The Maths of Being an Older Dad (And Why I Do It Anyway)

I will be 62 when Ellie finishes secondary school.

I will be 64 when Sam does.

I do not know what condition I will be in at 62. My father was 62 when I was finishing school and he seemed, at the time, fine. He has since had a hip replacement and a small cardiac event, but he was fine at 62. Probably I will be fine at 62.

I think about this with some regularity. Not obsessively — I am not sitting in the corner running actuarial tables while the children eat breakfast — but with a steady, low-frequency awareness that I am doing something the timeline was not, strictly speaking, designed for.

I know the numbers. I ran them early. It is a very software-engineer thing to do when confronted with an uncertain system: find the parameters, map the edge cases, understand the range of outcomes.

The numbers

I was 40 when Ellie was born, 42 when Sam arrived.

Ellie will be 18 when I am 58. She will potentially finish university when I am 62. She might get married when I am, let's say, 70.

If Sam follows a similar timeline, he will finish university when I am 64.

Average life expectancy for a man in the UK is currently around 79. If I hit that number — which involves a range of variables I am trying to influence through sleep, exercise, and cutting coffee at 1pm, as previously documented — I will have seventeen years after Sam finishes university. More if I am lucky, fewer if I am not.

I will probably be at Ellie's wedding. I will probably see my grandchildren, if there are grandchildren. I will probably be alive and functional and present for most of the important things.

Probably.

When the maths becomes anxiety

The numbers are fine. The numbers are not the problem.

The problem is the middle-of-the-night version of the numbers, which is less calm and less probabilistic and more of a low-fidelity horror film in which I am not at things. This is the version that shows up when Sam has been awake since 3am and I am lying in the particular darkness that only exists at 4am with a brain that will not stop performing calculations.

The 4am version is not interested in average life expectancy. The 4am version skips straight to the tail risk. It finds the stories — the ones you read on forums, the ones where someone says "my dad was 62 and he didn't make it to my graduation" — and it holds them up as evidence.

I have been in this territory enough times to recognise it for what it is. Anxiety does not reason from evidence. It selects evidence to confirm the feeling it has already decided to produce. At 4am, with a toddler screaming three rooms away and a Body Battery reading of 28, the feeling it wants to produce is dread.

The useful thing I have learned is not to argue with it at 4am. Arguing with anxiety at 4am is like trying to debug code without your glasses: you will make things worse and feel stupid about it in the morning. The better approach is to observe it, note that it is happening, and wait for dawn.

At dawn the numbers are fine again.

The unexpected peace

Here is something I did not expect: the awareness of finite time, which I assumed would be predominantly distressing, has turned out to be mostly useful.

I was, in my late thirties, quite good at deferring things. Not dramatically — I wasn't deferring the important things, I had a career I was engaged with and a marriage I was committed to — but the smaller things, the quality-of-time things, the being-fully-present things, I was reasonably adept at scheduling for later.

Having children at 40 made later feel less abstract. Not in a morbid way, but in a clarifying way. The question "am I doing this well?" became more urgent, and more useful, because the answer had consequences I could actually feel.

I notice things I don't think I would have noticed at 30. Not because I am wiser, exactly, but because I have more context for how quickly the texture of things changes. I know that the phase Sam is in right now — loud, physical, comedic, completely unreasonable — will not last, because I watched Ellie move through it. I know that the specific weight of a sleeping four-year-old on your shoulder is something you will not be able to reconstruct later from memory. So I stay still longer than I need to.

This is the gift buried in the maths. The numbers make the time legible. And legible time is easier to inhabit fully.

Why I do it anyway

Because the question "is this a good idea?" arrived after the fact. Sam and Ellie are not ideas I evaluated and approved. They are people who exist and who I love with a completeness I was not prepared for.

But also because the maths, honestly examined, is not as frightening as the 4am version suggests. Most older parents are present for most of their children's lives. Most of the statistics are on your side. The particular anxiety of being an older parent — the awareness of time, the visibility of the gap between your age and theirs — is real, but it is not evidence of a problem. It is the friction of doing something slightly outside the expected order of things.

I would rather have the anxiety and have them than neither.

That is the honest version of why I do it anyway. It is not inspirational. It does not resolve into a lesson or a principle. It is just the truth, held up in daylight where it cannot do the 4am thing to me.

Most days, that is enough.