The New Normal and Well-Adjusted

As I’ve said before, what you see these days is rarely what you get.

Take Mel Gibson, 59 and Rosalind Ross, 24.

To most, they probably look like father and daughter out for lunch.

To me, it’s gotta be his wife or lover.

How do I know this?

For one thing, I’m used to seeing vast age differences in relationships, so there’s that.

But it’s also his presence: confidence, worldliness, wealth.

He’s also handsome, and obviously wears whatever the hell he wants in the middle of the day on a Tuesday afternoon or whatever.

If he were random tool in golfing attire and by all appearances, scoliosis, I might be of a different opinion.

Some things just tell a story all by themselves.

On a related note, I’m thrilled to report that you front desk guys at the better hotels are finally getting the hang of it.

The last thing a man wants to hear when bringing his girlfriend to a Ritz-Carlton for a weekend getaway is “would you and your daughter like 2 Queens?”

As for Mr. Gibson the man, no comment.

Are Scalpels, Silicone and Sex Parties a Necessity for “Good Marriage?”

Louise Van Der Velde, 44, actively encourages her relationship therapy clients – mostly in their 40’s and 50’s – to turn to the scalpel and silicone to keep their husbands from cheating.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2814399/Women-forty-need-knife-stop-men-cheating-Expert-claims-surgery-way-stop-wandering-eyes.html

Ms. Van Der Velde also hosts some of London’s most exclusive sex parties, which she claims also save marriages…as if the silicone wasn’t enough.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3202497/Can-sex-parties-REALLY-save-marriages-Woman-arranges-raunchy-shindigs-frequented-huge-celebrity-names-says-deceit-wanting-sexually.html

As if this wasn’t enough, here’s a beat down on Courtney Cox for undergoing cosmetic enhancements that ms. Van Der Velde says is necessary for older women to maintain their appeal.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3206106/Courteney-Cox-51-unrecognizable-puffy-face-LA-event-making-appear-work-done.html

