I turned forty. I thought it would land harder than it did. No crisis, no mirror moment. If anything I feel more awake than I did at thirty-five, probably because I stopped pretending everything was fine. The work behind me is unglamorous. Assembly lines. Industrial cleaning, warehouses, factories. Managing crews, fixing processes, squeezing cost out of broken systems. Now logistics. Decent work, fair people, bills paid. But somewhere I started running on autopilot: wake, work, home, a show, sleep, repeat. Not miserable. Just empty in a way that's hard to name. The friends had the joke ready, forty, buy a motorcycle, ride into the sunset. I do like motorcycles. This isn't that. The honest question at forty is simpler: do I want to do the same thing for another twenty years, or admit who I am now instead of who I was supposed to be at twenty-five? At twenty-five I called a steady job "stability." At forty I can see that "stability" is often just stuck, and sc...
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