Bloody L

Ah, I'll do it when I get home, I think excitedly.

And I visualise it in my head, sitting at the computer and doing the thing which has just excited my mind whether it is writing, coding or photoshopping. Except in my head I am still sitting at my computer in my old flat even though I moved out of there a couple of months ago. The human brain maintains a model of the world around it and when things change in reality it takes far longer for these changes to percolate into the mindscape of the head. The older you are the longer it takes for these changes to kick in.

In dreams of course it takes even longer. When asleep I still seem to be living in the house I lived in as a teenager (although oddly am the age I am now).

These mind quirks dragging me back into the past have of late caused me to become increasingly worried about dropping dead although I suspect that turning fifty also has a lot to do with these concerns. When I was a kid the idea of being fifty was the same as the idea of being an old man. Fifty was the precursor of old age, a kind of dry run with the grey hair and the wrinkles and the exciting bit of your life behind you.

The problem is that now that I've reached that age I don't seem to have actually started my life yet, let alone achieved all the good stuff. I still feel like a teenager. At least in terms of what I haven't achieved. Still single. Still not doing the things I really want to do for a living. I still feel teen anger. Perhaps I've wasted my life. Perhaps there was something to the conventional lifestyle after all, perhaps it imbues life with a sense of purpose that is invisible and incomprehensible to me but which if I could only see it would give me the epiphany of a lifetime. But I still can't see and my eyes are beginning to go.

When you are a teenager you think you are going to live forever or at least if you don't actually think it then the idea of immortality is at the back of your mind. Now that I'm fifty I am fully aware that I am very probably more than half way through my life and that even if life extension and rejuvenation techniques are invented within my life time it will be too late for me to use them - or if not I very probably won't be able to afford them. So I have a limited amount of time left and being a rationalist I can see that it's all there is.

There is no room for regret, I simply don't have time for it. Thinking back over all those things that almost but not quite happened twenty years ago is pointless. Best to get on with doing stuff now that in twenty years time I will be able to look back on and say "I'm glad I did that!"

Difficult to know where to start though. Perhaps I am wrong about this as well and the point is not to do things now to make my future self proud, but to do things now for my present self. Enjoy my life now rather than investing in some kind of experience savings account. After all if I do the latter there's the danger I'll drop dead before I get a chance to spend it.

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