Turning 40 with Gaby Moss

Astonishing Legends Network. Disclaimer. This episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me. Hey everybody, welcome back to Scared All the Time. I'm Chris Collari. And I'm Ed Vercola. And today, we are celebrating my birthday. This is my birthday episode. This year was the big one. I turned 40 a few days before you were listening to this, and I still can't wrap my head around it. If you asked me, I probably would tell you I'm 30, but then I think back to turning 30, and I probably would have said I was 20. I just never felt as old as I am. And I don't think that that feeling is unique to me. The there's no way I'm actually this old feeling is familiar to anyone growing up in our hyper-nostalgic, hyper-online comparative culture, especially for anyone who has hit this particular middle-aged milestone. It doesn't help that our culture is obsessed with what turning 40 means, right? When you walk down the greeting card aisle at a grocery store, you're going to see a lot of gravestones, skeletons, ambulances, hearses, and wheelchairs on those 40th birthday cards, and it's going to make you feel like shit. But 40 was not always a death sentence. In different periods of history, it has meant you've reached full strength, you have wisdom, you've been purified, you're free from childbearing, it's the peak of adult life, or it's the moment that life finally begins. The story of how and why that all changed is fascinating. And to learn more, we're going to face the big 4-0 head on. Who taught us to fear it? Why were they right? And how can we face middle age without losing our fragile, deteriorating minds? We're going to be joined on this drive past the graveyard by Gabby Moss, co-author of The Midlife Plot Twist, how to reboot your life without burning it down, even if you really, really want to. And she will help us come out the other side of 40 without panicking and doing exactly that. So join us, listeners, and turn it up loud because if you're 40 years old already, your hearing is going. And if you're not 40 years old, it will be going soon. Let's get the episode started. What are we? Scared. When are we? All the time. Join us. Join us. Join us. Now it is time for. Time for. Scared all the time. Alright everyone, welcome back to the show. The topic for this week is going to be a little different for two reasons. First, we don't usually cover topics that are so universal and so specific at the same time. What I mean by that is most people, unless they're exceptionally unlucky, will turn 40, but they all have their own fears about it, not to mention their own response to turning 40. So We're going to be taking a very broad look at the topic, but I at least would love to hear about any 40-year-old specific fears that you might have or any crazy experiences that you've had at the ripe old age of 40. So hit us up at scaredallthetimepodcast at gmail.com if there is anything you'd like to share. The second thing that is different about this episode is that our guest, Gabby, is... perhaps for the first time on Scared All the Time, an actual expert on this subject. That is a rare treat. So before we rip the Band-Aid and dive into all the ways that my life and body are going to fall apart in the coming year, let me properly introduce her. Gabby Moss is a writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, GQ, Slate, The Daily Beast, RogerEbert.com, and Refinery29. She's the author of Paperback Crush, the totally radical history of 80s and 90s teen fiction. And together with Lindsay Goldwert, she has written The Midlife Plot Twist, How to Reboot Your Life Without Burning It Down, even if you really, really want to. And that book came out two days ago, so go buy it. Gabby, thank you for joining us and welcome to Scare It All the Time. Thank you for having me, and thank you for allowing me to begin the phase of my life where I am professionally 40. It's not a bad place to be. I feel like there's a lot of things that we are all trying to be professionals at, and being in age is a great thing to be very good at, or being of ages, which I guess is a good place to start. I know it is traditionally rude to ask someone's age, but since you are professionally 40, can you give us a sense of where in that age range you are? Have you just turned 40? Are you speaking with some experience? I have been professionally 40 for four years. I am 44, which... Science calls an aging peak that you fall off of. It's supposed to be one of two ages in your life in which your body disintegrates super rapidly. So I only just turned 44. So I'll call you back next year and let you know if my arm fell off. Okay, fantastic. It might happen during this episode. I hope it happens during this episode. While we were emailing and planning this episode, you also told me that your 40s have been the best decade of your life for almost everything except eating carbohydrates without consequences. So I thought, let's start positive and look at that list of improvements. What have been the good things for you about being in your 40s? Oh, God. I feel like I have more clarity about life. I've gotten over a lot of dumb problems I had throughout my entire youth. I might also like my 40s because I feel like I did jack shit in my 20s. So really, it's like being in my 30s. Absolutely. I definitely have felt that as I've gotten older. I feel like each decade I've done better. More. And I look back and go, man, it's so much better to be here than it was to be there. But we don't need to focus this exclusively on your journey through your 40s because my intrepid co-host, Mr. Ed Vicola, is also over the 40s age gap. Ed, you turned 40 last year, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How have you found being 40? Well, nobody made a whole show about me turning 40, so this. Feels a little overdue. No, it's fine. I don't know. I'm similar to Gabby in that way where I really squandered my 20s. My 30s were pretty good. I wish I could do my 30s over again. If I could do two 30s, that would be great. Um, but no, I'm in the forties now and I, yeah, I'm falling apart and it's a mess. So, well, yeah, we're gonna, I think we'll touch on for all of us, probably a number of the things that we have felt or facing or are struggling with or celebrating as we are crossing this boundary into 40. There's a lot of reasons for me that I'm scared of turning 40. And I think really the biggest part of it is just that. you start to see, and we'll talk about this with some of the psychologists and psychotherapists and stuff who are going to turn up in this episode, but You start to see the end of things more than you see the beginning of things. Yeah, all your friends have kids now, so there goes the ends of all your friendships, the ends of game nights, the ends of going out at bars. Ed, we are still friends. It wasn't a personal attack. I have a kid. You're the last one. That's true. That's true. No, but I mean, I think as you get... And there are plenty of people who have found... uh success or a second wind or whatever in their 40s i think there's that is it sam sam jackson i think was 46 samuel jackson when he got cast in um uh pulp fiction i think it was a pulp fiction that he was like 46 or something when he broke through with that um so you know these things these things happen but it does feel like all of all of the um your youth is potential, right? Like for me, at least your youth was like, man, someday I'm going to do this. Someday I'm going to do that. Someday I'm going to do this. I'm working towards these things. And then when you hit 40, you do start to go, what are those things have I actually done? How many of them do I still want to do? And I think that's kind of the fear is like, I'm running out of energy and I still have all these things I want to do. Energy, I feel, is a good word because I do the stuff we did in our 20s. You know, I said I didn't use my 20s well in the sense that like people like Chris and myself, we were working so often in our 20s. We weren't like partying or doing like all the fun stuff that your body would would jump back from immediately if you wanted to. But we just had so much energy to do insane amounts of work and like creative endeavors. And now to take on even this podcast, to take on anything at 40, you're like, I don't want to be up all night after my normal job and work till three in the morning and then work. You know, you just somehow don't have it in you anymore. It feels a little bit like, but anyway, that's my own thing. I should say my take on my 40s being awesome is colored by the fact that I spent my entire 20s like a, puking whiskey sours into the various gutters of new york city so. I'm like you had the one we thought we wanted okay you had the life we thought we wanted and it. Turns out when you stop doing that no matter how your body feels it feels great. Also well it turns out when. You start doing that at 40 it's just weird for everyone else yeah. Yeah we should have done in our 20s chris. Yeah, really, really. Well, to keep this episode from just being a laundry list of people who are past 40 complaining about all the things that 40 is, I think we should start the episode proper by backing way, way up and taking a look at the number 40s. 40 itself, because it turns out one of the first things I learned when I started researching this episode is that the number 40 was already carrying a crazy amount of symbolic weight before anyone even started thinking of it as a defining age. The number 40 turns up throughout history, religion, and culture. As sort of a load-bearing number. Once you notice it, you basically turn into Jim Carrey from the classic film, The Number 23. Oh, man, that's a horrible movie. Terrible movie. But you start seeing the number 40 everywhere once you start looking into the places that it is turned up. So, according to the Providence Journal, quote, at the Mesopotamian dawn of written civilization, there was the Sumerian god known as Enki, patron deity of Eridu, His name, written in hieroglyphs, spells the numeral 40. And for the record, Enki was not some low-level pissant god. He was a big deal. He was the creator of humanity, the god of fresh water, crafts, magic, and, as we'll come up a number of times discussing the number 40, he was the god of wisdom. That's a lot, right? That's a little, he's just like, throw my name on that. For a bunch of stuff, it seems like. Yeah, it seems like he kind of was one of the big dogs who threw his weight around a little bit and was like, shit, you know, I don't really want the underlings to get the credit for crafts. Oh, yeah, or crafts. For water, yeah. So