Rick's b.log - entry 2026/03/01

mailto: blog -at- heyrick -dot- eu

Being fifty is better - and no I'm not sorry

No, not "it has its moments", and not "you make peace with it". Better. Just better.

At fifteen, everything was a catastrophe in waiting. A bad haircut was social ruin, and god knows the school barber was trained in making bad haircuts. A single spot on your chin might as well have been a neon sign flashing "loser", as if your ability to do anything depended on a toxic combination of your hormones and the whatever-the-hell they were injecting into the meat that you ate.
And, when on summer holiday, if someone didn't phone the house landline by eight o'clock in the morning for a get-together, it clearly meant your life was over and you would die alone, probably in your childhood bedroom under a poster you now pretend is ironic.
Those social faux pas so easy to fall into (like talking to girls in any way other than "I bet I can climb that tree faster than you") became the laughing stock of the school. Unless you were handy with your fists, because violence equalled respect and girls love bad boys. Or maybe synthetic leather jackets and mullets. Hard to separate one from the other, really.

But the thing is, back then, humiliation was local at least. It happened in corridors, at bus stops, in shopping centres on a Saturday afternoon. There was no permanent digital archive of your awkwardness. No one was screenshotting your bad hair day or the time it looked like you wet yourself because it was just too much to coordinate all of the appendages to manage to carry a tray of stuff from here to there within a crowd of people at the local KFC.

The 1980s, for all their charm (remember, we're focusing on childhood issues), were a peculiar mix of freedom and constraint. Yes, we roamed about unsupervised and untracked, with a can of Quattro, a Yorkie, and vague plans about what we'd do that often amounted to "let's break into that old house and search for ghosts".
Yes, the music was superb and the fashion...existed. But mental health wasn't exactly a dinner-table topic, gender roles were narrower than we like to remember, and "just be yourself" often meant "be yourself, but not too much". You survived adolescence by blending in, keeping your head down, and hoping nobody noticed you were making it up as you went along.

Fast forward to now, and social media has transformed from a mildly useful novelty into something more akin to a Bond villain with a WiFi signal. It began as a way to reconnect with old friends and share holiday pictures and status updates as to the fun things you were getting up to. Harmless, really. Now it's a 24-hour comparison engine, a rage factory, and a stage on which everyone is expected to perform a highly polished, monetisable version of themselves; and this doesn't even cover the "mummy blogs" where people share out pieces of their children's lives. If you're fifteen today, your awkwardness isn't a passing phase, it is content. It is searchable, permanent, and there is an unrelenting pressure to curate your own brand before you've even worked out who the hell you are (look, I'm fifty two and the best I can come up with is "I'm Rick").

When you're fifty, though, there is a beautifully subversive option: opting out. I don't feel compelled to win the internet, cultivate a following, or turn every meal I eat into a bizarre blend of art and lifestyle statement. I can simply exist without narrating it. The older I get, the more radical that feels. There is freedom in not performing. This stuff that you read? I don't write it for "likes", I don't write it for the advertising coin (you'll notice a refreshing, almost alien, lack of advertising on my blog). I simply write it because I have all these ideas and words in my head and a tendency to overshare and, well, maybe some of it will resonate and/or help some of you? Or maybe I'm just an old grey haired git shouting at the moon. Either way, this is created because of a desire, not because of a necessity. My life, my income, my reputation, my entire being, does not depend upon regular carefully crafted updates of content.
That's what I would like my legacy to be - for that person that says "thanks" because something I wrote helped them make an important decision, or explained something they didn't get, or just piqued their curiosity in some random thing - and god knows my blog is plenty random. For me, that's more useful than whoring adverts for "This is the secret that banks don't want you to know" and all that other rubbish that nobody with a functioning brain would pay any attention to.

And then there's work. When I was fifteen, the script seemed pretty straightforward: get qualified, get a job, stay there, retire with a pension that allowed you to enjoy the rest of your life while you still had a rest to enjoy.
Now, advances in AI and machine learning are rearranging the job market with unbounded enthusiasm. Entire roles are evolving, or vanishing, industries are being reshaped, and the idea of a single lifelong career looks almost quaint, an anachronism of the past.

