Jan 18 JDN 2461059

This post goes live one day before my 38^th birthday. I think at this point I have to officially classify myself as middle-aged; I have nearly lived half the life I can expect to live. (Actually if you look at actuarial tables, the point at which, for a male, your expected remaining lifespan is equal to your age is 39 years old, so I’m not quite there yet.)

The odd part is I still don’t really feel like an adult. I don’t own my own home; I’m not making enough money to save; I don’t have any children. I am at least married, and I have a PhD; so I have at least achieved some of the milestones of adulthood—but not nearly as many as I’d expected to have achieved by the age of 38.

Then again, maybe growing older always feels like this. SMBC had a comic about this, where a woman grows older but always feels like she’s a child pretending to be older. But I don’t really feel like a child pretending to be an adult; I feel like a teenager pretending to be an adult. It’s as if my core identity was set at about the age of 16 and ever since then, time passes and my body keeps getting older, but I still feel like I’m that same person pretending to be someone else.

I think I felt more like an adult when I was teaching at Edinburgh; then at least I was working as a professional and paying my own rent. I wish I’d been able to find a way to be happy in academia, because I certainly haven’t found a way to be happy outside of it—and at least on the inside I was making money.

This last year in particular has been one of the worst in my lifetime—not just for me, but for the whole world.

For me personally: I lost one of my greatest mentors, I still remain unemployed, and my mother’s memory problems have not improved (though they also haven’t gotten worse).

For the world at large: Thanks to his enablers in the Republican Party, Donald Trump has been able to do tremendous damage to the United States, the global trade system, NATO, and global poverty relief efforts, with virtually no apparent gain to anyone but himself and perhaps a few of his closest cronies (though even them he would happily throw under the bus for an extra dollar).

I guess it remains to be seen what will happen to Venezuela; while Maduro was terrible, it’s quite clear that Trump does not have the best interests of the Venezuelan people at heart. He seems unwilling to even pretend that this is about anything but oil. (The weirdest part is that even the oil companies don’t actually seem all that interested in the oil!)

We have all watched helplessly as the carnage has ensued, getting news almost every single day about some new horrible thing that he has done. All the institutions that were supposed to stop this kind of madness have utterly failed in their task, most of all the Electoral College, which actually did the exact opposite of its intended purpose by electing him in the first place.

It’s not all Trump’s fault, either: The increase in US carbon emissions had less to do with Trump’s policies than with the war in Ukraine raising natural gas prices and data centers hogging our electricity.

It could be worse, I suppose. We still aren’t in World War 3. Congress is actually doing something to try to stop Trump from—I can’t believe I’m saying this—invading Greenland. And the recent increase in extreme poverty measures was a change in how poverty is measured, not a real reduction in standard of living; global extreme poverty is still decreasing (though also still horrifically high).

I still feel like I’m in survival mode: Just trying to get through each day, hoping that things eventually get better. But at least I get to have some cake with friends.