slap Big Enki's name up there and let me own that. Depending on the translation and how you're counting, the number 40 shows up roughly 150 times in the Bible. often around big-ticket items. It rains for 40 days and 40 nights during Noah's flood. Moses spends 40 days on Mount Sinai. The Israelites wander the desert for 40 years. Jesus goes into the wilderness and is tempted by Satan for 40 days, and then famously ascends back to heaven exactly 40 days after his resurrection. And it's not just Christians that love the number 40. Muslims get in on the importance as well. According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad received his first revelation at 40 and then, quote, prayed and fasted in isolation for 40 days before his pilgrimage to spread the word of Islam beyond Mecca, accompanied now by 40 followers. Also, when one assists a blind person for 40 steps, the Quran declares it to be an act of piety. Many Muslim cultures also mark the 40th day after a death as an important milestone for the departed soul, although that's more of a cultural tradition than a universal Islamic rule. And then there's one other modern tradition revolving around the number 40 that I thought was really interesting. which is that in Russian and East Slavic folklore, 40 days is how long the soul may remain near the home after death. And during this time, it will often visit places it loved or sinned or find other ways to stay connected to the living. Families traditionally leave out food, water, or vodka and then hold a final meal on day 40 to send that soul on. So I would... I'm not a big vodka guy, but if someone wanted to leave... Some vodka out for you when you die? For your soul? Some vodka out. To lap up in a bowl? A couple of decent beers maybe would be lovely. Gabby, did you, in researching the book, did you run into other ways throughout history that the number 40 has been used? Not anything as cool as Russian ghost vodka Santa Claus like you just laid out. But I did run into a lot of stuff where, you know, midlife has been a concern for a long time. Midlife is a concern in Dante's poem, The Divine Comedy, which is from the 13th century, I believe. It's not new. No, it's not. It is not a new release. It opens with midway upon the journey of life. I found myself within a forest dark for the straight forward pathway had been lost. So that is. I think a lot of people's experiences of midlife and it's been going on for many hundreds of years. So don't feel bad. No, I love it. It's actually a great opening line. It's this killer opening line. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody, nobody. I mean, unfortunately for the rest of the writers, it sounds like Dante kind of cornered the market on the midlife crisis book a while ago. But, I mean, for fiction writers, you guys are going to be fine. But for fiction writers, I think he sort of planted his flag and said, sorry, guys. It's him, American Beauty, and then that's kind of, yeah, out of idea. These are tough examples of what we have to look forward to. Well, and as we were discussing before we started recording, Serial Mom, which we can get to. Well, you know what? Let's get to it now. Serial Mom, Gabby. Midlife crisis film? You know, I think I love Serial Mom. I believe Kathleen Turner is my exact or close to my exact age when she made it. And that is a movie where when I watched it when I was a teenager, I was like, what the fuck is this old person shit? I don't care, right? Like, show me Divine eating dog turds. I don't I don't care about these people. In the John Waters filmography, you're saying. OK. Yeah. In the John Waters universe. And then watching it again, starting a few years ago as an adult, I was like, this is what it's like to be middle aged. Just try to you try to do something right. People are just fucking it up all the time. Yeah. Also like Babe, complete Babe. And it's supposed to be, you know what I mean? Like this is the older I get to, and you see yourself more in movie characters, but you, that you. Watched a lot as a young person. And as you get close, like when I was like, I talk about Poltergeist all the time when I would watch it, I watched it maybe as a kid. And so like Coach and What's Her Head are the parents. So they were just like adults to me. And now when I watch Poltergeist, I watch it every year. I don't see myself and the kids being afraid anymore. Now I'm like, I do want to be like smoking a J in that bed being like, hope these kids are. Fine down the hall or whatever. It's weird how you like identify with as you get older and got to watch it your whole life with the older characters. I had that same moment with Beetlejuice in my 30s where I was like, I'm not a Lydia anymore. I'm a Delia. Yeah. Shut up. I'm making my bad sculptures. Leave me alone. I don't care about your ghosts. Shot in Connecticut. I used to do that. Gabby's a fellow nutmegger. That's why I said that. Sorry. That's right. I've been in the Warrens' house. I used their bathroom. Used their bathroom. Saw their chickens. Was it spooky? Was the bathroom spooky? No, it was totally normal, but they did have a chicken in a cage living in their kitchen, I think. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. I feel like the end of the Warrens' lives may have been a little bit almost more tragic than the well-known parts of their lives. spooky if they're living with a chicken in their house in a cage i suspect you don't. Know what's purpose it could be like a canary in a coal mine like chickens might be able to sense demons or something that's very. Possible that's true that's true i was gonna say i don't have i don't know that i've ever had specific examples the way you guys did but i definitely remember as a kid reading books and i especially in that age from like eight to like 15 being like really keeping track of oh well now i'm older than this character that i thought was really cool and now i'm older than encyclopedia brown or like now i'm older than the kids from it or now i'm older and now it's like there's nothing left except like maybe indiana jones but i'm sure he's supposed to be like 25 in that movie or something so uh you know What do they always say? Homer is like, Homer on The Simpsons is supposed to be 32 or something? Something like that. Yeah. Any sitcom from, like, John Goodman, I think, is like 30 in the first season of Roseanne. When I found that out, I was like, I'm going to throw myself off the bridge. Yeah, dude. What is it? It's like Cocoon is the one they always go to, right? Yes. It's like the Wilford Brimley, how old he was in Cocoon type of thing. 42 in Cocoon or whatever. He was. It was something like, I think they actually aged up the makeup for him in that movie so it's you know he's playing a little bit older um yeah but uh temple of doom indiana jones is supposed to be 35 so yeah you've surpassed him now but in the last crusade he's. 39 oh well he's also immortal by the end of that movie so yeah well whatever forever 39 marion ravenwood. Was like 14 so like we're doing. Better yeah Yeah, infamously. We aged better than that storyline. Yeah. One interesting thing that I found before we move on from the historical significance of 40, an interesting fact that I found, one of the theories about why the number of 40 turns up so many times throughout history and different religions and stuff is that some researchers, and this is not an agreed upon fact, but some researchers believe that 40 was almost like ancient slang for just a long time the way we'd say like oh i was gone for a million years they would be like oh i was gone for 40 days was like just sort of so 40 turned up a lot because it was just sort of a colloquial way of saying hey man a long time passed you know like what. Do you really it identifies that there were potentially full civilizations that couldn't count past 40 is what you're saying. Like, if 40 is hyperbole, like, that's where the abacus stopped. Like, there were no more beads, apparently. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Well, 40 also gave us one of the most loaded words of the last decade, quarantine. I never knew this, but the word quarantine... actually derives from the phrase quaranta giorni, meaning 40 days. And according to no less an expert than the McGill Office for Science and Society, the term traces back to the 14th century when the city of Dubrovnik, now in Croatia, was under Venetian rule. The Great Plague was devastating Europe, and as a form of protection, Dubrovnik declared that all ships and people had to be isolated for 40 days, before entering the city. It's a tremendous amount of time, by the way. 40 days is longer than a month. And that is just a crazy amount of time to stay on the last boat. It's basically like two months, almost. Well, not quite. But it's a long time to stay on a fucking boat, especially back then. That's what I'm saying, yeah. But here's what brings us full circle. The reason that they defined a quarantine as 40 days and not 30 days or 50 days is not because of anything that they knew scientifically or anything that they'd been studying. It was because of Lent, the 40 days of prayer and sacrifice in Catholic tradition. So it's 40s all the way down. I thought you were going to say it's because they still didn't know a number over 40. That's what I was thinking. Yeah. They were like, what's as high as we can go? Somebody writing the Bible was like, I'm thinking. Jesus lives for 50 years. And it was like, no one. What? That's a made up word. He better be gone before fucking 40. Sorry, you're cutting your trilogy into two parts. Fuck it, into one part. Much like all of us. Well, not all of us. No, none of us. I was going to say, much like all of us, Jesus wants to redo his 30s, but he was only 33. Ed, you want to redo your 30s. Gabby, you definitely don't. Or you don't want to redo your 20s. I don't want to redo my, I could do, I would be game for like doing like a never been kissed of my thirties. Like I show up at the, wherever, wherever 30 year olds are. And I'm like, Hey fellow, 30 year old. That's me. Yeah. And that's the thing that's so weird about 40. And then I'll move on back to new numerology where the fuck we're doing is there is something magically horrible about 40 where it does seem like you're just the, like, You've become that Lord of the Rings meme where you're like, I was there 6,000 years ago. All of a sudden, nobody gets your references. People are telling you to your face, you're old. You're graying. So it's like even if you didn't open your mouth, people are like, that person's not 20. Although I had some friends in college who were gray. To