In a birthday video for Renetto/Paul, Tom Guarriello, Ph.D. reflects on turning 40 and the changing nature of age, time, and life stages. He contrasts "clock time" with "lived time," noting how perceived time can stretch or shrink depending on context. Guarriello argues that life is no longer a linear progression of fixed stages—childhood, marriage, career, retirement—because modern society recycles past experiences and discards rigid expectations. He expresses a personal desire to keep working past traditional retirement age, emphasizing that his expertise keeps him engaged. He observes generational differences, where some younger people live as if they are older due to adherence to staged life models, while others embrace a more fluid approach. The phrase "40 is the new 20" is presented as a cultural shorthand capturing these shifts. Overall, the monologue blends a birthday greeting with philosophical musings on aging, time elasticity, and evolving social norms.
Chapters
Hey Renetto, happy birthday, man! 40 on Friday, huh? Well, you know, I'm supposed to be working here and doing things, but I had to make another video to respond to yours because, you know, you hit the nail square right on the head. 40 is nothing nowadays, right? I mean, 40 is like nothing. I'm gonna be 60 next August. I'm gonna be 60, and it's hard for me to remember what my life was like at 40, but it wasn't what it is now. It's really different, and I think the difference has to do with the way time has changed and the way we've changed. You know, time, you know, you live time. There's clock time, but clock time is time, you know, is different than lived time. You know, lived time shrinks and expands. You know, we know that from like, you know, "Watched pot never boils," and you know, when you're waiting for something, how long the time seems to go, or how fast time seems to move when you're enjoying yourself and doing something. How could that be? Wow. You know, months fly by, years fly by. Now, at my age, years feel like months. Years feel like months. Used to feel. So what is— I mean, so time, time is elastic and our lives are not linear. What do I mean our lives are not linear? Lives used to be linear, right? You lived through stages in life and then you passed through those stages and you went on to other stages and it was like in computers and in other kinds of engineering things, they talk about things being a one-way gate. You know, you go through them and you can't go back because the gate kind of locks, locks from one side and you can't go back. Time used to be like that, and stages of our lives used to be like that. You'd go through childhood and then you were done with childhood. Well, we're never done with childhood nowadays. We're always going back to childhood, doing things, playing things, fooling around with things. So, so like, if, and if the past is different then the future is also different. Because, you know, the future used to have really specific tasks assigned to it. You know, like in different stages you were supposed to do different stuff. You know, you're supposed to get married by a certain age. You were supposed to, you know, have your real job by a certain age. You were supposed to have kids by a certain age. And, you know, none of that stuff is relevant to people anymore. And particularly when you get to be my age and people start saying, well, it's getting to be close to time to retire, you know. And, uh, I think, I don't want to retire. I don't want to retire. Retire from my work? No. Uh, but the kind of work that I do, I'm just feeling like I'm getting to where I know something about the work that I do, and So I don't want to retire from it. I want to keep doing it as long as I can do it. So all those expectations about the future are different. All of our sense of the past is different. And so that makes the present different because the present now is aiming at different things in the future, picking up different things from the past, and it's like, it's dynamic. It's not this static linear thing that it used to be. So, so, so time is no longer linear. We keep going back and recycling things from our past and pick them up in different ways, and that keeps us fresh. Many of us anyway, not all of us. Some continue to march along. You know, I have friends who are younger than me chronologically but way older than me in terms of the way they live their lives, because they're still living their lives in that kind of staged life way. And the other thing about staged life way is that you're always looking for the future. It's always gonna be something else. What it is now is hardly ever what they want it to be. It's always what it's gonna be that is what they're looking for. So, you know, I think you're right. I think, I don't know, 40 is the new 20, or, you know, these, these are, um, uh, funny little things that we make up to capture something important though about our experience of ourselves and one another. So, you know, it ain't the same as it used to be anymore, man. And I for one am very happy because if I had to be 60 back in the days when my father was 60, oh man, it'd be ridiculous. Well, happy birthday, Paul. Take it easy, man. Bye-bye.
