Turning Forty feels like a Spam Phone Call
Turning forty is like receiving an unwanted phone call: you weren’t expecting it, but it found you. How do you deal with the scam of “youthfulness” when even that seems to be running out?
I wake up on my 40th birthday to a call from one of those annoying call centers. The operator claims to be contacting me on behalf of the company that provides my electricity and gas, warning me about an error in my bill: the charges are supposedly higher than they should be. They’re doing me a favor and promising a refund. Sure, it’s a solvable anomaly, but I still need to confirm my identity in their system to avoid any risk of service interruption. It’s simple—we can do it right now, over the phone. Just a quick recap of my personal details.
“So, you are Mr. Paolo.” Paolo, yes, but Mr.? I wouldn’t be so sure. I was born that way, modestly speaking. I feel like Totò. “You were born on December 5, 1984, in Vittorio Veneto?” That’s my final answer, but confirming it outright would be naive—like going all-in with my meager bank balance—and in the end, there’s no need. A glimmer of warm but unsolicited confidence breaks through all that social engineering, shifting the focus from the scam to the ceremony: “So today is your birthday! Happy birthday!”
I put up a barrier before this flood of personal information becomes a rapid current, and I bring down the chill: “Look, thank you, but I’m not interested.” As I hang up, my gaze falls on the Yankee Candles lined up on the cordless phone table like a votive altar. After all, even in the darkest birthdays, someone always gives me one. Even if I had trouble with my energy connection, the illusion of preserving a bit of hygge magic for the winter would still be intact.
The Call to Forty
As I block the number and add it to the spam list, I reflect on how the “call to forty” is incredibly similar to one of these insidious phone calls: you weren’t expecting it, you have no idea how they found you, but it happened, and now you have to handle it with caution and a certain tact. Especially when it deceives you into thinking you can fix all the anomalies and accumulated errors in one go—or when it dangles irresistible offers that you’ll soon no longer be in a position to decline.
It’s the annoying rhetoric of “trains of opportunity,” the ones you have to catch on the fly, but at a problematic time: almost everything is going the wrong way, every “means to arrive” starts striking against life at your expense, and there’s little use in protesting. If your train is perpetually late, don’t you resent seeing those who left before you—whether out of foresight or sheer luck—already arriving at their destination?
At work, I was made to attend one of those courses on managing time and talent. The trainer used a metaphor about time zones to explain how everyone has their own pace and perspective. She gave the example of New York and California, which are separated by three hours, but that doesn’t mean one is “behind” the other. It’s just a matter of “zones,” which, outside the metaphor, function like a biological clock or a phase. Even if someone somewhere in the world is already reaching their goals while you haven’t yet, it doesn’t matter—don’t compare yourself. Stay in your own time, live in your own space. Maybe it’s the same space someone else had in a previous time zone, and the sun has moved on and will continue to do so. The point is that things move forward if you focus on yourself and keep going, like a clock hand moving ahead without fixating on the exact time.
But this self-made relativism, which confuses and mystifies the ups and downs of a journey, doesn’t feel very European to me, and even less Italian. Perhaps because talking about “zones,” which are assigned like the brackets in a competition where titles, wealth, confidence, and starting opportunities matter, sounds too American for us. In our country, we only have one zone, and to change it, we have to leave—to go somewhere the ups and downs are at least swift, where social mobility works. Even then, despite effort and maintenance, those elevators—here or there—often break down halfway, leaving many waiting and only a few enjoying the view from the top, where the details blur and crises aren’t in focus. The crisis, after all, is the ground floor of modernity, its defining feature as we know it.
The Meaning of Crisis
In everyday language, when we talk about crisis, we think of deterioration, discomfort, or a moment of personal difficulty (including career and age-related crises, such as the infamous “midlife crisis”) or a historical phase with uncertain and potentially dramatic developments. We associate crisis with our concerns, with situations where systems either jam or malfunction, where conflicts arise and people are affected. No one wants to be in crisis, nor experience it as an impending catastrophe.
Yet, krinein, from which the word derives, is an action verb that carries an ancient and reassuring image: skilled hands separating wheat from chaff to ensure a healthy harvest. Plato used it to describe the process of choosing between truth and deception. Thucydides used it to assess the reliability of testimonies and separate facts from myths. In ancient Greek medicine, “critical days” were the turning points of illness—when one could predict recovery or the end.
Thus, every crisis, even the most trivial one triggered by age, actually functions as an antidote, drawing a clear line between a “before” and an “after.” It places an interval between the two times and operates as a kind of cultural reset. But it’s not like everything starts anew.
The Cult of Youth
Feeling “still young” is an attitude undoubtedly encouraged by today’s society—not just through aesthetic models but also in lifestyle and relationships. But for those not in show business, continuing to look young, even when it seems like a blessing, comes with several drawbacks—especially in the workplace.
The most evident? A lack of immediate credibility.
Even if you have years of experience and are skilled, you’ll still be considered “in training.” If there’s a crisis, you’re LIFO—Last In, First Out. They pile work on you because “you’re young and have energy!” or give you menial tasks because “you’re young and need to build your know-how.” Even if you lead a team, the risk is that people won’t take you seriously.
So, you have a valuable asset, you keep using it, yet you remain invisible to those who should recognize it—just because you don’t look “settled.” And there’s no way out of this vicious cycle: the more you appear “unsettled,” the less you resolve.
At this point, I want to look my age—at home, at work, and out in the world. I’ve lived these years; I haven’t stolen them. But it would be naive to think that altering my exterior and adopting new priorities or habits would be enough to change how others perceive me.
Maybe the key to breaking free from the golden cage of “youthfulness” is to stop obsessing over the body and shift the focus onto others—to find our real utility there.
A passage from Patrizia Cavalli’s poem Adesso che il tempo sembra tutto mio sums it up perfectly:
"This is what the body is for: You touch me or you don’t, You embrace me or push me away. The rest is for fools."
Paradoxically, children and the elderly solve this issue best. They care for their bodies only up to a certain point, using them in a less conscious way—out of inexperience, due to newly arrived limitations, or simply because of a lack of perspective. Other bodies are still unfamiliar to them, and the others, unfortunately, are already gone. It’s not that the body isn’t important to them—on the contrary. It’s just that they don’t feel the need to stitch an image of themselves onto it, because for them, it is time that “takes shape” fully. They live each day as if it would never end, or conversely, they experience its remaining brevity with an intensity that, if you are in the middle of life’s journey, you struggle to either recover or anticipate.
Because your body is still absorbed and engaged in unraveling yet another crisis, trying to find a way out of the dark forest with clear ideas and the right answer—but you’re solving the wrong puzzle: Do you have, yes or no, the position you wanted? The GPS inside you keeps flashing “recalculating route.”
The line between 39 and 40 is still unwritten—we might as well try to solve it like an open-ended Bartezzaghi puzzle. Start somewhere, train ourselves in difficulty—no tricks, no deceptions. Maybe the missing answers will piece themselves together on their own, even without verifying their exact fit to the number. And we realize it just a moment after getting lost between one guess and another. We were trying for ages to figure something out. And life was bombarding us with a spam call in the meantime.