Apparently, once women enter their 40’s, they have to begin an aggressive plastic surgery regimen, workout 3 hours a day, and then attend sex parties in the evenings [with their husbands] if they want to keep their marriages in tact…

~~~

Comments on the first link:

As an older man who runs in circles where 40-year-old women look 25 [for reasons that have little to do with genetics and everything to do with money], I can assure you that all of them know the stakes for non-compliance. If they aren’t exemplary, they’re traded.

Why is this?

Answer: CONDITIONING.

Wherever they go, whatever they do, they see other successful men in th company of beautiful young women. It’s often referred to as “living life to the fullest,” to which they feel entitled.

For older women who use the same phraseology on dating profiles, it means I expect to be taken to Monaco on your dime.

Most of them are smoking hot for a reason. the rest are deluded and deleted.

Not long ago I attended a cocktail party/fundraiser hosted by a wealthy couple I don’t know.

When I was introduced to the man’s wife, i assumed she was 20 years younger than she was. Her skin was flawless, her body taut and perfectly proportioned and her teeth the stuff of cosmetic dental ads on TV.

How could a 48-year-old woman possibly look like this?

Money and the complete absence of stress.

In other words, she set herself up for a certain lifestyle in exchange for maintaining a specific physical aesthetic.

A small price to pay, indeed.

One look at her lifestyle, including framed photos of she and her husband at their Aspen “compound” was all most people need to see.

Comments on the second link:

People get bored, even with older women who manage to look half their age, and sometimes, especially.

The reason for this is that women who are willing to do pretty anything for money are also perceived to be morally and ethically malleable.

If lifestyle is the sole focus of one’s existence, then sex is just another lateral move in an otherwise relative universe.

Put another way, if men expect women to be beautiful at their expense, they also expect them to be sexual at their expense.

Thus, the sex parties attended by attractive and very affluent couples who deserve to “live life to its fullest.”

Why in Hell would anyone want to have sex with the same woman all the time? It’s ridiculous, right?

So now they have sex with ten times that number and it improves their marriage – marriage [again] being relative.

The women are willing to do what’s necessary, while the men do what they feel entitled to with women who are little more than objects, anyway.

No wonder they order them around like slaves.

When women have the money, they order young men around like slaves. Money doesn’t care. It’s an equal opportunity destroyer in this context.

Comments on the third link:

Courtney Cox has been through hell and back.

This aside, celebrities have it the toughest because people are always comparing them today with photographs taken 30 years ago and then wondering what happened?

Age happened.

I know how difficult this is to grasp, but as we age, celebrities age as well.

Courtney Cox in a vacuum looks great.

But none of us look great next to our college graduation pics.

Sorry.

2 Exercises and 1 Diet that CAUSE AGING!

According to findings cited in the following article – and backed up by lots of clinical research – the following exercises and dietary practice are guaranteed age-enhancers.

http://www.maxworkouts.com/lp/3-worst-exercises-that-cause-aging-p1/?e=1

1] Steady State Cardio

Cardio is great for heart health, but hardly the answer to weight-loss and fat-loss. As the article points out, “doing long frequent cardio sessions will break down your muscles and increase the production of free radicals. These free radicals damage the cells in your body and accelerate aging.”

2] Low-Fat Diets

“Science has proven that fat is not the cause of weight gain or heart disease. In fact, since the introduction of the fat-free diet, the world has gotten more fat and sick than it has ever been before.”

If you’re following a low-fat diet, you’re depriving your body of the nutrients it needs to slow aging and keep your youth.

Monounsaturated fats and polyunsaturated fats are known as the “good fats” because they are good for your heart, your cholesterol, and your overall health.

Monounsaturated fat	Polyunsaturated fat
Olive oil Canola oil Sunflower oil Peanut oil Sesame oil Avocados Olives Nuts (almonds, peanuts, macadamia nuts, hazelnuts, pecans, cashews) Peanut butter	Soybean oil Corn oil Safflower oil Walnuts Sunflower, sesame, and pumpkin seeds Flaxseed Fatty fish (salmon, tuna, mackerel, herring, trout, sardines) Soymilk Tofu

3] Yoga