anybody, just to be clear, to anybody not watching this episode, Ed and I are 1,000% going gray. Gabby's hair looks great. Oh, it's all, the gray, I paid someone to make the gray go away. Although gray is, gray is, I think, more normalized now. I think people, men and women, I think, are coloring their hair maybe less in a way that previous generations maybe didn't. And also being 40 in, like, I don't know, like you were 39 when you had Felix, right? So 38. Yeah. So I think like also like starting late to starting a family is like being 40 is kind of like a starting place where it wasn't maybe in generations previous. I think so. I think so. And we'll get to that in a minute. Because I think that's... Yeah, sorry for blowing up the whole numerology part. No, no, no, no, no. But you're on to something, Ed. I'll tell you what. you nothing gets by you to return to islam for a moment there is something. Else please put that on my tombstone. To return to islam for a moment there's something else the quran uses the number 44 44 not 44 yeah number 44 what a dumb language. It's considered that wouldn't happen in arabic. No no it would be much more clear 40 is considered the age that one finally reaches full strength and maturity. And Muslims weren't alone in this. Many ancient cultures actually considered turning 40 a very positive milestone. And not just because their life expectancies were much lower than ours. They felt that 40 was a great age. Judaism thinks it's a great age. The Talmud has a line about how a person... doesn't truly grasp their own teacher's thinking until 40 years have gone by, and a different collection of rabbinical texts pinpoints 40 as the year wisdom arrives. And at least one notable ancient Greek, Solon of Athens, felt that the years between 35... Now, this is a big window, but... And 90. It's like that Christmas song from kids from 1 to 92. Yeah. He felt that the. Years between 35 and 56 were the peak of life. And Confucius said of 40 that it was the age at which he could no longer be confused nor tempted, which I have to ask, Gabby, Ed, does that hold true for you? Were you confused or tempted past 40? I mean, I'm confused every day. Yeah. I don't know what, like, temptation remains. I mean, I didn't have to have two beers since we started recording, but I did. Yeah. I think Confucius was maybe a little full of himself to say that he turned 40 and he could no longer be confused or tempted. That's sort of a humble brag, I think. Is it like a. Sex thing maybe that I'm not picking up? I'm just trying to figure out what the meaning is here. Yeah, I don't get it either, but the guy speaks in riddles. That's why he's on Fortune Cookies. Yeah. That way you can interpret it any way you want these cookies. It's 2026 and I'm still not entirely sure what he was trying to say, but he seemed to think that 40 was important in his development of at least to some degree. So it was the year he stopped getting scammed. It sounds like every year prior, he was like falling to some scam artists. And then he bought, he bought so much life insurance up through the year 39. And then he was like, no more. Yeah. You wouldn't catch me buying a racehorse this year. Yeah. Now this is where we'll get a little bit further. I think I suspect into some of the research. I should also say we're talking specifically about 40, uh, The book that Gabby wrote deals more generally with midlife. We're sort of conflating the two because they are often considered almost one in the same. But a lot of the midlife stuff isn't specifically 40. But I think we're about to get into a little bit more of the area where Gabby was really focused in writing her book. So the belief in the upside of the backside of your life didn't die out in the Bronze Age. Before 40 became the age where we decided a midlife crisis will drive you insane and probably result in you buying a vehicle that you no longer have the reflexes to drive safely. Joke's on them. Just make it so no one can afford vehicles. And there goes the confusion and temptation. Exactly. We're 10 steps ahead of you, Confucius. Yeah, dude. It's called inflation. check it out sometime. But before 40 became that age, there was a huge cultural push here in the United States to convince people that turning 40 was actually the beginning of the best part of their lives. And in 1932, a Columbia University journalism professor named Walter B. Pitkin published a book called Life Begins at 40. Now, before I ask Gabby's opinion on his research, I do want to point out this was three years into the Great Depression, so I want to acknowledge the balls that it took to look around in America in 1932 and go, hey guys, the good part's just getting started. This guy was an optimist, I think, in every sense of the word. But I guess people were looking for good news about anything, because according to The Atlantic, Life Begins at 40 became the best-selling non-fiction book in America in 1933. Gabby, do you want to fill us in on sort of on Pitkin's argument in this book or what he wrote it to talk about? Yeah, in a stance that's not that dissimilar from all of the religious stuff about turning 40 that you were just mentioning. He Pitkin thought that kind of you hit kind of an age of full reasoning at 40, that you were not capable of fully understanding life until you hit that point in your life. And the book was full of a lot of sketches, like inspirational sketches of people who had done their peak work after 40. Joseph Conrad, who wrote Heart of Darkness, was a big one in there. some politicians. And that is a time period in which a lot of writers have traditionally done their best work is after 40. Yeah. Pitkin, I found a quote or a partial quote from him that I thought was kind of illustrative of how rough people had it. He said that Before the machine age, people, quote, wore out at 40, which I feel like really... I mean, I'm tired a lot at 40, but I feel like that really drives home how rough people used to have it. Because I can't imagine being more tired most days. And his thesis seemed to be like... hey, man, up until the 1930s, you were done. You were spent at 40, and now you can really get to living. I mean, this is just a guy who's yelling at John Henry, being like, why are you even fighting this? For once, we have a machine to do this work for us. Just go enjoy your 40s. Yeah, I mean, it is true. I think that the Industrial Revolution did probably extend people's not lifespans, but maybe ability spans in which you can have your your body and life be more functional. Like, you know, I think if you were living on the prairie and doing, uh, you know, pa Ingalls type shit all day long. I think your body was probably totally jacked by 40. Like, yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, I think there was another quote I found from him that I thought was rich, given the fact that we still hear versions of this, uh, from all kinds of people, especially in the tech world. He said, uh, men and women alike now turn from the ancient task of making a living to to the strange new task of living, which I feel like is the same promise that we get. So you retired at 40 back then? No, I don't know. I mean, I think, I think his point was like, look, we have like the cotton gin or like whatever, like we could, you know, you can now enjoy your life instead of, you know, working in the fields like Gabby said. But it's funny that we still have people you know, suggesting that now with AI that like, oh yeah, now you don't have to work. Now you can just get to living and doing what you've always wanted to do. And we've been saying that since the 1930s. It's just, this stuff is very cyclical sometimes. Yeah. And in 1904, if you're 40 in 1932, you fought in World War I, very likely. So it's not like, maybe he was just saying like, thank God we're never doing one of those again. So I can start living, you know? Fast forward six years. Oops. Yeah. But yeah, Pitkin's idea was basically that by the time you were 40, you'd put in the work to gain some skills. Your kids were grown. You probably had a little bit of money. You spent somewhere around 20 years doing the things you were supposed to do. And now you could figure out what you really wanted to do, which I'm sure some people did. And some people... probably just died during the Great Depression at that point. Who are you to say that's not what they wanted to do? That's true. If you're 38 and the Great Depression rolls around, you might just check out. Yeah, you got 16 kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And four of them have hunchbacks, so they're useless in the field. Speaking of kids, though, Gabby, when we were prepping for this episode, you also mentioned that some of the early positive writing about middle age was actually aimed specifically at women because the idea was that menopause or the end of childbearing could actually be presented as kind of freedom. And I guess my question, not having read that literature. With 18 kids, it should literally be presented to you like the key to the city. Like you've earned it. There's a day named after you now. But do you think, here's my question about that. Do you think that that information was received as genuinely liberating or do you feel like it's just sort of became like a new set of instructions for how a middle aged woman was now supposed to behave in terms of like, well, now you have freedom. So now you have to go do something else. No, I think, you know, the book I was referencing for you, it's from 1902 and it's called What a Woman of 45 Ought to Know. You're going to get. A lot of questions about how you lasted this long. Just know that up front. I sincerely hope that was written by a woman. It was written by a woman. It was written by a female obstetrician. But, you know, if you think back on this period of time, this is a time with no reliable contraception. Unless you really have a plan or you're a nun or something, you know, if you are a 45-year-old woman, you have just been knocking these kids out. You have had a baby on your teat for many a year. And, you know, I think there was an idea that this part of your life has closed and now you can start living for yourself. A quote from her book is that midlife for women is a time to be selfish. You have been so unselfish for so long. All sorts and kinds of opportunities lie in waiting. And I mean, I think across all decades and centuries of kind of literature that's positive about midlife, there is this idea that maybe in the first half you were had obligations, you were doing things the way your parents wanted, your family wanted, society wanted, whatever. And now you do have the opportunity to just live for yourself. Your knees will be fucked up while you do it, but you do have the opportunity to live for yourself. Right. No, that's great. I mean, I think that's a really optimistic way for women to be approaching sort of the middle of the American century and which the only problem with optimism is that it doesn't work at all for this show. 1902 is the middle of the American century. Okay, okay, okay. 1902. You mean the American whole thing? I was back into the 1930s. You're right. 