pick the worst from any list and so if I lived my life again I would rely on other people's opinions much more.
If I lived my life again I would buy far fewer non-fiction books and far fewer computer games. I tend to buy both as retail therapy and then they just gather dust. I have a few computer games I replay repeatedly over the years. Not buying these things, not drinking coffee daily from the cafe would have saved me thousands of pounds over the year (I had spent over £2080 on coffee at work since I joined the company in Summer 2005, which I could have made myself in my office). This money would have gone into holidays to places I want to visit and still have not done such as Budapest, Florence, Lyons, St. Petersburg and Japan.
If I lived my life again and had the chance, I would have gone to the weddings in Germany and Malta that I was invited to but bottled out of attending. They would have been fun or at least an experience to talk about. I could have attended the one in Scotland too if I had not done the TEFL course which started the day of the wedding (a Monday, unusually). On one-off incidents, I wish I had not taken the bus back from Coventry to the party in Oxford and stayed the night with the woman who had invited me. I had walked away from her when we had been on a date two years earlier when another man interested in her had shown up and started making advances (the whole relationship had been very hesitant as I never had the courage to tell her how I felt about her, and her friend said that because I was two years older, I was too old for her) and staying that evening would either had re-ignited the relationship or it would have snapped me out of the wistful way I thought about her for a decade later. I knew she was popular, but if she had told me right out, 'no', then I could have moved on. I almost jumped off the bus when it came to a stop and ran back, but it seemed too movie-like at the time. I have always been too romantic in an ineffectual drippy way and not in a robust, actually achieving something way.
I wish I had heeded the advice in 'The Guardian' in about 2003 about never going on holiday with your girlfriend. Every holiday doing that has been a huge mistake and usually ended the relationship. Weekends away are safe, but anything long is fatal and led to lots of heartache.
There are very few things in my life that I am proud of that I would repeat if I lived my life again. Of course, putting all these variations in would mean I would not encounter many of the circumstances, though, for example, in the case of housing, I am sure I would have had equally as bad landlords/ladies just with different names and houses. If I still ended up in certain circumstances in my re-lived life again then I would happily do them again. The first is help a woman with a child in her hands pull an elderly man who had fallen off the back of a canal boat in a lock on the Oxford Canal, out of the water. The second is, dissuade a woman who had been living with a man for many years, from trying to seduce me or trying to have sex with me. She went back to him and confessed her attempted infidelity, not something I advised, but a consequence of discouraging her from trying to have a sexual relationship with me. Obviously it would have meant sex a few years earlier than I got it, but I am morally proud of me getting her to do the right thing and remain faithful (ten years later they are still married).
I do not think my existence has harmed people. It has disappointed a lot of people, but in fact in most cases they have probably found better outcomes not being intimate with me than if they had done. For me though if I lived my life again, I would strive for a wider range of experiences at an earlier age, leading to a fuller engagement with adulthood at an earlier period (17-22 rather than 34-8) based on a better career plan and a mixture of greater caution and greater courage (I think the two go hand-in-hand as with the flatmate and removal company, having the courage to say 'no, you are useless, I want someone else'). However, I cannot get over the fact that actually removing me from the system would benefit a lot of people. I would not be taking up the job that someone could better use than me to lead a successful life. I suppose if it comes down to it, I do feel like 'The Butterfly Effect' character, if you feel your life is invalid then the best option will appear never to have started it.
The factor that confuses the issue is that the key way I would have lived my life differently is probably have to have killed myself when I was a teenager. I did not have a happy childhood but it just got worse afterwards. I know it would have upset my parents but given how they went on to humiliate me utterly and cause me to be ill in the subsequent years, I doubt they would have missed me long. Of course with me out of the way my younger brother may have suffered more such damage, but given his more laid-back attitude maybe it would have impacted on him less. I would hope that with my death my parents would have realised that they had been making my life unhappy and would have felt remorse, it is the least they deserve, though I doubt it would have affected them much or for long.