Yoga improves inner consciousness, mind-body connection and spiritual health or whatever. But it’s not an effective form of exercise as it “lacks the necessary components to stimulate your body to build lean muscle, burn fat and most importantly… trigger your youth-enhancing hormones to help slow aging. Yoga can improve your flexibility and calm your mind, but it will NOT stimulate your “youth” hormones, according to findings.

Personally, I like yoga pants and the practices’ emphasis on long lean limbs and tight round butts.

To many, this is plenty enough.

But if youth is what you’re after, I have some alternative recommendations that have worked extremely well for me:

1] Circuit Training Workouts using free-weights and body weight.

I know that when I start my 1 hour workout, I’m in for a ball buster. I get my head focused, take a deep breath and go in. I rarely sit down, opting instead to “walk it off” between sets, which are separated by more than 30 seconds, occasionally 45 if I’m really winded. We move from cables to free weights to body weight exercises in rapid succession to keep my heart rate up and my body charged. While this is NOT the best way to put on mass and maximum strength, it is the very best way to burn calories, shed body fat and keep my heart strong. For strength and mass, we do 2 days a week of mass and strength training, focusing 1 day on upper body and the 2nd, lower. At this age, that’s a lot, as it takes several days to recover from each of them.

2. Cardio: High Intensity Interval Training [HIIT]

On the days in between I do High Intensity Interval Training [HIIT], which involves continually switching between low and high intensity ‘intervals’ between 30 and 60 seconds in length. We usually start with rope work for 30 second intervals then super set it with box jumps. Then we’ll do treadmill sprints followed by ladder work. This goes on for an hour where the focus is on driving my heart rate to 90% of maximum, and then dropping it back down to baseline as quickly as possible. The idea is strengthen cardiovascular strength and endurance to a point where the body is capable of dropping heart rate from, say, 155 BPM to 118BPM in under a minute.

Comments

Performing the workouts above also condition the body to handle maximum loads on strength training days, when lots of rest is required between sets.

However, if your only interest is in either just building mass – or running marathons – you can forget about what I just said.

Why Testimonials and/or Memoirs are Inherently Hostile.

I get it.

Feelings are hurt.

People feel exposed, violated.

But memoirs are what they are…inherently hostile.

I’m referring to my latest book Urban Dystrophy [the book], now selling on Amazon.

In it I make the case that personal histories are all relative.

We live and love in our own shoes, including family members living under the same roof.

All of us are composite sketches, fragments of both nature and nurture, colliding in one gene pool.

Some family relationships are seamless, others a series of backfires over and over again.

How each of us turns out is always a crap shoot.

In Urban Dystrophy you’ll find a Preface that goes into some detail about my relationship with my late father.

Apparently, that one small section of the book is the very heart of bedlam, sacrosanct in the minds of some.

Once you read it you can’t help but notice that my father made a monumental impression on my life, both good and bad.

But in the minds of some, I should have stuck to the good and tossed the rest of it in the nearest trash bin where history is buried forever.

“Why air dirty laundry?”

“Why violate anyone else’s subjectivity?”

I certainly didn’t set out to hurt and/or exploit anyone involved for the sake of publicity, fame or money.

That’s not who I am.

Calling things as I see them, however, is.

I can’t please everyone, nor would I try.

But I do have to live with my decisions, which is not easy for anyone who scripts memoirs involving people other than themselves.

Here’s an interesting article on the subject:

http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/how-to-write-about-family-in-a-memoir

Sue William Silverman offers this advice: “I never allowed concerns to stand in the way of writing. I’ve always felt that as a writer of memoir, I own my truth and I am free to write about it.”

We can’t know how family members will react to the exposure of painful secrets or unspoken truths, but most memoirists would agree that you can’t predict what will happen, who will feel good or bad about the revelations in your work, and why. I thought one of my memoirs served as a sort of apology to someone, and that person is one of the people who couldn’t forgive me for writing it. I was terrified about how my mother would respond, and she’s been one of my greatest supporters. We can’t know, or control, what happens. The key, then, is to write. Just write, and prepare for potential responses, good or bad.

Well said.

No Road-Map for the Middle Aged Outlier

When you’re 20, everyone has an answer.

When you’re 3 times that, no one has the vaguest idea.

