Birthdays, Middle Life, and the Specific Joy of No Longer Caring About the Wrong Things

I have a birthday this month. I am not going to tell you which one specifically because that information is on a need-to-know basis and most people do not need to know. What I will tell you is that I am squarely in what the culture politely calls middle life and what I personally call the era of extremely informed decision-making. I know what I like. I know what I do not like. I know which things are worth my energy and which things are not. This is a gift that nobody tells you is coming when you are in your twenties worrying about everything.

The thing about getting older that I genuinely enjoy is the recalibration of priorities. When I was younger, I spent energy on things that I thought I should care about based on external signals. What other people expected. What looked impressive from the outside. What kept the peace in situations that probably just needed someone to say what was true. I do not have the patience for any of that anymore, and the loss of it turns out to be an enormous net positive. The energy I used to spend managing appearances is now available for things that are actually interesting.

I have goats. I have chickens. I am working on a graduate degree in computer science with a focus on AI while working a full-time IT job and running a small hobby farm in South Georgia. My life is objectively strange and I find it completely delightful. Middle life, at least the version I am living, looks like staying up too late reading about photonic computing and then waking up at an inconvenient hour because a goat has opinions about the gate latch. This is a specific kind of chaos that I would not trade.

There is something that happens around this time in life where you start to take genuine pleasure in the small, excellent things. The really good cup of coffee. The podcast episode that makes you think differently about something you thought you already understood. The moment when a complicated infrastructure project clicks into place and everything runs exactly like it should. The afternoon on the farm when the light is good and the animals are calm and nothing needs fixing. These moments were always available. I just could not see them clearly through all the noise of trying to be whatever younger me thought I was supposed to be.

If you are reading this and you are somewhere on the younger end of things feeling like you have to have it all figured out, I want to offer you this: you do not. And the process of figuring it out is actually the interesting part. The destination is fine, but the journey is where you develop opinions about things and learn which hills you are willing to die on and figure out that goats are genuinely good company. Give it time. It gets better in ways you will not expect.