Of course, as has been proven in recent months, I lack the courage for suicide. I think that given the high rate of suicides among teenage boys in the UK, if I was going to be able to do it, I would have done it and so it would have happened for real by now anyway. If I cannot bring myself to do it as an adult with access to so many more means, then I was unlikely to do it when I was 12. So, assuming I bottled out then and stayed alive. What things would I have done differently. One thing is I would hope to have quite a lot more courage. I have noted before how fear has stopped me going to and seeing so many places and certainly stopped me having success with women. Even if I was courageous on say one out of ten occasions that I lacked courage, then I think my life would have been a lot richer and a lot happier. I never seemed to lack courage in standing up to my parents and that simply led to more condemnation from them and greater humiliation at their hands, but standing up for what I believed in at school and elsewhere would probably have helped me, it may though, have led to even more bullying. Given that I got bullying at all levels of my school life right up to when I was 18, I guess it could not have been any worse and appearing tougher may have scared off other bullies.
Though I think I would have benefited from being more courageous, I think I would have saved a lot of time, discomfort and money by realising what I was not able to do. As I have written before I was useless as judo, canoeing, fencing, go, aikido, ten-pin bowling and Chinese all things I took courses in, sometimes repeatedly for absolutely no benefit. I could have put my efforts into things that I have had more success at, generally nothing sports or language related.
I was unfortunate when a teenager to witness men on at least two different occasions being utterly humiliated when they asked women out. This scared me away from doing this and at least on five occasions I walked away from women who were asking me out. Of course, you are not going to succeed on every occasion and even when I gained some courage I offended one woman so much by asking her to go out with me that she demanded an apology. However, if I actually had had more dates and break-ups and new relationships, then I would a) have become more adept at doing it and b) more immune to the embarrassment it can bring. Of course I could not have removed the scars on my body which made me feel so awkward, but I would have sooner realised that women do not really give a damn about such things if the man treats them properly and seems to have had some confidence. I also think that if I had had sex before I was 34, then I would not have run into the problems with women despising a virgin in his 30s. There were certainly women when I was 18-21 who would have slept with me but I walked away from because I felt so inadequate. If I had more courage I would have also contested other men for them, rather than simply giving up on a woman when I saw another man interested in the vicinity. I also wish I had learnt far quicker to forget about the women I fancied in my youth and not agonise over what might have been. Also I wish I had understood that we are not living in a Jane Austen novel and women pay no attention to little notes of affection, these days they want to be asked directly. I wish I had joined a dating agency in 1994 when I first moved to London rather than waited five years. I had more success by far when I did than before and I could have had a great deal more in that mid-1990s period when okay I was not rich, but I was younger (27-32 in 1994-9), of course if I had had sex earlier and more confidence with women, then it would have increased my chances even more, but as it was I could have had a lot more dates (something I thoroughly enjoy), in a city I love, London, with so much to see and do there that is better with someone than alone. In general I wish I had had the courage just to ask women I fancied out rather than agonising over it until they found someone else. Usually the rejections have not been painful.
I certainly wish I had studied different subjects at school. I would have worked far harder at Chemistry and Physics and taken German rather than Latin, though given my difficulty with languages the outcome would have been little different. I certainly should not have taken English 'A' Level (which I failed first time and only scraped through on retake), I should have gone for Law and then applied for a Law degree and got a job in the law. It is an area which fits my personality and I would not have had the many years (up until I was 33) of earning less than £10,000 or periods of unemployment. Once at university I would have worked a lot less than I did. I worked incredibly hard, in the library most days until 9pm when it closed, and yet I still only got a 2:1 degree. I could have got the same and had more socialising and getting on with women rather than day-dreaming about them.
I wish I had never thought I could be a teacher. Taking a TEFL course was an error, partly done to keep my parents off my back, but it was clear I was useless at it and imagining myself in some remote East European city teaching English filled me with fear. Trying to be a school teacher was even worse. Even if I had not failed the course, the job would have stressed me out so much as to probably have led me to retirement from illness by now. Of course, if I had studied Law, then I would not have ended up in this awkward position. The alternative was to get into the civil service sooner than I did. Of course if that letter from the Inland Revenue had not been disposed of by my useless flatmate, I would have been at the exam and be a tax inspector by now, so even opportunities to get back on track failed.