~~~

Generally speaking, life is like a TV show.

You start out with a murder, followed by an investigation, followed by a conclusion, where the bad guy is caught and justice is served.

For our purposes here, let’s focus our attention on the investigation, where we try and figure out which direction to turn in the absence of solid leads.

If you’re in that 55-64 demographic, you know exactly what I mean.

It’s a weird place [think Devil’s Crossroads] where the pavement hits the dirt and you’re on your own.

Every decision feels like a skate over thin ice because everything matters 10 times more than it did when youth was like a high-density shock absorber.

EXAMPLES

1] You can eat this, but probably not that.

2] You can exercise, but not so hard that you stroke out.

3] You may need a mini-aspirin every day for life insurance, but it may also give you bleeding ulcers.

4] You should probably take mountains of vitamins, but nobody has any idea whether or not it’s necessary with a disciplined diet.

But what constitutes a ‘disciplined diet’ when your body is constantly under assault from everything that came before?

~~~

When I have a physical, the doctor tells me I’m fine.

What he doesn’t tell me is that I am fine for my age.

He may intimate that my blood work looks like that of someone half my age, but this doesn’t give me license to act like it.

TRANSLATION: “Keep doing what you’re doing, and be happy you’re not facing hip and shoulder replacements, herniated discs or arthritis like most people your age…”

That’s a tough pill to swallow, but everything’s relative.

Almost everything I do I not supposed to be doing, but because it hasn’t killed me, I keep doing it.

With this in mind, here are 3 life tenets I live by.

They’ve helped guide me through thick and thin and I’m still here to tell the tale:

1] “To Thine Own Self Be True…”

Yea, Shakespeare got it right.

So did Aristotle…“Criticism is something you can easily avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing, being nothing.”

The first thing I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older is that burying things you feel strongly about is toxic.

You have to believe in yourself and be willing to place yourself in the line of fire for your convictions.

If no one ever did this, there would be little great art, music or literature, to name just three.

Life is not a popularity contest. It’s about standing for something, and not abandoning it when the blow-back begins.

This is what tests the meddle of a person’s life.

It elicits respect from all people who know that taking strong positions on anything is tough, particularly as a species that seeks safety and security above all else.

Tough decisions are the bane of every winner.

2] Athletics are not just for the young.

You think you’re too old to throw a Frisbee, swim 1000 yards in a pool, or perform a box jump?

If so, you probably are.

For everyone else, it’s open season.

Just because you’re no longer 20 doesn’t mean you can’t workout, and, in many cases, dust people half your age.

Life does not come with a manual that tell us what we can and can’t do at certain stages of life.

We do.

Going back to #1, if you don’t have the fire in your belly to take a stand for yourself, life will stand on top of you.

Take what your body will give you, and when it won’t give another inch, find another approach to the same challenge.

There are always work-a rounds.

If one joint is inflamed, find another way to perform an exercise that doesn’t hurt so that it can recover.

This is all academic. But so many older guys I know throw up the white flag.

The moment they do this, life takes twice its toll over the same course of time.

That’s also academic.

You get back what you put in.

3] Be good to the people close to you.

The people who stand by you are the ones you owe your life to.

They deserve your support and your love.

Going back to what I said about human beings seeking safety and security, just know that the entire world can be against you and those closest are enough to withstand the fire.

All we really need in life are people we can count on, who love us, and who have our backs when things get really tough.

Nurture those relationships and you’ll never lose a dime to nature even if it kills you.

~~~

I’ll leave you with this:

http://tinybuddha.com/blog/how-to-let-go-of-the-need-for-approval-to-start-thriving/

14 Foods to Kick to the Curb [along with the tire around your waist]

Occasionally I run across a health-related article that’s both accurate and easy-to-read.

The following is from Men’s Fitness and covers the generalities without killing you with fine print.

The only problem is that you’ll have to sit through a ton of ads every 2 minutes to complete it, so I’ll save you the aggravation:

http://www.mensfitness.com/nutrition/what-to-eat/14-foods-to-kick-out-of-the-kitchen-forever

~~~

Most Boomers I know stopped eating most of the following foods because they are hypochondriacs like me, and therefore, spend an inordinate amount of time balancing health with destiny.

They read, they get annual physicals, and go to the gym regularly like other normal middle-aged people who live in large urban settings.

No wonder urbanites who occasionally visit a WalMart for a last minute gift for a 6-year-old post “people” pictures to Pinterest of creatures who could well be descendants of another species.

Okay, for the list:

1] White or “multi-grain” bread

When I was a kid growing up in New Orleans, french bread was a staple.

We’d toast it with butter and call it a meal.

Of course, were were kids and pretty much immune to anything we ate, unless the only thing we ate was crap, in which case we were also screwed.

These days, life is not as forgiving.

Everything we consume comes with ten times the impact.

For example, white bread contains zero while grains for cardiovascular protection, and spike blood sugar levels. [see white rice].

Leave it on the shelf or get a leather bound insulin container with your initials embossed on it.

2] Ready-to-eat breakfast cereal

“Healthy” is a term manufacturers use to sell products.

Understand that 4 grams of sugar on a label equates to 1 teaspoon of added sugar in reality.

It’s up to you to read.

3] Fat free pretsels

Pretzels are full of basically nothing, so consuming an entire bag in a single sitting is not uncommon.

Try 49 pistachios, instead.

They’re packed with nutrients, so eating 49 of them equates to half the bag of pretzels.

Of course, if you can limit yourself to a few pretzels, no harm no foul.

But good luck with that.

4] White rice

Stripped of nutrients, fiber and antioxidants, white rice does nothing but spike blood sugar and insulin, leading to fat storage.

There is no upside for white rice unless you’re about to perform wind sprints on an empty stomach.

5] Generic peanut butter

If it’s not absolutely, positively natural, there are usually trans fats in peanut butter.

Even if the label says ‘zero trans fats,’ if it’s fully hydrogenated, there can still be 0.5 grams of trans fats.

Try the natural alternative.

It’s more expensive, but far less expensive in long-term medical bills.

6] Trail mix

Who doesn’t grab a bag of trail mix before hitting the road or airways?

It looks like the healthiest snack on the planet.

It isn’t, particularly if it has chunks of chocolate and dried fruit, which are sky-high in sugar.

A better alternative is to make it yourself, and store it for your next outing.

7] Canned corn

What the hell is canned corn?

I remember eating it as a kid, but like I said, “as a kid.”

No sane adult eats canned corn because they know it has enough starch to choke a pig.

Try green beans if you have to eat something out of a can.

8] Plain pasta sauce in a jar

The great thing about canned pasta sauce is that it usually has lots of prostate-healthy lycopene.

But it also has enough salt to drive your blood pressure through the roof.

Marinara sauce is a better choice.

9] White pasta

Like anything else you est that’s white, it’s stripped of everything, including fiber and bran.

Try whole-wheat pasta, quinoa, black or brown rice and whole grain couscous.

10] Canned soup

Think 800 grams of sodium and this should put an end to the discussion.

Try a low-sodium alternative.

11] Traditional beef jerky

Pretty much any food product you buy in a convenience store is guaranteed to kill you prematurely.

It’s cheap, over-processed and bereft of any nutritional value.

Your best bet is to fork over the money and buy healthy beef jerky at 10 times the price, but 1000 times the nutritional benefits.

12] Cereal bars

A 4-oz cereal bar can contain up to 30g of sugar.

Try hearty bars with ingredients you can clearly see.

13] Powdered coffee creamer

If you use coffee creamer, I’m sorry.

What you’re putting into your body is empty calories, fat, sugar, and salt.

This is idiotic.

Just drink it black until you can locate some actual milk.

14] Movie theater-style popcorn

It’s full of trans fats and loaded with butter.

Try air-popped popcorn and enjoy a snack filled with a healthy dose of fiber.