1902 was well before that. But my point was about to be that this all sounds very optimistic, which doesn't work for Scared all the time. these things all sound far too positive and these women are doing way too well. I'll give you another positive future affirmation or outlook that sounds pretty good, but it does work for scared all the time, which is how many immigrants came to America with the promise back then of the streets were paved in gold without realizing they would be the ones paving it. And so, same thing. This outlook is like, look at all the time you're going to have, but I'm sure you're going to tell us that it was either, it was a bullshit lie. Well, it wasn't a bullshit lie. I think actually in. The early part... You can't make it a bullshit lie for our fans just one time? I think in the early part of the 1900s, there actually was, you know, up through Pitkin's writing, there was this upswell. I think probably, I have no evidence to back this up, but I think probably... having something to do with the fact that people were living longer and that middle age was sort of your late 30s, early 40s. Even if you weren't making it all the way to 80, it was roughly middle age. And I think there was a positive upswell around all of that. There was a lot of optimism. But then there's a new character who enters the world of the midlife crisis, a man named Elliot Jax. And he said, he looked at all this optimism and said, you know what you should be thinking about is death. You need to think about the fact that you're going to die. And Elliot Jacks kind of became the man who invented the midlife crisis as we currently think of it. So we can actually trace the beginning of the midlife crisis or the modern midlife crisis that sees 40 as sort of the beginning of the end to a meeting in London in 1957. And that is when and where a 40-year-old Canadian named Elliot Jacks stood in front of about 100 members of the British Psychoanalytical Society, a group that sounds super fun, and presented a paper that he called The Midlife Crisis. Could you imagine if, because that's, at the time, if you're in a group like that, they're probably like, they're both peers and like friends, probably. It's like as if you were like, Ed's coming over tonight to present a paper to his friends. It's like so weird. That's sort of what this podcast is, is Chris is coming over tonight to present a paper called I'm Afraid of Everything. Yeah, it's true. We'll start with clowns and go through airplane disasters. That's why at this point it's just you, me, and Gabby, buddy. That's all that's left. But according to this paper, The Midlife Crisis, and a history of the paper that The Atlantic wrote, Jax came up with the midlife crisis theory by studying the lives of artists, writers, and composers. He noticed that somewhere in the mid to late 30s, the work of these artists often changed. Some of them fell apart or stopped creating. Some of them had found talents that had been long buried. Or as Gabby mentioned earlier, others entered a new phase where their work became even more patient, disciplined, or honest. And his original theory, this I thought was really interesting, didn't necessarily paint the midlife crisis as a bad thing. what it meant was that you were finally making the thing that you were always capable of making. The crisis itself was the moment that you realized time was running out to make the thing. And this hit particularly close to home for Elliot Jacks. His paper describes a depressed 36-year-old patient who felt like he had spent his life climbing a hill. For the first time, Also, climbing a hill at 36 is something neither Ed nor I was ever capable of, so this patient is ahead of that. No, there's a pretty famous picture of me trying to go to the Hollywood sign around the same time, and I was fully... I did not make it and fully read, just from head to toe, sunburned. For the first time, this patient had reached the top of the hill and could see the road coming down the other side. Quote, now suddenly I seem to have reached the crest of the hill. There is death observably present at the end. Oh, God. Years later. He meant like metaphorically, sir. Yes. I was still seeing him on the hike to the Hollywood sign with me in my head. That's why I was like. Oh my God, I'm glad he didn't make it. If that's on the other side of the Hollywood Hills. He saw you at the other end of the hill. This guy's fucking dead. Let's get out of here, dude. Let's get out of here. Years later, Elliot Jacks admitted that this patient he described was him. So he was well versed in the idea of feeling like the end was near. In other people, though, Jack said the symptoms of a midlife crisis could include a sudden inability to enjoy life, obsessing over your health or appearance, finding religion, sleeping around, or making what he called compulsive attempts to remain young. Gabby, I will not ask you this question because it would be rude, but Ed, how many of those things have you tried? With hiking. Well, hiking's not on the list. A sudden inability to enjoy life, obsessing over your health or appearance, finding a religion, sleeping around, or making compulsive attempts to remain young. Two of the five. Okay. Two of the five. The first two. I don't think I've dabbled in the back three. I did have a thing like a year ago where I was like, I got to find out who Sabrina Carpenter is. So that might be a compulsive attempt to stay young. Yeah, that may be. They did the SNL did the Domingo thing or whatever. And I literally thought that was a song they just made up. I thought that was written for the sketch until, like, my niece was like, that's a huge suck. It's funny. A girl that Ed and I went to college with, who I won't name because I don't know if she would want her name out there, but she worked for a very long time at Disney. And... At Thanksgiving's, she's friends with my cousin. And so at Thanksgiving's, I usually catch up with her like once a year. And she it makes me feel so old because she was working in like teen programming at Disney. And that whole run, Sabrina Carpenter, like I think Olivia Rodrigo, a bunch of those girls that came through there. She's like, oh, yeah, she was so sweet. Like she knew those girls and they were like 12. And then they were 11 or whatever, and they went through the whole Disney machine and came out the other end, and they're all pop stars now. But I couldn't name a single... Well, Olivia Rodrigo. I could. I mean, I just get... I get triggered just from hearing dates of birth now, where it's like... See, the X-Men cast was announced. They were all born in 2004. And I was like, I went.... Three years before they were born to see X-Men in theaters. Yeah. Like, like that's just, just hearing a year that someone's born, like throws me through a loop now. A few days ago in my day job, I too will be too classy to name names. Um, but in my day job, I write for a website and I was interviewing, uh, an actor who was born in 2002. And the whole time we're doing this interview, I'm like, is this for him? Is this just being like scolded by your mother? What is this experience like? Because I look at him and I'm like, we're the same age. My kid, this, I almost fell over in Target the other day. My kid, I realized, is going to have nostalgia maybe for the 2020s, but probably the 2030s. When he's older, he's going to be like, man, the 2030s, That's when life was real, man. Oh, was it during the water wars? Yeah. That's what he's pumped about. We're going to have amazing music during the water wars. That's true. Well, yeah. Can you imagine the standup is going to be so good during the water wars? Unfortunately, all the music will just be like steel drum or whatever else is empty. At that point would be the instruments. The drink minimums at clubs will be way down, though. You only have to buy one because there won't be any left. I heard Gen Z is already not drinking. So I don't know. That's true. They're not. Anyway, where were we talking about Elliot Jacks? And we were talking about the things that he felt were the symptoms of a midlife crisis. And he felt that all of these behaviors came from the same horrifying realization that You understand intellectually from the time that you're a kid that everybody dies. But somewhere in the middle of your life, that information finally becomes about you, which I do want to know. Gabby, I guess we'll start with you. Do you know? Was there a point? Because I feel like my recognition that I'm definitely dying was way before middle age. Did you have the recognition? Do you have a moment that you're like, oh yeah, that's when I realized? You know, I had a recent one that makes me wonder if maybe there are multiple ones because obviously I did not expect to live forever in a robotic suit until recently. Wait, until recently? So now you've come to that conclusion. But no, no. I mean, it's not like I believe that, but I have had a more, I had a thing a few weeks ago where I woke my husband up and I was like, in 26 years, I'm going to be 70. So I do think. Don't worry. According to the interns, you already are. But I do think there is a thing where, yeah, it feels a little bit more real. You know, maybe you have had people you knew from high school or something at this point in life pass away from, like, non-wild reasons, like natural bodily decay reasons. And I think that made it seem a little more real to me. Yeah. Yeah. I absolutely, Ed, have you, do you know the moment? Was there a moment? Has there been a recent moment where you were like. Fuck every day since I was 29 and the, and, and, and anything outside of just those thoughts, I'm allowed to talk about publicly. So I, I, I, for my part, I will say, I think probably, you know, being raised really Catholic probably clued me in really young. Cause there was just such a focus on like death and suffering and what was on the other side. But I also think that I'll take this moment to get on my soapbox. I think part of the reason that John Carpenter's Halloween is one of the greatest American movies of the past century is because I think it's not what