Housing of course has been a bane of my life throughout. It was always something that alarmed me especially when applying to university. On each occasion I seem to have picked a place with a bad landlord/lady, in Coventry, in Oxford, in Norwich, in Milton Keynes, in all of these places I had to move on. Maybe it is simply that such a high percentage of landlords/ladies are bad and that I could not escape having troublesome ones. In recent years it has got worse as outlined on this blog, but in those cases there was little property to choose between. Of course I should have sold my London flat before they started dumping £14,000 charges on me, but that would have been counter to all the advice I had been receiving about renting out property up until then. Certainly in terms of flatmates I would have been far, far more careful, particularly in terms of the complete nightmare in London a man who stole and broke almost everything he came into contact, sub-let the living room and threw litter at our neighbours. I just wished I had waited for the woman who was coming to see me after him. I am very bad at picking people. Every removal company I have ever used has been terrible, even though in Milton Keynes, there is a large selection of decent ones. I always pick the worst from any list and so if I lived my life again I would rely on other people's opinions much more.
If I lived my life again I would buy far fewer non-fiction books and far fewer computer games. I tend to buy both as retail therapy and then they just gather dust. I have a few computer games I replay repeatedly over the years. Not buying these things, not drinking coffee daily from the cafe would have saved me thousands of pounds over the year (I had spent over £2080 on coffee at work since I joined the company in Summer 2005, which I could have made myself in my office). This money would have gone into holidays to places I want to visit and still have not done such as Budapest, Florence, Lyons, St. Petersburg and Japan.
If I lived my life again and had the chance, I would have gone to the weddings in Germany and Malta that I was invited to but bottled out of attending. They would have been fun or at least an experience to talk about. I could have attended the one in Scotland too if I had not done the TEFL course which started the day of the wedding (a Monday, unusually). On one-off incidents, I wish I had not taken the bus back from Coventry to the party in Oxford and stayed the night with the woman who had invited me. I had walked away from her when we had been on a date two years earlier when another man interested in her had shown up and started making advances (the whole relationship had been very hesitant as I never had the courage to tell her how I felt about her, and her friend said that because I was two years older, I was too old for her) and staying that evening would either had re-ignited the relationship or it would have snapped me out of the wistful way I thought about her for a decade later. I knew she was popular, but if she had told me right out, 'no', then I could have moved on. I almost jumped off the bus when it came to a stop and ran back, but it seemed too movie-like at the time. I have always been too romantic in an ineffectual drippy way and not in a robust, actually achieving something way.
I wish I had heeded the advice in 'The Guardian' in about 2003 about never going on holiday with your girlfriend. Every holiday doing that has been a huge mistake and usually ended the relationship. Weekends away are safe, but anything long is fatal and led to lots of heartache.
There are very few things in my life that I am proud of that I would repeat if I lived my life again. Of course, putting all these variations in would mean I would not encounter many of the circumstances, though, for example, in the case of housing, I am sure I would have had equally as bad landlords/ladies just with different names and houses. If I still ended up in certain circumstances in my re-lived life again then I would happily do them again. The first is help a woman with a child in her hands pull an elderly man who had fallen off the back of a canal boat in a lock on the Oxford Canal, out of the water. The second is, dissuade a woman who had been living with a man for many years, from trying to seduce me or trying to have sex with me. She went back to him and confessed her attempted infidelity, not something I advised, but a consequence of discouraging her from trying to have a sexual relationship with me. Obviously it would have meant sex a few years earlier than I got it, but I am morally proud of me getting her to do the right thing and remain faithful (ten years later they are still married).
I do not think my existence has harmed people. It has disappointed a lot of people, but in fact in most cases they have probably found better outcomes not being intimate with me than if they had done. For me though if I lived my life again, I would strive for a wider range of experiences at an earlier age, leading to a fuller engagement with adulthood at an earlier period (17-22 rather than 34-8) based on a better career plan and a mixture of greater caution and greater courage (I think the two go hand-in-hand as with the flatmate and removal company, having the courage to say 'no, you are useless, I want someone else'). However, I cannot get over the fact that actually removing me from the system would benefit a lot of people. I would not be taking up the job that someone could better use than me to lead a successful life. I suppose if it comes down to it, I do feel like 'The Butterfly Effect' character, if you feel your life is invalid then the best option will appear never to have started it.
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