~~~

Look, eating healthy is not that difficult, but it can be a pain in the ass for those of you not used to reading – or caring about – labels.

Just remember, life doesn’t care about you.

You have to care about you for life will pay you back.

Self-Acceptance the Antidote for Existential Annihilation.

Striped_bodysuit_for_Aladdin_Sane_tour_1973_

You can’t please everyone.

THE GOOD NEWS: Accept yourself for who you are and it won’t matter.

~~~

Children seek the approval of their parents, while adolescents seek the approval off their peers.

Down the road we all seek the approval of our employers and/or clients if we want to keep our jobs.

But what happens to adults who rely solely on parental approval?

Why do we care?

Because on a certain level, all of us want to feel secure, both physically and emotionally.

But external affirmation is a slippery slope, keeping us in a state of emotional vulnerability.

We never grow up.

We’re frozen in time and space where nothing changes.

Eventually, we morph into facsimiles of our parents. We become clones, if you will.

The person inside never climbs out from the shadows, and for all intents and purposes, they die.

Just another seamless line of wallpaper on an endless wall.

The greatest achievers of our time set out on missions to accomplish certain objectives that were important to them, not to anyone else.

This is particularly true of writers, musicians, actors, entertainers of all kinds, where parents looked upon their life choices with disdain.

The classic case is the parent who wants their kid to carry the torch for the family business, but he or she decides instead to pursue science, research…or the culinary arts?

If that child – and all others – were trapped in the cycle of “parental approval” humanity world would be bled white of its individuality.

Does anyone think that great art comes from a parents pat on the back?

Hardly.

That only happens after they’re successful, then they’re praised in exchange for a house in a better neighborhood.

All I can say for men my age who didn’t have the courage to be themselves is I’m sorry.

I’m sorry you’re depressed that life wasn’t the rose garden you imagined.

I’m sorry you have nothing to say for yourself other than you were an obedient son, an obedient adult.

Now you know why no one respects you, including you.

The true blessing of children is their individuality, which should be embraced above all else.

Of course, if they start killing the neighborhood cats, I might suggest boundaries that have nothing whatsoever to do with their interests.

For everyone else, gay or straight, painter or attorney, your life is yours to live as you see fit.

In the end, we’ll all be better off for it.

Godspeed.

Who I Was Supposed to Be.

There’s this man I know who is a few years older than myself, though our difference in age continues to shrink the older he gets, according to him.

We’re shared an acquaintance for the better part of 30 years, and nothing about him has changed – other than the fact that he has, in fact, aged.

He’s always flawlessly coiffed, handsome, charming, narcissistic, and bordering on what many clinicians under duress would describe as functional psychopath.

I assume he has the capacity to feel empathy, and I assume, remorse, but it’s controlled like everything else about him.

He has fathered many children by almost as many wives, who maintain friendships with him if only because they don’t know exactly what else to make of someone who appears to skim the surface of life without getting his shoes scuffed.

This is what cold-blooded and calculating looks like in men who use veneer as a weapon of mass destruction.

This is also the man my father wanted me to be because he was exactly like him.