Carpenter intended because he would probably physically slap me if I suggested this to him. But I think what that movie is about is teenagers realizing that they are going to die. Like, I think that's really what kind of my interpretation of the movie, at least is Michael Myers is death. And that movie is about teenagers realizing he's coming for them. And that seeing Halloween, it bothered me for decades. I saw it when I was 14, maybe. And it wasn't until I was probably in my thirties that I was like, Oh fuck. That's why it bothered me so much because it was all these relatively good kids, which I was one. I was a, No adventure, no danger, no bad stuff. But it was them going, oh, shit, it's coming for me someday. And I think that was the beginning of the awakening. And now I think about it all the time. Yeah, well, I think about it all the time from 29 on in the way that I think we've been discussing, which is like looking at the end coming and not just the idea that I'm going to die. but that I'm running out of time, that the hourglass is getting shorter or whatever. Not shorter. You know what I mean? There's less sand in it. I don't know why we're still using sand as a measurement, but I'm saying that there's less sand. Also, Halloween H20, 20s half of 40, just if we're going to go buy anything. Also, Halloween H20, phenomenal film. The first of the Halloweens that I ever saw. Most people consider it a very bad Halloween movie. I think it's I think it's maybe the second or third greatest Halloween movie, especially John Ottman's orchestral Halloween score. I've been shamed out of rooms of horror fans by saying that it's one of the better Halloween scores, but it's very, very good. And it's basically the new trilogy just did that again, more or less. And no one seemed to point it out or notice, and it frustrates me to no end. Anyway. Should we call this episode Halloween H4O? just for no one if you guys got 50 plus minutes into this episode you're gonna be in for a treat when the title makes sense to. You just you wait until Jamie Lee Curtis calls into this episode about 10 minutes before the end. Trying to sell us probiotics over the hell that little thing she had was. Her yogurt. Yeah. Which, by the way, she was selling when we were like 15. She was selling. You want to. Feel old, bro? Yeah. Think about how long she's been selling his little milks. I do remember finding that to be hilarious. I was like, old people need help shitting. This is hilarious. And now we're all there. And now we're all there. Just fridges filled with it. To get this train back on the tracks, Elliot Jack's theory wasn't embraced right away. According to Pamela Druckerman's History of the Midlife Crisis, Jack's was nervous to present this paper because the audience of these very, I'm sure, entertaining guests included leading psychoanalysts like Donald Winnicott and Jack's mentor, Melanie Klein. These meetings were reportedly known for their brutal questioning after papers were presented, but Jack's presentation was met with something worse. Silence. He presented the midlife crisis to an absolutely quiet room. One of his mentors tried to tell him that if there was one thing the psychoanalytic society couldn't cope with, it was death, but that didn't cheer him up at all. He was convinced the paper was a failure, and he sat on it for six years. until he finally submitted it to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, which published it in 1965, under the much better title, Death and the Midlife Crisis. And this time, people were ready for it. Some people think it's because maybe the midlife crisis didn't feel so scary and final. By 1965, the average life expectancy in Western countries had climbed to around 70, so the midlife crisis... would arrive and you still had like 30 years left to do whatever it is you decided you wanted to do. But Gabby, this prompted a question I wanted to ask you. In your research, did you find any kind of, were there patterns or any kind of logic to the reason that the realization that, that you know, you're halfway through life and the death is down the bottom of the hill or whatever metaphor you want to use. Is there any reason that sometimes that makes one person finally, you know, create the thing they were always meant to do, but might make another person just burn their whole life down? Asking for a friend. I mean, I do usually think that when you end up burning your life down, it's because you realize you've constructed a life that stands in the way of anything you want to do and has maybe spent the past 20 years trying to impress your dad. Who am I talking about? No one. Neither of us, I can guarantee you. But I think it is all from the same urge of, the same realization that you don't have infinite time left. And, you know, for some people that gets expressed in a really wholesome way, like I'm going to write that novel. And then for other people, it ends up getting expressed in a less wholesome way. I'm going to abandon my family and fuck that 22 year old. No. Well, in that case, no, I'm not, I'm not asking for anybody. That's not at all. I, I, I approach midlife with the feeling of, I do want to try to finally, like, knock some of the things out of the park that I've been trying to knock out of the park for the past, like, 20 years, but I do see how people who have kind of just been, like, randomly grasping at the idea of what their life is supposed to be could reach 40 and kind of go, oh no, you know, like, not that that's right to burn your life down, but I I could see how you could live a life where you would look around and panic and make some bad decisions. And I will say we did research for our book. We did a survey of 150 women in their 40s and over 70% of them said they had thought about burning their lives down. They didn't all do it, but it has crossed the mind of a large, large segment. I would imagine that the numbers are the same among men as well. About a million percent. I think it's an urge that passes through a lot of people's minds. I think especially in this day and age where it's so easy to see the lives that everybody else is living, I think it's really hard to be satisfied with the life that you've built. I mean, it is something that I wrestle with and I'm sure lots of people listening to this show wrestle with. You look around and even if you're not a jealous person or you're not a person who's always keeping up with the Joneses, I feel like it's just Everyone else's lives are so much in our face now that it's really hard to just be like, no, I think I'm good. I think I like what I have and I think I like what I'm doing and I think I'm happy on this path. Like, our world is no longer designed to encourage that. And maybe it never really has been, but I feel like it's got to be harder than ever. It's got to be even doubly harder than ever because I feel like we're 20 plus years into this social media experiment now. And I feel like we. We're there at the beginning and we're there at the end, we being millennials. But it's like, yeah, comparing yourself to your friend's Instagram feed for a long time was like, why am I doing that? You wouldn't compare your game footage to people's highlight reels. And that's all we're being shown. And I could see how you can get it twisted. But now it's almost worse because I used to just see people who were doing better than me and then be like, oh, what am I? Am I a fuck up? And now I don't even see that anymore because we're just fed stuff in our social media that's like for you page. People I don't even know who are trying to tell me how to fix the fucking feeling I'm having or used to have because they're like, listen to me. I'm going to tell you how to do this. And then you click on one and then you go down this whole stream of like, oh, this person resonated with this fucked up manosphere shit. Let's throw a million at them. And so I almost want to go back to when I just was jealous of my neighbors. is what I'm saying. But there's no version in which social media is not exasperating the problem of the midlife crisis. No, I mean, I think it's definitely feeding into negative midlife crises where you're like, oh, you know, I'm not keeping up with the Joneses. I mean, there's also, I would say, the flip side, there is a very positive midlife crisis, which, like, I will out myself. I had a midlife crisis because, like, unlike you guys who were, you know, pursuing your real shit from early on, like, I spent the first like 12 years of my working life having bullshit office jobs because my dad thinks the most honorable thing a human being can do is like work for the IRS. You know, when you construct this life that's not about, you know, the things that are genuinely good for you, almost when you are living the version of like being bummed out by Instagram, when you're actually making that your life, I do think sometimes you hit the hit a point in the middle where you're like, I got to tear this down because this is, this is, I can't do another 40 like this. It's too fucked up. Yeah. I mean, the only, the only thing my dad has ever cared about and saw his success was there was like two years where I had an office with a parking spot and he was like, you have a parking spot? And I was like, yeah. And he was like, they put your name on it? And I was like, yeah. And he was like, You made it. Everything else I've done, no other achievement. The parking spot with the name on it was like, damn, son, you've arrived. It's tough in our industry because in any other industry, you'd be like, I've arrived at the parking spot with my name on it. And now I enter that chapter. In our industry, it was like, do you like that parking spot? It's fucking gone. You had that for a year. Now you're back to the bottom. I often arrive to find a much more successful writer parked in that parking spot. Because he was working at the office that day and they just gave it to him. So, you know, it did not mean the same thing that it once did. But yeah, it's fucking tough. No matter how you approach life, once you kind of hit middle age, it's like you start looking around and it's really hard to not compare or not question. Well, because you feel that you have less, like those days are gone. They're gone. They're genuinely not coming back. So if you're at 40 and you're like questioning why I'm not at a different place at 40 than I thought I'd be, you can't. Redo your 30s. All you can do is go, I'm going to make a bunch of changes in my life. And maybe I'm going to be the person I hoped I was at 40 at 50. But now you're 50. And so it's like, fuck, why does it keep moving forward? This sucks. And it's like, I'm doing the right things. It's that thing where it's like, when's the best time to plant a tree? 20 years ago. You know what I mean? But you still have to plant something and do something. Right, but you're leaving the end of that little saying off, which is the second best time is today. No, I mean, I kind of did. I just didn't use a whole... So I mentioned the seed, you understand. But the problem is that now you're 50 and 60. And then at 40, we've already established you have no energy. And so it's like, well, I can plant the seed, but that's as far as I can go. Have you tried planting a seed at 50? No, you can't even use a shovel. You're fucked. Every private equity already took those seeds. You guys are getting really midlife negative here. