When you were 25 and you got inebriated, did you feel the urge to start stretching? Hell No you didn’t! Now though, different story. For whatever reason, between cocktail # 3 and 4, those hammies get tight. Or maybe it’s your bad back or that shoulder that went bum for no real reason. Next thing you know you’ve got the foam roller out and you’re bitching to someone about your IT band. What a raucous evening!
Can you really party hard for more than one night in a row? Or is there a tacit agreement between the crew that night two “can be a little lighter”. There’s a reason that the average age at Mykonos and Ibiza is 23.
When you do go out for cocktails and good times, do you get excited about getting back at a reasonable hour? I do. I love starting at 630-7 PM and being back home by 11 so that I can be asleep by midnight. I think to myself: “This is great, I had some fun and I can still be productive tmrw!!”. 10 years ago, we didn’t go out before 11 PM. In Europe, before midnight! If you went to the bar before 11 PM you were a straight up dork. If you showed up at the club before 1 AM you were ridiculed and treated like dirt. 7PM to 11PM weren’t primetime, they were reserved for pre-gaming. A mere warm-up.
In college I used to order a medium, ham and bacon, Dominos pizza and eat it by myself in one sitting. In high school I’d get a Chipotle Burrito AND an order of soft tacos. Now. I can’t metabolize anything. I eat half a pizza on a Sunday and the next day it looks like I swallowed a soccer ball. I have to spend the next week on a juice cleanse and clandestinely smoking cigarettes on the john to try and work that poor decision out of my body. Wait until you get into your 60’s. Your daily diet will consist of two plums, a kiwi, and probiotic gummies…. and you’ll still feel like you spent your weekend at Golden Corral.
Do you wake up at 7 AM on weekends even on those nights that you do go out “hard”? Yeah you do. It’s cause you’ve been in the workforce for so long at this point that you’re basically a robot. On weekdays I often wake up literally a minute before my alarm clock. When we were young, we didn’t set alarm clocks because we had jack shit worth of obligations the next day. Wake up at noon and eat the lunch that mommy made you. Now, you don’t need an alarm clock because Corporate America has you trained like an obedient dog: These PowerPoint slides and excel sheets aren’t going to make themselves, chief.
This last one might just be me: As I get older I increasingly demand clarity and details when people talk to me and am infuriated by ambiguity and lack of details. My colleague the other day called me and dropped the following gem: “So I met with them yesterday and I feel like maybe they want to see some more deliverables by the end of the month.” I waited 5 seconds to see if more details were coming and when I realized he had nothing else to say, I ripped into him. “Who is ‘them’? What deliverables are you talking about? You ‘feel’ like…..? So this is just your perception or did ‘they’ actually communicate some sort of end of month deadline?” Get your fucking shit together, bro! I had a friend in 3rd grade named Rubin. He had just moved to America from Nicaragua in 2nd grade and was in the English as a Second Language (ESL) program. I swear that kid was more articulate back in 1993 than this idiot colleague of mine. These morons make me so angry!!!
My suggestion: Focus on the downsides of what you used to be able to do. Going out until 4 AM was pretty unproductive. What’s more likely to happen at 3 AM – you meeting the love of your life – or you getting in a sloppy barfight? Do you really miss having meals at Golden Corral or Waffle House? If so, you’re a very unique person. Your greying or balding head now gives you enough gravitas at work to offload some of the most annoying shelf-ware creation to someone younger and more enthusiastic. Dangle that promotion carrot in front of them and tell them it’s up to them to “make a name for themselves in the organization”. After all, it’s not that you’re merely delegating your work to them. No, no, no, you’re giving the young kids “an opportunity to grow.” While they’re “growing”, you can focus on what really matters: Foam-roll the shit out of your lumbar area and stretch out those hamstrings. Remember that, at our age, without taking proper precautions, the chances of violent, painful, 3 AM Charley Horses is pathetically high.
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