Once upon a time and within living memory, a person with a steady and reasonably paid job could expect to buy a house, own a car, and build savings. One income often covered it. Two incomes were quite comfortable. The future, while never guaranteed, felt structurally supported.
Now? Two people working full time can find themselves nervously watching rental listings climb out of reach, wondering whether "retirement" will simply mean "working slightly fewer hours while knackered and hurting". House prices have floated off into the stratosphere, if you don't have a relative to leave you a house or a pile of cash you just aren't going to go there. Pensions have shifted from being a defined benefit to "best of luck, maybe". Meanwhile, companies speak warmly of "family culture" while offshoring roles to wherever the work costs less, because the quarterly report is everything.
Globalisation and technology have created extraordinary efficiencies, but the gains have not trickled down in a tidy, egalitarian fashion. Jobs are automated, outsourced or restructured in the name of shareholder value. Loyalty, once a two-way street between employer and employee, now feels more like a historical anecdote used as a weapon.

It's unsettling, certainly. But here's the difference: at fifty, I understand that a job is a transaction, not a definition. I have a job. It isn't dazzling, but it pays a salary. I have some savings. I pay my bills. Once in a while I buy Playmobil because I'm an adult and I can spend my money on whatever the hell I like. My identity is not my job title. That alone feels like progress.

Being single at fifteen felt like a verdict. It meant you weren't chosen, weren't desirable, weren't enough, or were just some undefined sort of weird. Being single at fifty can mean something entirely different. It can mean peace. It can mean autonomy. It can mean eating muesli for dinner without commentary, and arranging your life in a way that suits you and not some imaginary panel of judges (or worse, the in-laws). I have found a peaceful place where I can be myself rather than a draft version tailored to other people's expectations. That is not a consolation prize, it's the main event.

The greatest upgrade of fifty is not physical, and it certainly isn't technological. It's perspective. I no longer require anybody's approval. I no longer assume that every awkward moment will define me for eternity. I understand that most people are too busy worrying about their own lives to give any concern about mine. The spotlight I felt at fifteen was largely imaginary, and stepping out of it has been a relief beyond measure.

Let me add something very clear: it's not that the world is better. In many ways it's noisier, angrier, crappier, more precarious, and powered by tiny glowing rectangles that appear to be fuelled by spite and rage.
It's that I am better equipped for it.

Politics, which once felt dull and faintly beigey-grey, has turned into full-contact sport. Outrage isn't common, it's currency. Anger travels faster than reason, and social media, originally sold to us as a tool for connection, has become an accelerant. Lies ricochet around the internet dressed as "just asking questions". Sealioning is a competition sport designed to silence opinions one doesn't agree with. Algorithms quietly notice that fury keeps us scrolling and oblige by serving up more and more of it. And people, astonishingly, will vote against their own long-term interests if the vote feels like a punch thrown at someone they dislike.
We've seen how quickly it happens. A horrific crime. Grief. Shock. And before the facts are even settled, a rumour - seeded by someone with an agenda - spreads online. Within hours it hardens into "truth", outrage is redirected at entirely the wrong target, and suddenly people are trying to set fire to a hotel full of strangers who had nothing to do with anything. The original lie came from abroad. The damage was done at home.

Now take Brexit. Whatever one's position, it's hard to deny that much of the debate was powered less by sober economic forecasting and more by identity, grievance and promises printed on the side of a bus. Complex trade realities were reduced to slogans; nuanced arguments were flattened into memes. Social media didn't invent misinformation, but it industrialised it. Anger felt decisive. Nuance felt weak. And here we are.

It's not entirely mysterious why so many people are cross, though. The social contract does appear to have developed a suspicious number of cracks; like the job situation mentioned above, like the pension situation hinted above, like having rich people who live in Monaco or suchlike to avoid paying taxes using the media they own to call you - a person who maybe left school with a GCSE pass grade - "scum" because you struggle to find a job in this mess.

We used to worry about foreign interference in elections. Now it interferes in our moods, tempers, and reasoning.

At fifteen, you sense instability without understanding its causes. You feel the tension but have no framework for understanding any of it. This is why most of what Thatcher did was something our parents complained about, but the only real impact it made on us was "no more milk at school".
At fifty, I can see the machinery. I may not control it, but I recognise it. And, to a degree, I understand how it works and how it is being manipulated.

Talking of machinery: Technologically, I'm grateful to have grown up when things were simpler and, crucially, examinable. Gadgets had screws. You could open them. Circuit boards were visible. Components were identifiable. If you were curious, you could trace how something worked and, with enough patience, understand it. The digital world had edges you could inspect. Some devices, such as the infamous BBC Micro invited you to play with that digital world.