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Yeah, I can plant anything, though. That's the beauty of it. Okay, we're going to turn this around. We're going to turn this around because, Gabby, I want to ask you about a woman named Gail Sheehy. Gail turned us back around from the... death, the death awareness of Elliot Jacks to a slightly more positive angle, despite her thoughts about the midlife crisis being born from tragedy. So, Gabby, do you want to tell us a little bit about who Gail Sheehy is and kind of what she did to make the idea of the midlife crisis become something that every American knew about. Yeah, so Gail Sheehy was a journalist. She wrote for New York Magazine and In the 70s, she decided she was going to kind of document the different phases of the lives of Americans. She was going to interview people in every decade of their lives and try to come to some conclusions, which is a thing people would give you money to do in the. 70s. It was a groovy time that we all missed out on. But she did spend years and years talking to people in every decade of their lives, and she produced a book called Passages, The Predictable Crises of Adult Life, which also, you could have a book that was a bestseller in the 70s called The Predictable Crises of Adult Life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the real problem is not that we're 40, it's that we were not around in the 70s. We have a. Lot of the stuff from the 70s. We have inflation, we have coming off a protracted war, we have an insane.... Political situation. An energy crisis on the horizon. We're living in everything in the 70s, minus how far the dollar went. We also don't have music. We don't have the cool clothes from Dazed and Confused. I think we're doing a much worse version of the 70s now. Much worse. Wait for the 2030s. It's all coming back, like you said. So Gail wrote this book, and each section on it is a different decade, but one of the sections that got the most attention was her part on midlife. In her research, she found, I'm going to quote her here, people in midlife often think I had better take a survey, re-examine where I have been and re-evaluate where I'm going to spend my resources from now on. Why am I doing all this? What do I really believe in? And she said, between 35 and 45, Quote, if we let ourselves, most of us will have a full-on authenticity crisis. Oh, no. Oh, wow. It's funny because people always, like, conflate or they're always, they're like, kids get radicalized in college when they're with these big ideas and blah. And it was like, really? It sounds like everybody in Midlife Crisis, based on that quote, is like, I can burn this whole fucking place to the ground. I am one idea away. Like, I don't, you know, it's just like, it seems these people almost seem more passionate about, from that quote in their midlife than most 18 year olds or 20 year olds are leaving college. That's been my, I mean, I was, I was drunk for all of college, but that is my experience of midlife. I am, you know, I do think a lot of people are, are more engaged and kind of really examining things. And she also said that, you know, if you feel this and you push it away, like, you might end up with a fucking mess on your hands. You might, you know, destroy your family for no reason and start dating whatever the 1976 version of an Instagram model was. But if you embraced it, she said, quote, you have the opportunity to emerge reborn, authentically unique with an enlarged capacity to love ourselves and embrace others. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. It's funny that that's, the previous quote you said from the people who were interviewed and that quote, they're both like self-care quotes and they're both about like setting boundaries, it seems like, and both about like, not only are you taking in what you've been doing, you know, working too much and doing whatever, but also it sounds like, hey, I gotta get these fucking losers away from me. I gotta get these people who are dragging me down, who are making me not feel great away from me. And that might include my employer. That might include my family. that might include whatever, but yeah, I guess it, I guess you do. I mean, I'm, I'm a living proof of that. I do find myself having a lot less patience for fucking idiots, you know, in my forties. Uh, and that includes the people I've surrounded myself with and call friends. Like, it's just about like, you are taking maybe a tally of every part of your life. It's about, uh, to go like, what am I not going to just waste time with anymore? you know? Yeah. Gabby, you can, you can check me on this if, if my facts aren't, aren't correct here, but I, I saw that, that Gail, she put the most dangerous part of the, of one of her passages, a period where the assumptions that got us to this point kind of stopped working. We have to decide what comes next. She put the most dangerous part, most dangerous passage between 37 and 43 and, which she called a treacherous footbridge. Oh, no. I'm on a treacherous footbridge right now? Yes, we are on a treacherous footbridge between youth and middle age, and I want to say between 37 and 43 might be the exact period that this podcast exists. before it might be our entire treacherous footbridge because we started this when i was 37 yeah and. Gabby's standing pretty on fucking terra firma on the other side of the bridge yeah and we're still on it we're still on this rickety ass bridge what does this mean explain it to me why am i why am i in danger You. Know, I think that the idea is kind of, I think, when you get to your mid-40s, this moment of crisis has passed. You've decided what you're going to do about it, even if it's nothing at all. You know, you've had these thoughts, you've examined your life. If you need to make a big change, you've done it already. If you've decided everything is fine, you're embracing the life that is fine. And if you decided I'm just going to stay unhappy forever, then you've also decided to stay unhappy forever. But whatever the choice is, you've made it by that point often. So you've run out of energy even to make choices by 44, is what you're saying. Great. I mean, people make choices forever, but I do think that, and I think especially because of the energy around turning 40, the kind of psycho mind game of going, oh God, I'm turning 40, or oh God, I've turned 40, that people who are going to switch things up or examine things like it. I do think it tends to reach a fever pitch around that age, like certainly for myself, like things have cooled down immensely over the past few years. Yeah, I think so. I think so. I think that's it's part of it's a combination of, yeah, of sorting through the decisions you've made, the things that have worked, the things that haven't, the things you want to change. And I, you know, at least for me, a little bit is that loss of energy of just like, you know, there's some things that you're just going to go, yeah, I don't worry about that anymore. That's not, that's not on the list of things I need to handle today or ever. Um, so yeah, I think, I think Gail really, uh, well, I don't think, I know that part of the reason that, that Gail, she, he was able to, uh, make the midlife crisis something that every American understood, uh, is because passages was an earth shattering bestseller within four weeks of publication and, And it was the most sold book in the United States within three months. It remained on the bestseller list for two years, longer than any other book published the same year. In that time, it sold half a million copies in hardcover and another three to four million in paperback. Roughly one out of every five American book readers read passages. Is anyone discussing if it worked? Because that's something interesting to think about. Just everybody read the same book. It's nuts. Everybody read the same book. And this was sort of the peak of what I will call midlife is good, actually, thinking. Because Gabby, you have a really interesting theory about why we culturally turned our back on this idea. Do you want to walk us through? what you think changed at the end of the 70s? Sure. So the Gelshi's book and kind of this kind of thinking was very much part of 70s, you know, self-help culture, which covered a lot of things that have actually become very popular again now. You know, it's everything from from Reiki to polyamory. And in the middle, we have midlife crises. Like I said, we're living in the 70s again, just for real, just without the power of the dollar. But so, you know, as we've all experienced in our 40s or more than 40 years, whenever there is kind of a changing of the cultural guard, it involves rejecting everything from the previous era and being like, that sucks. That was stupid. Why did we think that way? And, you know, obviously, at the end of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s, when you have, you know, a massive sweep by Reagan, kind of a mass adoption of, of the yuppie taking the place of the groovy 70s swinger of kind of this hip person in culture. So you reject all of the groovy 70s macrame values, and that includes being someone who's searching for meaning in midlife. A movie I brought up with you, I think, Chris, The Muzi 10 with Dudley Moore, I think, is an early 80s movie about how having a midlife crisis makes you a stupid asshole. Ed, you got to put this movie on the server, by the way. I will. Yeah. Maybe everyone is too young who is listening to this to know who Dudley Moore is. No. I've seen Arthur, but I've not seen.... Oh, 10's the one with Bo Derek. Bo Derek. And I think a lot of our ideas of kind of that we grew up with, millennials that grew up with of a midlife crisis, I honestly think come from 10 because it's about this loser guy. His wife's fine, but he decides he has to have sex with Bo Derek, you know? There were certainly a