23 February

As a P.S. to today’s brain dump. I love being in my 50s, it’s the best decade of my life so far. I remember when I started work over 30 years ago, being a bit in awe of people in their 50s. These were people at the pinnacle of their working lives, with knowledge and experience and often a calm authority, coming from that and from them being adults who had got over a lot of the challenges of adult life outside work too. They’d raised families, paid off mortgages, buried parents etc. That’s how being over 50 feels, to me. No more need to defer to any stupidity. A calm focus on getting stuff done, and a pretty ruthless disregard for petty personal things, especially in a work context. People can fuck right off if they want to act like they’re still in high school, and I’ll tell them to their face. I feel at the peak of a life’s work right now, and I’m not sacrificing that to any more idiots playing high school Prom King and Queen games. I sometimes think people see me as a cranky person, but that’s definitely not me. What you see here on FB is that couldn’t give a shit adult over 50 stuff. Cutting through the niceties. I just don’t care, what people think about me, I rarely think about myself either. I’m a grown up, my focus is life and work, not me. Society has no leadership now, as rich countries we’ve indulged ourselves with political philosophies of personal freedom. A fish rots from the head, that cascades down through every layer of society, and we all now have to tolerate incompetent dickheads managing our work and lives, as high school popularity games fill workplaces. Zero tolerance for all of that now too, I’ve worked under several bosses who I swear must have struggled to put their own shoes on in the morning. Not any more.