Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash

The Terrifying Moment of Middle Age

It all becomes uncomfortably clear and there’s nothing you can do

Pete Williams
3 min readMar 22, 2023

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When you’re young, you feel as though you’ll live forever…

Oh sure, you know death is a thing on an intellectual level, but it’s not something you really feel or contemplate as something that will happen. It’s just something that happens to old people, and because time moves so slowly for you, it’s not on your radar.

But then you hit your forties, and everything starts to change.

One day you look at your child/ren and are shocked at how much they’ve grown. At how they don’t have that chubby cuteness in their face anymore. You’ll realise that they’ve been zooming through school and find it incomprehensible that they’re shortly going off to high school. They’ll be a teenager in just a couple more years.

Then you look the other way and see your parents.

Those people that’ve been there all your life, they’ve firmly stepped from late middle-aged to proper old age. The colour is almost gone from their hair. The wrinkles you didn’t really notice before are prominent. They might’ve had a couple of medical scares and probably minor surgeries.

Life comes at you fast…

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