lot of Bo Derek posters, I think, at this time period and the following decade. And, you know, the ultimate conclusion this movie comes to is it's stupid to dedicate your life to having sex with Bo Derek. Go back to your wife, idiot. Dedicate your life to having sex with Bo Derek. It's not a long-term plan. There's no 401k. But. I think that just in that moment, we had this huge changing of the guard and suddenly this was a dumb, irresponsible, navel-gazing thing to do as many trends from the 70s were suddenly considered dumb, irresponsible, navel-gazing things to do once we moved over to the 80s. And so do you think that's where the trend of sort of like, oh, actually, the 40s means you hit 40 and that means you're dying now? Was that sort of where that kind of grew from? Yeah, and that is just my guess. I haven't done research into that, but I have, as someone from the 80s, from the 1900s, as my niece says, I have very vivid memories of when you would go to Spencer gifts and it would be full of those, you know, the over the hill candles shaped like a tombstone, the over the hill t-shirts that people would have like funeral themed 40th birthday parties. And I think that was sort of part of that. cultural move towards sort of small c conservatism like no like no this is the end it's not a new start it is the end shut up go home. Right yeah no i i tend to agree i mean i also i and i think that the 80s sort of uh you know i mean our culture has always been pretty obsessed with with youth and and beauty and and and freshness but i feel like the 80s really doubled and tripled down on that and so i think Those things kind of combining, really, when you hit 40 in the 80s, goddamn, they were ready to throw you in the hearse and get you out of there. No, there's too much money in throwing you in a nursing home and never seeing you again. That's true. The hearse is a one-time expense. They want to keep you paying a monthly fee in the 80s and through today. Well, all of these philosophical ideas about 40 are really interesting, but I want to end this episode on something that is a little bit more of a physical, guttural, animalistic fear, which is what happens to our bodies as we start to turn 40? And, you know, sort of refreshingly or positively, the medically honest answer would be nothing. There is no switch that flips at midnight the night that you turn 40 and decides that you are now going to start falling apart. Most of the processes that we think of as aging are gradual, and a lot of them start in your 20s or your 30s. You just don't notice them. One of them that I found noted in the National Institute of Health's News in Health newsletter is that our bodies begin losing muscle mass immediately. around age 30 at a rate of roughly 3% to 5% every 10 years. So good to have an excuse now, like a documented excuse for my situation. Thank you for that. At 40, we have already completed our first decade of what I guess we could call involuntary muscle disposal. It's just gone. It's not like it turns into anything useful or your body recycles it or turns it into energy. Our bodies are basically just like, hey, you only need muscles to, like, stand and do everything else. What if we just got rid of some of this? So that's good. Over time, the loss of muscle can contribute to a condition called sarcopenia, which can, quote, make it harder to stand up from a chair, walk. open a jar or carry groceries. Man i actually this is true story i had to get a pair of scissors and i don't think it's me and my absence of or evacuating muscle whatever you're saying is happening at this age i had to open like a motz fruit snacks like uh little i had to go get scissors i i don't know why i couldn't rip it i couldn't pull it open i don't know what was happening and i just had to go get scissors and i again nice to have these excuses i'm learning about now which is like do you need help with that? I'm like, of course I do. I'm 40. But, uh, uh, yeah, that was wild the other night. I thought I was having a, it was really, it was a concerning thing, but now I feel fine about it. Okay, good. Well, yeah, I mean, it could be just your, your muscles, uh, deleting themselves, uh, out of your body. So yeah, maybe Ed, you have sarcopenia. Gabby, have you had any, uh, concerning issues with muscle loss or you feel like you're still doing all. Right uh i if i may take a moment to do do real talk psa this is why you're supposed to do a weight-bearing exercise in your 40s i don't know if any of you had the moms with the little tiny hand weights in front of the tv but that was what that was what she was doing and that is actually what we should all be doing oh so you're. Just saying all day i should have small weights that are like can i just attach them to. Myself I mean, maybe you can do that. I mean, I remember my mom like in the 90s, she had like these little like like a two like a two pound barbell and she would do it while we were watching, you know, Seinfeld. And I now understand what that was about. It keeps the muscles from flying out of your body. It keeps the muscles. You have to make a concerted effort at this point in your life to keep the muscles in your body from going up to heaven and leaving you dead. With little angels inside. Your muscles are waiting for you in heaven or hell. Or hell. But I'm just saying that you're reunited with muscles. No one ever talks about that. I can't wait for the day. I'm going to be reunited with my muscles and every single egg that ever came out of me. They're all going to be up there waiting in the afterlife. Ancient world religions talked about a lot, but they never mentioned this one fact. Ed, guess what else is on the chopping block when we turn 40? I'm hoping the head of someone, because usually I think people are expecting to hear about serial killers in their 40s in this episode. No, no, it's something else that neither of us can really afford to spare, which is height. We start to lose height in our. We're losing height. We're losing height. Why can't we just stop? MedlinePlus says people typically lose almost half an inch every 10 years after age 40. And this is because. Why? This is because the gel-like discs between your vertebrae dry out and flatten. Loss of muscle and core strength can make your posture stoop. Even your feet begin to flatten. And over a lifetime, you may lose up to three inches. I can't afford to lose three inches. And... This is just not going to work for me. To top it all off, Medline also notes that, quote, the amount of body fat goes up steadily after age 30. Older people... Older people may have almost. I'm 10 years after that starts. Older people may have almost one third more fat compared to when they were younger. So from this point forward... Our bodies are drying out, collapsing, and getting wider at the same time. This is tough. Why even bother? Gabby, we have a concept on this show. Ed and I would like to encourage our listeners to try to stay in somewhat decent health. And the term that we've come up with is getting square, named after... Zac Efron getting into the shape of a physical square for the film Ironclaw. If you look at a picture of him, he's cube-like. So we want to get square. But all of this information is making it very hard to get square. I will say this information is making it easy to tell people, get square today, because trying to get square at our ages might not be in the cards. So if you're younger than 40, get after it. The best time to have gotten square was 20 years ago, but the second best time is today. There it is. Yeah, there it is. I just learned about that second part. To bring this all the way back around to something that was mentioned at the beginning, maybe one of the scariest things about hitting our 40s and reaching into the middle of our 40s is the idea of the aging cliff. which for those of you who didn't watch a lot of Looney Tunes growing up, a cliff is something you want to stay very far away from. You don't want to go anywhere near it. You will fall off and find yourself spitting your feet in midair very quickly before plummeting to a terrible doom. Gabby, what is the aging cliff and is there anything we can do to avoid being shoved off of it? So the aging cliff is something scientists have begun talking about pretty recently. They have theorize that instead of just a gradual kind of decay of our bodies we have two periods of they call it rapid change but it's rapid decay um that occur at 44 and 60 so oh. My god right when you're off the rickety bridge you're hit in the face with a new surprise. So that's the thing you cross the bridge but then your knees are fucked up from having walked across the bridge Oh, my God. And, you know, I'm very positive on the issue of midlife, but you cannot positive think your way out of the aging cliff. All you can do is, you know, try to take as good care of yourself and what you have now. Try to get as square as possible with what you have left. Yes. And I saw in my research that... I thought you were going to. Say, I saw on camera you drink three Coors Lights during this. Well, no, this is related to... This is an intervention. Because our ability to process the two substances that I think many middle-aged people rely on to start and end each day, alcohol and caffeine, it becomes harder to process those substances once you fall off of the aging cliff. Oh, so you're saying I'm doing it right. Get it all in now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get it all in now because in another three years... We've got bad news for this fucking show. We're not going to be able to process alcohol or caffeine. and things are really going to. No more drink check. No more episodes written. Could it be Waterloo's or La Croix or something? It had to be beer and coffee. Of course it did. But we're gallbladder boys, so we actually live our lives a little better anyway because we can't... do the fat. We can't really process the fat. That's true. It doesn't mean we can't get bigger. I mean, this is the body savory foods, mainly Parmesan goldfish made, but it's like, we also are forced to eat a little better because we can't like have cheeseburgers and stuff. I will say now, Gabby, you can check me on this because you've done far more research on the topic than I have, but I did see that there was a bit of an asterisk that Some of these aging cliff changes may be caused by the way people live in their 40s, that maybe people are more stressed, they're exercising less, sleeping worse, drinking more. So it's possible that our bodies aren't suddenly betraying us. They're just responding to 20 years of us treating them like shit is maybe... a