Everything seems fine until you're about 40. Then something is

When Martin Amis said, “Everything seems fine until you’re about 40. Then something is definitely beginning to go wrong. And you look in the mirror with your old habit of thinking, ‘While I accept that everyone grows old and dies, it’s a funny thing, but I’m an exception to that rule,’” he spoke with the piercing irony of a man confronting mortality not as an idea, but as a presence. His words, though laced with humor, are a meditation on the great awakening that comes when youth’s illusion begins to fade — the realization that time, that patient and indifferent sculptor, has been at work on us all along. Beneath the wit lies a lament, and beneath the lament, a truth as ancient as humanity itself: every soul believes in its own immortality until the mirror disagrees.

The origin of this quote can be traced to Amis’s reflections on aging, a theme that haunted his later work. Known for his sharp intellect and biting prose, he often explored the paradoxes of human vanity — how the mind, brilliant and self-aware, can still be a fool before the laws of nature. In this line, Amis captures the precise moment when self-deception meets the undeniable. Youth carries with it a secret arrogance: the belief that decline is for others. We see old age as distant, almost mythical. But at last, the clock’s hands reach us, and the body — once obedient, radiant, immortal in its vigor — begins to whisper the truth we have long ignored.

This is not a cry of despair but of recognition. It is the voice of one who has lived long enough to see through the illusions that once sustained him. The funny thing, as Amis calls it, is that our resistance to mortality is both absurd and profoundly human. Every civilization has told this story in its own tongue. The Egyptians built pyramids to defy time. The Greeks sang of Achilles, whose choice between glory and longevity became the archetype of human defiance against decay. Yet even Achilles, radiant and doomed, could not escape the fate he sought to outrun. We, like him, know the truth — and yet cannot help believing that somehow, mysteriously, it will not apply to us.

The ancient philosophers faced this contradiction with stoic grace. Marcus Aurelius, emperor and thinker, wrote, “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” Unlike Amis’s wry astonishment, Aurelius offered calm acceptance: that to live is to die in motion, and that wisdom lies not in denial, but in alignment with the eternal rhythm. Yet even he, surrounded by the grandeur of empire, could not have been immune to the mirror’s accusation. For knowledge does not still the heart’s rebellion. We may understand death, but understanding does not make it less personal.

Amis’s image of the mirror is particularly haunting. It is the oracle of our mortality, the silent judge that reflects not only the face, but the years that have lived within it. Once, the mirror was an ally — a confirmation of youth, of possibility. But one day, it becomes a messenger. We gaze into it as we once did, expecting the familiar, and find instead a stranger who carries traces of our parents, the fatigue of time, the shadows of experience. It is then that the illusion of exception crumbles. The mirror, like truth itself, is both cruel and kind — cruel in its honesty, kind in its refusal to lie.

Yet there is a strange beauty in this disillusionment. To see one’s own mortality is to awaken to the fullness of life. Those who still believe themselves immortal live shallowly, thinking there will always be time for forgiveness, creation, and love. But the one who has seen age’s slow advance, who has felt the weight of years in the bones and in the breath — that person understands the sacredness of each remaining day. The irony that Amis speaks of — the funny thing — is, in truth, a blessing disguised as melancholy. It is life’s way of teaching us to be present, to cherish the transient, to make peace with the passing.

Consider Leonardo da Vinci, who, near the end of his life, looked upon his own work and said, “I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.” This was no failure of skill, but of expectation — the eternal longing for perfection against the boundaries of time. Like Amis, Leonardo felt the sting of the human condition: that no matter how much we achieve, we remain tethered to our mortality. But both men, in their own ways, turned that realization into art. For what is great art, if not the defiance of death through beauty and meaning?

So, my children, hear the lesson hidden within Amis’s humor: to live wisely is to remember that you are not the exception. Look in the mirror not with despair, but with reverence. Each line upon the face is a scripture of your becoming, each gray hair a mark of battles endured. Do not fight time; dance with it. Do not curse the decay of the body; honor it as proof that you have lived. Accept the universality of mortality, and you will find freedom from fear. For when the heart no longer clings to the illusion of eternity, it finally learns to inhabit the moment — fully, gratefully, and without regret.

Thus, as Martin Amis teaches through his laughter, the joke of aging is not cruel, but divine. It reminds us that our lives, fragile and brief, are precious precisely because they end. The mirror’s truth, though humbling, is the beginning of wisdom — the moment when we cease pretending to be exceptions, and begin, at last, to be human.