50-60

Alt can become lighter when you turn fifty, because then you can finally breathe out. You are no longer young, and there is no need to even try. Many view this as the best decade of their lives. Not just can you life, you've also learned a lot of habits – at least you're on your way to it.
First and foremost, you are finally done with the old sin that has ridden man since the days of Abel and Cain: the habit of comparing himself to others. If not, at least it's time to start getting rid of it.
My friend the artist, clown and radioman Asbjørn Olsen puts it this way:
“To stop comparing yourself to others is at the heart of a good life. It is impossible, but must still be possible. Comparison creates unhappiness. In all areas, there are some who are more than you: nicer, younger, older, richer, wiser, more powerful, nicer, thinner, thicker. The list is as endless as life itself. ”
I think ninety percent of our misery comes from ourselves – an eternal voice that always criticizes you for what you are. Or rather, for what you for is. Self-torment, which never leads to gold and green forests, can only be learned with the help of thought. A decision of the will.

The Swedish poet Haakan Sandell said so to me during a deep dark winter, when we walked the empty, cold streets of Frogner in Oslo:
“There are two things that can bring about a fundamental improvement in people's lives. One is love, the other is a decision of the will. "
Life is – anyway – being in the space between what is and what should be.
On the whole, there are three main challenges you face at this age:
- To learn to compare themselves with others. It is an almost impossible process, but it is still necessary.
- Realizing that debt is your life and there are problems that cannot be solved, and goals are impossible to reach.
- To learn to grow old and thus not despise their own aging process.
You become more frail and are no longer as interesting as a sex object. If you manage to make "a will decision" about having a good life despite defeat and not fulfilling dreams, there is hope that you will still have a meaningful life.

I myself have, through will, decided that life would be good even though I had not achieved any of the goals I set myself as a young man. Why should I, even if it sounds sensible, be unhappy because I failed to be as successful, happy and rich as I dreamed?
I do not believe that the pain of what you did not get – a life project, a relationship – can be undone, by all means, not understand it that way. The grief cannot be denied. Everyone knows clowns. The question becomes: How can you live with grief? The heavy clouds in you that sometimes shadow the joy of being?
As written: Through a decision of will, and if you are extra lucky, through love.
What should you do when you have no love life, but would like to? You will do everything for love. There is no given meaning in the universe that some should have and others will not. If you haven't gotten a partner before, it's time now. Not least, many middle-aged men stroll around for years without anything happening on the sex or love front.
Love is almost impossible, and it's a wonder that anyone gets at all. But to passively relate to it is like believing in the world's worst myth. The notion that love should only happen by itself, as a miracle or religious revelation.
Get out of the house – and take the first step. There are enough women and men out there.
Do you feel lonely every now and then?

Everyone stands alone on the heart of the earth,
pierced by a sunbeam.
And suddenly it's evening.
- Salvadora Quasimodi, Italian poet.

loneliness is primarily a place where you work with your grief. The feeling for many, very difficult to reach, that lies beneath everything experienced discomfort. You must be happy if you can cry, because then you have contact with the grief; the very goal of all classical therapy, since being in pain releases. The pressure eases when the window opens and the fresh air seeps in.
Loneliness is a complicated feeling. You are redeemed from others, but at the same time free. Most people who come there have wanted it on one level. They have had a need to retire. At the same time, no one wants total solitude, whether it is a state of consciousness or harsh physical reality. If, as a fifty-year-old, you have never been or felt lonely, you are missing something essential in your character formation.
Loneliness is only abandoned when it is perceived as worse than socializing.
An obvious paradox is the so-called villagers, of which the religious literature is full. They are often monks or holy men who have moved out into the wilderness. The phenomenon still exists today, and some Russian monasteries have their own areas of contemplative solitude. The goal is always the spiritual and religious development it can offer.
But when I write "paradoxically," it's because someone knows he's sitting there, the lonely one. The monk's seclusion is a conscious social choice – and at any time he can go back to the others and the community.
A real recluse is never mentioned because no one knows he or she exists. Even Nietzsche's Zarathustra had to go down to the people again. Without them he would have been nothing – neither prophet nor superhuman.

The pressure eases when the window opens and the fresh air seeps in.

Loneliness has been linked to insight throughout human history, because in leaving the community, a knowledge only the encounter with yourself can provide. Author Andre Gide writes in The Immoral: "Everything new is created in solitude."
And think how right he is; what would the world have been without Moses 'stone tablets, the Buddha's and Jesus' respective desert walks, where they were forced to face the devils, here understood as the "erasing" sides of themselves. Desire, pleasure, greed and hatred were to be overcome.
But none of them stayed. Everyone came back. What people need is other people.

The fifties are the decade when you face the consequences of previous elections. For what you have done and have not done. Maybe you established a well-functioning family, but had to let go of the artist's dream. Or you were creative, but ended up poor and lonely. You may have said "no" to him who was peaceable, and now you regret it. You said yes to a job, but should have done something else.
The sum of the pluses and the minuses has set itself as an acknowledgment of consciousness – a sense of life. What is yours?
Sooner or later, you must decide that you have come home. Have to believe what happens the day you say: Here I will be, here I will live.