Halfway

When I was seven or eight years old, I used to lie awake at night and imagine the end of space. It wasn’t the concept of infinity that scared me—it was the wall, the barrier, the membrane between known and unknown. What if, I wondered, you flew far enough that you hit a wall? And if there was a wall, who built it, and what was on the other side? My recovering-Catholic brain whispered, “God.” My budding Gen-X cynicism, nourished by reruns of The Twilight Zone and fresh episodes of The Wonder Years, and existential dread between bites of Cap’n Crunch, said, “Meh. Probably nothing.”

Now I’m fifty. The wall is still there, metaphorically speaking, though these days it looks less like the edge of the universe and more like a mirror. And I’m left with the same question, rephrased by half a century of experience: what’s real, and what’s just the story I’ve been telling myself?

Enter Solipsism: that slippery old philosophical eel, suggests that I can only be sure of one thing: my own consciousness. Everything else—every person, every planet, every dog, every galaxy—is merely a construct in the theater of my mind. To take solipsism seriously for more than a few minutes is to either go insane or become a philosopher. At fifty, I’m neither (though I flirt with both).

The thought experiment sounds absurd until you realize how fragile “reality” actually is. Every perception is filtered through senses that evolved for survival, not truth. The photons bouncing off a chair strike my retina, get converted into electrochemical signals, and then my brain—essentially a lump of self-electrified, salt-powered meat—tells me a story: chair. But it could be anything, really. A matrix of code. A shared hallucination. Or just a dream.

And that’s before we even factor in the simulation hypothesis—the mathematically plausible notion that we’re all living inside some unfathomably complex computer model created by a civilization so advanced they probably consider us a nostalgia project. Sim City on crack. A cosmic Tamagotchi. Press A to feed your human.

It’s a strange comfort, actually. If the universe is simulated, then turning fifty doesn’t mean decay—it means an update patch. Maybe a performance boost. Maybe the rendering on my knee joints and lower back finally stabilizes.

Fifty years. That sounds impressive until you remember what a “year” actually is: one complete orbit of a rocky planet around a star that’s not particularly special, in a galaxy that’s not particularly unique, in a universe that probably has more empty space than meaning. So when someone says, “You’ve made fifty trips around the sun,” I want to ask: compared to what?

Age is a mathematical construct wearing the mask of significance. It’s a unit of measurement, not a verdict. The fact that we base so much of our identity, our worth, and our sense of time on this repetitive solar twirl is absurdly human. Like measuring emotional growth with a ruler.

And yet, there’s something grounding about the ritual. It’s how we make sense of entropy. Counting orbits gives the illusion of progress. We’re not just decaying organisms; we’re travelers. The sun is both clock and compass, the celestial metronome by which we dance our brief, confused waltz (or Funky Chicken) through the void.

I came of age in the liminal space between analog and digital, idealism and irony. We were the latchkey kids of the Cold War, raised on Star Wars and WarGames, perpetually waiting for either salvation or annihilation. Our cultural milestones were a strange collage: MTV, Reaganomics, grunge, the Challenger explosion, a Commander in Chief who didn’t inhaled, rotary phones giving way to pagers giving way to flip phones giving way to an app that knows when you’re sad before you do.

Gen-X never really bought into the myth of progress. We were too busy watching our parents’ marriages dissolve and our presidents lie. We internalized distrust as both armor and identity. If the Boomers believed they could change the world, we assumed the world was a joke and leaned into the punchline. Cynicism was our faith, sarcasm our liturgy.

So when I hit fifty, I didn’t feel the panic of lost youth that previous generations described. I just shrugged and thought, Huh. Figures. The solipsist in me whispered that maybe I’d always been fifty, and the rest was just backstory—an elaborate prequel my mind generated to make the present feel earned.

My Catholic upbringing left me with a blueprint for meaning: sin, redemption, eternity, confession. The universe was a moral narrative, not a mystery. But like many recovering Catholics, I eventually traded ritual for reason, doctrine for doubt. I still light candles sometimes, though—mostly out of habit or to address a restroom-related incident. The stuff they put in blog posts nowadays, huh?

When you grow up believing that an omniscient being watches your every move, solipsism comes as a kind of relief. At least the observer is me. It’s not blasphemy—it’s self-referential efficiency. If the universe is a construct of consciousness, then maybe prayer is just a conversation between different versions of myself: the frightened child, the skeptical adult, the emerging elder. I always rationalized my internal narrative, fueled by the heady blend of external poverty and internalized synesthesia, with the presumption that it is OK to talk to yourself… you just should never talk back to yourself. Story still checks out at my half-century mark.