~~~

Many of us grew up in the shadows of our WW2 fathers, men who held the horrors of the world in check.

They traded in their uniforms for suits of armor that kept them in lock-step with a rigid mentality necessary to maintain sanity in the midst of wholesale bloodshed.

Who were they…really?

Many of us have no idea. We just see the symbols, hear the stories, imagine the people they were as children.

Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like if I just accepted everything I was told.

Some of us are just doomed to failure, I guess.

Radical Acceptance a Problem for Boomers [Like Me]

One of the four options you have for any problem is Radical Acceptance (Linehan, 1993). Radical acceptance is about accepting of life on life’s terms and not resisting what you cannot or choose not to change. Radical Acceptance is about saying yes to life, just as it is.

~~~

I have a personal trainer who pushes me hard. Really hard. Three days a week we train for an hour, followed by 30 minutes of “homework” [support exercises] I do on my own. If I were 25 this would be a slam-dunk. Add 3 decades to that and not so much.

The problem for me is that I still resist where I am.

Let me restate that: I resent where I am, and, therefore, I resist it.

Case in point: On Friday we were doing vertical box jumps. I say “we” because I like to grab a bunch of kids half my age to do things like this with me to gauge my abilities against people who should be able top smoke me, but often don’t. It kind of my way of figuring out where I am in the scheme of things, athletically. Anyway, I had just completed a 36” jump when they decided to raise the bard 4 inches. Okay, I thought to myself, no big deal. It’s only 4 inches. I can nail this.

Side note: Truly athletic Boomers in the range of 60 are virtually non-existent. The ones who are, “juice” [i.e., take steroids], which makes up for some of the lost time, but never enough of it. But I don’t “juice,” which means I’m working with what I was born with and carved out over time.

So, back to the box jumps.

Two 20-something athletes before me barely made the jumps, and feeling immortal [I assume], I decided it was time to set the record straight on misconceptions about older men.

I approached the box knowing that I had done several sets before it, without incident, in spite of the soreness in my hamstrings from the previous Wednesday’s leg workout. My knees weren’t tucking the way they should have, but screw it, I was going in.

I raised my hands above my head as I readied myself to force them down to my sides, propelling me upward, when I stopped.

Something wasn’t quite right. I had to get my head in this if I was going to clear the edge of the monolith in front of me.

So I took a few seconds to compose myself, breathe, and visualize the jump.

This time, I approached the box with more determination and focus, as an audience stood around to watch this eccentric older man battle reality with a vengeance.

Again, I approached the box, raised my hands, took a deep breath…and jumped.

On the way up I could feel my left hamstring tighten slightly and all hell broke loose. My right leg cleared the edge perfectly, but my left foot hit the side of the box, forcing my shin into the hard foam cover a block of wood, and forcing me forward. The entire box collapsed with me along with it. I rolled twice and then stood up like a champ with a growing hematoma [a solid swelling of clotted blood within the tissues] on my left leg the size of a grapefruit.

I received applause for the effort and follow-through, but came away with the realization that not only was I not 25, but that I was in over my head.

While I could still outperform most guys my age by a wide margin, the kids were blowing me away.

“Not in everything!” I told myself, because it was true.

But what I failed to consider was the fact that, with the proper training, many of them would leave me in the dust. I was simply better trained no matter what the age difference happened to be.

This is textbook denial.

While I do accept the fact that I am older, and thus, less able to accomplish the feats of athleticism I could decades ago, I still try, thinking that I will somehow conquer the odds and land on my feet, instead of the floor.

Some will argue that without the belief in oneself, nothing would ever be accomplished. But there is a difference between running a Fortune 500 company and doing a 40” box jump.

Yea, I like the irony in that, too.