little bit of what's happening? I think it's possible. There was an article, sort of a first-person journalism article about the aging cliff a while ago in which the writer who was 44 was like, I get three hours of sleep a night. I vape all day. I have like 10 ghost energy drinks and I feel horrible. Like it must be the aging cliff. And I do think sometimes that is what is happening, that maybe you are living a lifestyle that is good for no one at any age and are just feeling it more acutely now. And you might go, oh, that's the aging clip. You know, I was... Chris, before you got here, I was... telling uh ed i'd i'd fucked up my knee recently and like i could say that's the agent cliff or it could be that i was like i've been running in fucked up sneakers for like 20 years because i didn't care because i never thought there'd be any consequences you know yep. My mom is a big like like uh like look after your feet and your teeth. I didn't do any of that. Yeah no just arches to the ground teeth hanging out of my head Like, yeah. I mean, I was told this for years, but ignored it. Yeah, some of it's probably just your chickens coming home. Like, I did ballet as a teenager and ran as an adult. I can barely walk now, and that's my own fault. No, yeah, that's a rough combo. I never, I sort of fucked up my tailbone sledding as a kid, I think. There were one or two times I went off like a little snow ramp and really landed hard on my tailbone, and I think I still have a couple of, I think once I might have, I don't want to say broke my tailbone because I probably didn't, but severely bruised it maybe. And I've got some issues from that. And my shoulder, when I was a kid, I realized my shoulder was double jointed and I could reach the whole way around my head. And then I could let it pop back into the socket. And I had a lot of adults and teachers tell me to stop doing that because it would be bad for my shoulder later in life. And sure enough, it kind of hurts now. Because I'm sure I pulled a ligament or, you know, who knows what, but. other than that, I feel like I am very taking walking my 10,000 steps every day very seriously. You've always been big into that. I mean, I feel like a lot of us would be probably better off if we did what you did. But yeah, not all of us can just spend time with our own thoughts the way you can. Oh, I never. I put on music, anything to not be with my own thoughts, podcasts, music. Well, I guess sometimes I'm kind of working on something in my head. But Yeah, walking, it is a health tip for anyone listening to this show. If you could just walk 10,000 steps a day, it's not going to delay or fix every health problem you have. But I do think there's really something to be said for, like, just walk every day. I have to edit this show. I have to be chained to this chair 10 hours a day. Sorry. We got to get you a treadmill. Treadmill desk. Treadmill desk. I'm not going to do that. It's going to be covered in my clothes within two weeks. Treadmill desk 2027. That's the next goal for scared all the time is getting Ed taking those steps. All right. Well, Gabby, this has been an incredible journey. Thank you so much for joining us on this very special birthday episode of Chris is going to die someday. Scared all the time. And anybody listening to this, please go pick up The Midlife Plot Twist, How to Reboot Your Life Without Burning It Down, even if you really, really want to. Gabby just scratched the surface of the wisdom and interesting history of the midlife crisis, what can be done, how to cope with it. Gabby, is there anything else before we reach the fear tier? is there anything else that you want to plug, tell people where to follow you, find you, et cetera? I just really wanted to say for anyone who's disappointed we didn't talk about midlife murders, John List. John List is a great midlife murderer. That's a great midlife crisis murder. Thank you. We'll have to have you on for the bonus episode about John List because I also was waiting for the midlife murderers. So here's the thing. I did some research on midlife murderers, and the best one I found is a guy who annihilated his family three days before his 40th birthday. But I felt like it was probably a better story for our someday in the future upcoming episode on family annihilations. But yes. But yes, there is also not a ton of evidence that there are, you know, like a family annihilation really has nothing to do as far as we know with an age. It's more of a control thing and an abusive thing. His may or may not have been triggered by the fact that he was turning 40 and that may have contributed to But it wasn't really enough that I felt it was worthy of inclusion here. But Gabby, who's this other figure? Oh, John List. Now I'm like, what? One of my favorite murderers. No, but I should preface this by saying, yes, you know, family annihilation is terrible, abusive. Don't don't condone them. But yeah. John List is a fascinating character. He was a family annihilator who lived in New Jersey in the 70s, who was not 40. He was in his 40s. But someone who, and I think this is kind of maybe the real extreme of having a midlife crisis and handling it poorly, killed his entire family, took off. They didn't find him for like 30 years until he was on America's Most Wanted. He just started a new life with new people. Whoa. That's fascinating. That's the dream, really, in many ways. Well, it's really interesting because the other guy that I researched, Robert William Fisher, they never found him, but they do suspect that he did the same thing, that he killed his whole family and possibly ran off. It's either that or his body is somewhere out in the wilderness and they haven't been able to find it because they did find his car in an area where he used to camp. Um, so it's possible that he either killed himself or died out in the wilderness, but they still consider it, uh, an open case and believe that he could have started a life somewhere else just as somebody else, which feels a lot harder to do. I think he did that in 2001. So it feels a lot harder in 2001 than in the seventies, but still possible. I think it was still possible. I think free page, free Patriot act. Nobody's looking at anybody. That was the golden age of changing your identity. You can't do that now. That's true. That also reminds me of, this is for a completely different episode, but did you guys ever read anything about that woman who disappeared the night before 9-11? Yes. Oh, yeah. I have heard about that. 9-11 happened the next day. Bigger news story. I'm sure buried this. Chris and Ed have since done this story as a new Fear Unlocked episode. Head over to Patreon to hear it now or wait a year for it to show up on Flashback Friday. Yes no one knows yeah i forget what her name was uh but i i think it might have for some stupid reason i might have stumbled across it researching this somehow but yeah a woman who seems like she was possibly unhappy in her life vanished the day before 9-11 is that right yeah uh it's usually her. Name's like sneha phillips i'm probably pronouncing her name wrong s-n-e-h-a but she is someone who i think the last video evidence of her existence is late at night on 9 10 or early in the morning on 9 11 and she was just never seen again her family became very insistent that she had died a hero's death pulling people out of the twin towers there's not a lot of evidence that that's what she was in new york she was she was downtown in new york she was living in the area so it's not like Not like she lived in Ohio. And they were like, she had hero's death. But there's not any proof that she was involved in 9-11 either. And there's a lot of. Maybe people thought she was. And that's why she's like, I got to get out of here before I'm blamed for this. I don't know. I just know I'm going to be blamed for this. Yeah. I was on a message board. I forgot to lock the doors before I left the Twin Towers last night. I was the last one out. I was supposed to lock the doors. If only. Anyway, yeah, lots of weird stories. That has nothing to do with turning 40 or anything of the sort, but a weird story that maybe we'll get to someday. But anyway, yes, stay tuned for the hilarious episode on family annihilations that we'll do probably next year. Oh, yeah, sorry, Gabby, where can people find you online? Oh, I have a sub stack. You can just. I didn't do nine 11.com. 11.substack.com. The doors were locked. Sub stack. Yeah, no, we'll put a link in the show notes. Thank you so much, Gabby, for joining us before we get out of here. We are going to place turning 40 on our fear tier, which goes from a scale of zero, which is not scary at all to 10, which is the scariest thing you could possibly imagine. Uh, Gabby, as the guest, we will start with you. Where will you place turning 40 on your personal fear tier? Oh, like two. Good. Good. That's what we like to hear. I want to keep it positive around here. I'm going to put it at a three. Uh, Ed, what about you? I'll do a three as well, just cause it's, I did it and I'm still here, uh, much to my, though I can't get into that, but I, I'm still here and, uh, it's turns out fine. Turns out fine. All the things that seem pretty terrible in my 40s seem out of my control. Yeah, for sure. Well, we'll check in with all of us when we fall a little further over the aging cliff and see how things are as we start to disintegrate. Just three tombstones. Yeah, yeah. It's just three dusty old graves on Zoom trying to record a podcast together. Well, this was fucking awesome. Gabby, thank you so much for coming on. Everybody go buy the book. It's in stores or online now. But until next time, I'm Chris Colari. And I think I just got hired to do the audiobook version of Gabby's book. Yes. So I'm Ed, known for his audio version of her book. And until next time, the show is Scared All the Time. We will see you guys soon. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Scared All the Time is co-produced by Chris Killary and Ed Ficola. Written by Chris Killary. Edited by Ed Ficola. Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Feifel. Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew. And Mr. Disclaimer is. And just a reminder, you can now support the podcast on Patreon and get all kinds of cool shit in return. Depending on the tier you choose, we'll be offering everything from ad-free episodes, producer credits, exclusive access, and exclusive merch. So go sign up for a Patreon at scaredallthetimepodcast.com. Don't worry, all scaredy cats welcome. No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions. Good night. We are in this together. Together. Together.