And yet… there are moments that break through even my most rigorous philosophical defenses. Watching my kids laugh uncontrollably at something absurd. The smell of rain on asphalt. The quiet ache of a song I’ve heard a thousand times that brings a long-lost pal back to the hurty part of my chest or the wet part of my eyes. These don’t feel like neural tricks. They feel shared. As if the universe—whether simulated or not—sometimes taps me on the shoulder and says, “Hey, I’m real enough. Now let’s go buy some grocery store sushi and eat it in the parking lot while we contemplate great mysteries before you have to drive your daughter to softball practice.”

The most unsettling part of turning fifty isn’t mortality—it’s multiplicity. At this point, I can see the branching paths of all the selves I might have been. The writer who stuck with fiction. The musician who never sold his guitar. The corporate version of me who retired early, spiritually empty but financially solvent. The teacher who stayed in the classroom for 30 years and never moved to the Dark Side of administration. The father who didn’t get it right. The friend I forgot to be.

In some universe, maybe those versions exist. Maybe they’re reading this now, wondering about me. Solipsism would say they’re all figments of my mind, but multiverse theory complicates the story. What if I’m the figment? What if I’m the one in someone else’s thought experiment?

The metacognitive twist, of course, is that the act of wondering might be the only thing that’s real. Consciousness reflecting on consciousness, folding in on itself like a cosmic origami swan. And not that cool one that “flaps” when you pull its tail.

The closer I inch toward retirement, the more surreal the concept becomes. Save money for a future that may not exist in a universe that may not be real? That’s commitment. Still, I contribute dutifully to my savings plan, because even simulated realities seem to penalize unpreparedness.

It’s strange, though, to imagine “retiring” from existence when you suspect existence might be the dream. Maybe, when the simulation ends, we don’t die—we just wake up. Maybe I’ll blink, stretch, and find myself at a cosmic coffee shop that looks predictably like that cute little one I stopped at one time in Lone Pine, CA… scrolling through alternate realities, muttering, “Wow, that one got dark around 2020.”

Or maybe none of this means anything, and that’s okay too. Meaning, like time, is a construct we build to keep the void at bay. If I can choose my own simulation, I’d like to fill it with art, laughter, and the occasional existential spiral—preferably with good lighting and better company.

At fifty, the face in the mirror is familiar and foreign at once. It’s an evolving artifact of time’s slow erosion. Each wrinkle is both data and story—a lived record of joy, confusion, sleeplessness, and sunscreen negligence (I have always been a freckly guy.) But beyond the physical, there’s something else: awareness watching itself.

The shadow of a believer in me still wants to believe there’s a soul behind the eyes. The solipsist says, “You’re just watching neurons watch neurons.” The Gen-Xer cracks a joke about flannel. All of them are probably right.

And yet, when I look long enough, the boundaries blur. Maybe I am the mirror. Maybe consciousness doesn’t live in the body but around it—diffused through the universe, reflecting itself in every sentient mind. Maybe reality is just one big feedback loop of awareness trying to remember itself. Even if it’s all in my head, it still feels real enough to matter. The laughter of friends, the sting of loss, the pain of longing, the tenderness of love—all data points in the illusion, yes, but what an illusion. If this is a simulation, it’s a heartbreakingly beautiful one.

And if everyone else is just a construct in my consciousness, they’re damn good actors. Their pain feels authentic, their joy contagious. Which means empathy, even if imaginary, still functions. That might be the moral kernel at the heart of solipsism: treat others well, even if they’re just pixels, because they’re the part of you you haven’t met yet.

So what does turning fifty mean in a meaningless universe? Maybe it’s simply a checkpoint—a chance to pause the simulation, examine the code, and decide whether to keep playing. Maybe it’s the moment when you realize the wall you feared as a child isn’t the edge of space—it’s the edge of certainty. Beyond it lies not nothingness, but wonder. If I live to be a hundred, I’m only halfway there. You start your journey in diapers, and maybe if you do it right, you end your journey wearing diapers. The Alpha and the Omega inexorably linked to shitting your pants. How delightful.

The metacognitive act—the thinking about thinking—doesn’t resolve the paradox. It just illuminates it. Maybe that’s the point. To live half a century and still marvel at the absurdity of being here at all.

If this is all happening inside my head, I hope I never wake up. The universe, real or not, has been generous in its confusion. And if I’m lucky enough to make it another fifty orbits—well, maybe by then I’ll finally have an answer.

Or maybe just better questions. After all, I only wrote this down because I’ve had a weird pain in my lung all day. And if tonight is the night I go exploring a Carlinian interpretation of what comes after death… at least I showed my work on this final math test.