~~~

Here is reality for me in a few bullet points. If I don’t practice radical acceptance on a daily basis, I’ll end up in a mental institution.

Here we go:

1] Age.

Unless you’ve been here, walking a planet for damn near 60 years is an existential nightmare.

You have to get past the fact that time is not a figment of your imagination, so no matter how much you deny it, it keeps marching with or without you.

2] Skin, teeth, hair and nails.

Suffice to say, just looking at a high school photograph of yourself next to a recent photo-op at a gala is enough to trigger a 911 call.

Get a grip. It happens to all of us, and no one likes it.

3] Energy, recovery and fitness.

You’re no longer a kid no matter how much testosterone pellets you have imbedded in your butt.

This means that your physical condition is subject to the passage of time – no matter what the quacks who prescribe the aforementioned testosterone tell you.

4] Your children are younger than you are.

This one is particularly difficult for many because, on a certain level, they feel like children themselves.

But radical acceptance teaches us that no matter how strong one’s delusions happen to be, reality doesn’t give a damn about fantasy – and in this context – neither do your kids.

5] Sex.

You may have noticed that your sex life is – let’s just say – different than it used to be.

There are workarounds, of course.

ED meds will soon be stacked next to aspirin bottles at CVS, and medical science has a quick fix for everything else.

But the intense desire to copulate like a wild animal is now a more subtle compulsion that encourages us to think before we act.

This is an adaptation that helps preserve wealth in the middle years when faltering egos are most susceptible to the exploits of gold diggers.

~~~

If you need more, fill them in for yourself.

I’m not that masochistic.

Harmful Drinking Patterns are Common in Affluent Older Adults

According to the online journal BMJ Open, “active, affluent people over age 50 in the U.K. appear to be at greater risk for harmful drinking behaviors than their less successful peers…”

http://psychcentral.com/news/2015/07/27/harmful-drinking-patterns-common-in-affluent-older-people/87360.html

The full extract here:

http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/7/e007684.full?sid=989311e3-556b-4eb3-9c81-e705b3169fe6

“…a 10-year study of alcohol use transitions among men aged between 50 and 65 in the USA reported that the different trajectories of risk were associated with age, education, smoking, binge drinking, depression, pain and self-reported health.”

The defined risk of harmful drinking following the guidelines set out by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).

NICE has defined the following levels of risk of harmful drinking:

Lower risk drinking: ≤21 units per week (adult men) or ≤14 units per week (adult women).

Increasing-risk drinking: 22≤50 units per week (adult men) or 15≤35 units per week (adult women).

Higher risk drinking: >50 alcohol units per week (adult men) or >35 units per week (adult women).

Note: One alcohol unit is measured as 10ml or 8g of pure alcohol. This equals one 25ml single measure of whiskey (ABV 40%), or a third of a pint of beer (ABV 5-6%) or half a standard (175ml) glass of red wine (ABV 12%).

~~~

1] Time

Most of the men I know drink more because they have more time to play.

They don’t have to get up every day at 4 am to work in the coal mines, or sit behind a desk and look alert at an office farm.

Time is at their disposal.

2] Money

The great thing ab0ut money is that you can buy a lot of things without thinking much about it.

Liquor comes to mind.

Add time to money and you have lots of exotic vacations where people drink at all hours of the day and night, including room service at 2 am.

3] Active Social Lives

Affluent older men attend galas, cocktail parties, and cultural events of all kinds where alcohol is served.

During the cultural season we could be talking about 4 or 5 events during the course of any given week.

4] Boredom

What the hell else are you going to do at night when you don’t have any particular time you have to go to bed?

A glass of wine or two over Law and Order sounds logical to me.

5] Depression

Existential pain is a bitch and one way to fight it is to drown your sorrows in another depressive.

It sells itself.

I could go on with this, but you get the picture.

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