Now we live among sleek, opaque black slabs sealed with proprietary glue and legal disclaimers eighty screenfuls long (SOME OF IT IN SHOUTY CAPITALS BARELY LEGIBLE) that you're expected to read, understand, and agree to every other time something gets updated. The firmware is secret, the hardware is miniaturised beyond comprehension, and the most interesting bits are protected by patents and NDAs thicker than a telephone directory. We are surrounded by miracles we cannot meaningfully interrogate. They function, but they do not invite understanding. But most of all, the same company that wants to profile and analyse everybody is also responsible for the software inside the device. It's all magic secret sauce based upon the principle of "trust us".

I'm also glad I grew up in a time when you could vanish on your bike after breakfast and return at sunset, slightly wet and muddy and entirely unmonitored, and nobody assumed you'd been abducted by lunchtime. Boys and girls could wander off together without triggering moral panic about imagined decadence. Freedom was just assumed. The world was not necessarily safer than now, but it felt much less hysterical.

And the snacks - let us take a moment for the snacks. So many brands that have quietly faded away. Chocolates reformulated into blandness by multinational corporations that bought the brands that remained. Fizzy drinks before someone decided they needed to taste faintly of chemical penance. Oven meals on metal trays that went into an actual oven. Beans on toast as lunch, snack, dinner, and sometimes all three.

As for romance, I'll be honest: as an introvert, I mostly observed that particular theatre from a safe distance. I used to talk to twelve year old girls (when I was twelve). Upon leaving school I tried talking to sixteen year old girls. Oh my god, the drama. Four years and they were practically a different species. So I committed to my introvert self and here we are three and a half decades later.
Fifteen was less a whirlwind of passion and more a masterclass in standing awkwardly near a drinks table. If anything, fifty is kinder. There's no expectation to perform sociability on demand. Solitude is no longer a deficiency; it's a preference. Peace is not suspicious.
But, most of all, dating meant finding a girl you thought was cute and trying to tell her that without her laughing in your face and crushing the tiny flicker of hope you had inside. These days it's a mere video game. Swipe left, swipe right, swipe the damn phone and toss it out the window... Like everything else, it's an advert-addled money-making machine where everybody lies to everybody else and vapid people (of both genders) want to score a "ten" when they themselves would barely pass as a "two" if we're being generous.

Which leads us on to the apps. Oh dear God, the apps. At some point, quietly and without a referendum, it's like we all agreed that every mundane action in daily life must now be mediated by a corporation and its multitude of "trusted partners". Want to check your bank balance? App. Charge your car? App. Look at the weather forecast? App. Adjust the heating? App. Optimise your washing cycle? Of course there's an app...because apparently I can no longer be trusted to turn a dial without consulting a cloud server in Luxembourg.

Nothing simply works any more. It must connect, sync, update, request permissions, track location, accept revised terms and conditions, and share "anonymised data" with several hundred advertising affiliates who are absolutely not building a disturbingly intimate portrait of my life. I don't need my fridge to have firmware. I don't want my lightbulbs to require a password. I certainly don't want to download a software patch before I can wash my socks. And, hang on, a lightbulb has one bloody job. Why does it even ever need a firmware update?

And what unsettles me isn't just the inconvenience of dozens of apps fighting for space in your life and on your home screen, it's the quiet normalisation of surveillance. Every tap, every charge, every journey, every load, every purchase, and every day becomes another data point in someone else's profile and optimisation strategy. Once upon a time, if you wanted to know what I was doing, you had to physically observe me. Now my toaster could probably tell you. We've wrapped the most ordinary parts of human existence in proprietary code, NDAs and targeted advertising pipelines, and we're calling it "convenience".

This is the bit that feels properly dystopian. Not flying cars or robot overlords that somehow never managed to exist like sci-fi in the '80s promised they would. It's just the creeping assumption that no aspect of life is complete until it has been product-managed, monetised and nudged into "engagement". I grew up in a time when you could understand your possessions, fix them with a screwdriver, and use them without agreeing to many pages of incomprehensible legalese. Now even the washing machine wants a "relationship".

So yes, the world is angrier. Politics are sharper. Everything more polarised. Social media amplifies the worst of us. AI is reshaping work. Jobs are offshored. Companies chase profit with extreme devotion. Housing is absurd and house price hiccups make the national news. The pension horizon is more like an Event Horizon. The social contract is at breaking point.

