5 of 50

When you turn 50 (or actually a little before) you start to get an interesting range of offers. ‘Over 50’s life insurance’, ‘equity release’, ‘Saga membership’, ‘funeral plan’; and that’s coupled with all the other ‘offers’ from my doctor for a health check and financial advisor for a wealth check (I like that they call it a wealth check even when they know full well I don’t have any).

I guess when you’re younger it’s much more a case of which fan club you want to belong to – I was a member of both the Buzby Club, and the Desperate Dan Pie Eaters Club – and perhaps as you got a little older about getting a driving licence, and then a mortgage and other ‘responsibilities’.

Now someone somewhere is trying to sell you something because of your ‘characteristics’ and at the moment for me that’s my age and my guess is it must be a lucrative market, even if I’m not buying in.

As you’ll probably have guessed by now if you’ve been reading these newsletters, I am quite nostalgic about those simpler days. An uncomplicated approach. Where you weren’t bombarded with offers for things that you didn’t really need but everyone thought you should have.

Life lessons teach us that if something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. So I suspect all of these recent offers, perhaps with the exception of the one from my doctor which is probably as bad as it sounds, are not worth it and I’ll be passing on them. That said I wonder if there are any cool things that you get when you turn 50? I’m pretty sure that there’ll be some cake, but that’s not an exclusive thing to turning 50 – although the number of candles making your cake a fire hazard probably is – so I don’t think I can claim one for that.

Then again does it matter? With all that is happening in the world, these things are trivial in comparison. I grew up wondering whether there was going to be a nuclear war and now all those years later there’s a dictator threatening the same thing again. So have things really changed all that much over 50 years? There might be more junk mail than there was in the 1970’s but an apocalyptic conflict seems just as real a threat now as then.

Is it a case of the more things change the more they stay the same, and it is just the personalities that change? That collectively we learn nothing or perhaps don’t want to learn those lessons. That collectively we are so resistant to change that we actually don’t no matter the outward appearance.

I doubt there’s very much that can be taken from my 50 life lessons and applied to global geopolitics but there is such resistance to doing anything at all that is meaningful that it is staggering.

Thanks for reading this newsletter, I hope you’re enjoying it. If you are please feel free to share it using the button below. If for any reason you’re not and want to stop getting these emails, there’s an unsubscribe link at the bottom of each email.