Earlier this month I turned fifty.

Fifty!

The big five-oh.  5-0.  50.  Half a century.  20% as old as the United States of America.  Old enough to join AARP (which I immediately did upon turning 50).

There have been 10 U.S. Presidents during my lifetime (although I’d definitely put an asterisk next to Trump and Nixon)

Turning fifty is a milestone.  If nothing else it provides one with a certain amount of perspective.  That doesn’t mean I don’t still get upset (I do), but I’m better able to calm down and move on (though possibly that’s a result of the testosterone having leaked from my body for the last 25 years so that I am an adult man but only really on the outside — like a Potemkin Village man).

And, with perspective comes a certain amount of wisdom.  It’s not wisdom as in “cure cancer” or “figure out how to sustain life on Mars” or even “how do you get the GOP to get off their ass and impeach Trump already,” but it is certain knowledge about truisms of life, knowledge that I wish I had possessed earlier in life.

So, in the hope of helping someone younger avoid some of the pitfalls that befell me along the way, and at the risk of seeming preachy or pedantic, I offer up the following nuggets of wisdom that I’ve picked up along the way to 50.  I hope they help:

1. There is no time machine.  You can’t go back and undo things.  The best you can do is perhaps mitigate the damage, apologize for your errors, move on, and learn from what you messed up.  The smartest people are the ones who made the most mistakes and learned their lessons.  By that measure, I’m about a B minus student of life.  I’ve learned some things, but I keep making some other mistakes again and again (like buying lottery tickets and paying for food delivery instead of investing in the stock market and cooking at home to save money).  Don’t be like me.  By 50, you should be an “A” student of life.  At least an “A minus.”  If you’re getting Bs or B minuses like me, you need to either stop trying to re-litigate past errors (for me, I’m always kicking myself on which college I chose to attend) and just move on and learn the lesson (next time you make a big decision, do some homework, visit the place, find out if you’ll feel like an anonymous cog in a giant student body filled with soul-less people who only want to work in finance).

2. Spend your time with people who love you and don’t waste time with people who don’t offer you love, attention, or respect.  It’s a big world, with a population of billions, so there’s no way to know how many of that total population actually love you (even if you have a million Instagram followers).  And, of course, over the course of your life, you will meet new people, and you won’t know if they love you till they actually meet you.  Understood.  But, even given this, understand that life is better when you’re with people who love you.  They offer help, advice, support, and, generally, mirth.  Spending time with people like that is effortless. They already love you for you.  You don’t have to worry about trying to be something.  The “you” that you are is good enough for them.  How great is that?  By contrast, with people who haven’t warmed to you or who affirmatively don’t like you, there’s an inherent need to “win them over.”  Good luck with that.  You can spend a lifetime trying to win people over, and it’ll never happen because those people suck. Who are they not to like you for being you?  They should go f*ck themselves.  At a minimum, they should leave you alone and stay out of your way and you should do the same toward them because all these people will do is cause you to expend enormous resources trying to prove you’re “worthy” (which is something you and the people who love you already know). [One caveat — if you are a horrible person or Donald Trump, then you should try a little bit to get people who don’t like you to change their mind by being, you know, different than you are].

3. Staying in shape makes your life better.  Yes, yes, I know, being a fat schlub who sits around watching movies and eats whatever he or she wants may seem enticing.  But, I’m here to tell you that the key to feeling good as you get older is  . . . feeling good. And, the only way to feel good is to feel good, meaning if you eat reasonably well, and you exercise at least a bit, and you don’t abuse drugs and alcohol beyond ordinary levels, and you don’t smoke, you can be spry enough to really enjoy what life has to offer (including, most notably, sex).  That’s not to say that there aren’t completely out-of-shape people who have good lives.  I’m sure there are a few.  But, we’re talking about maximizing the odds here.  And, the way to do that is to stay in good enough shape that you can touch your toes, and get in your clothes, and do a few “dosey-does” (with your consensual sex partner).  Also, on at least a few occasions in life, your very survival may depend on being able to run to (or away from) something.  Staying in shape makes it more likely you’ll be able to catch that plane leaving with the object of your desire aboard or run away from the pack of zombies chasing you.

So, there you go.  A few key pieces of wisdom from a 50 year old.  I’ll have more later.  But, it’s late, and I’m tired (the way middle-aged people tend to get), and I have to go watch the news and scream out to the universe about what a horrific blot on the World Donald Trump’s presidency is.