But fifty comes with perspective. It comes with the ability to step back from the algorithmic shouting and decide not to participate. It comes with the quiet confidence of having lived through decades of "new face, same old crap" and still be fundamentally yourself.
The world may have grown more complicated, more polarised and more sealed shut behind proprietary glass. But I have grown steadier. I know who I am. I know that I do not have to contort myself into whatever shape somebody else demands.

Let's be honest - if you handed me a form and said, "Sign here to be fifteen again", I would check it for hidden clauses, laugh knowingly, and slide it straight back across the table.

At fifteen today, you are not just navigating puberty, identity, friendship hierarchies and existential dread. You are doing it under surveillance. Your adolescence is searchable. Your mistakes are recordable. Your worst moment can be replayed in high definition with commentary. When we were fifteen, embarrassment had the decency to fade. Now it trends.

You are expected to cultivate a personal brand before you've worked out your personality. You must be attractive but effortless, informed but not preachy, confident but not arrogant, vulnerable but not messy. And never say the wrong thing even if something that needs to be said. The algorithm is always watching, always ranking, always deciding whether you are worthy of distribution.

At fifteen now, you're absorbing a constant drip-feed of catastrophe. Climate collapse. Political fury. Economic instability. Housing unaffordability. AI threatening to automate the very jobs you're told to prepare for. You are told to dream big while quietly realising that the ladder has been pulled up and thrown away. You are encouraged to "go the extra mile" while watching companies offshore entire departments because someone elsewhere will do it cheaper. You are advised to "invest in your future" when two full-time salaries can barely secure rent, let alone a house and a pension.

And through it all, the internet hums in your pocket, whispering that everyone else is richer, fitter, happier and more successful than you. It is a comparison engine strapped to a dopamine lever. Of course anxiety is through the roof. We've built a psychological obstacle course and handed teenagers a scoreboard. And we're surprised that there's a mental health crisis?

At fifty, by contrast, I have the most luxurious asset imaginable: perspective. I know that most of what feels urgent isn't. I know that outrage is often engineered, often by people with malicious intent. I know that corporations would quite like to live inside my phone and lease me back my own existence one subscription at a time, and I have the deeply satisfying ability to say, "sod off".

I don't need to be the most attractive person in the room, the most productive worker on the spreadsheet, the most righteous voice in the comment section, or the most enviable life in a filtered 16:9 rectangle. I have a job, certainly not magnificent, but real and it pays me money. I have carved out a peaceful corner of the world where I can be precisely who I am without applause or approval.

So no, I would not go back. Not for smoother skin, not for faster metabolism, not for a back that doesn't ache and the ability to leap over the stream without worrying if my ankle will survive it, not even for the vague promise of infinite possibility. Possibility is overrated when it comes bundled with insecurity, surveillance, economic precarity and an app for your washing machine.

If this is what ageing gets you: clarity, autonomy, selective indifference, and the wisdom to mute the algorithm, then sign me up.
Because honestly?
Anyone with a functioning brain would look at the modern teenage gauntlet and say "hell no".

At fifteen, I was trying to fit into a world I didn't understand.
At fifty, I understand the world...and I no longer feel the need to fit.

And then go and make a nice strong cuppa in blissful, app-free defiance using a kettle with a mechanical lever.

Your comments:

Please note that while I check this page every so often, I am not able to control what users write; therefore I disclaim all liability for unpleasant and/or infringing and/or defamatory material. Undesired content will be removed as soon as it is noticed. By leaving a comment, you agree not to post material that is illegal or in bad taste, and you should be aware that the time and your IP address are both recorded, should it be necessary to find out who you are. Oh, and don't bother trying to inline HTML. I'm not that stupid! ☺
As of February 2025, commenting is no longer available to UK residents, following the implementation of the vague and overly broad Online Safety Act. You must tick the box below to verify that you are not a UK resident, and you expressly agree if you are in fact a UK resident that you will indemnify me (Richard Murray), as well as the person maintaining my site (Rob O'Donnell), the hosting providers, and so on. It's a shitty law, complain to your MP.
It's not that I don't want to hear from my British friends, it's because your country makes stupid laws.

You can now follow comment additions with the comment RSS feed. This is distinct from the b.log RSS feed, so you can subscribe to one or both as you wish.