 Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday, so I just turned 40, which you'll be unsurprised to learn has led to a bit of existential naval gazing, but not with the conclusions that one might expect. So when I was younger, not just like in my teens, but also through my 20s, I thought of adulthood as like an ending. Like in my imagination, human life was this epic road trip that started when you were born and ended when you reached your destination, adulthood, and once you arrived at adulthood, you were never allowed to leave. To me, adulthood meant being weighed down with all these responsibilities. You have to mow the lawn and take your kids to soccer practice and pay your bills on time because you care about something called your credit score. And from what I could tell about adulthood, these responsibilities would sort of pin you down and prevent you from growing or changing, and you would just become a robot that fulfills obligations. You know, I thought it was like an existential death that came several decades before your actual physical death. So to delay the onset of adulthood and the metaphysical death that came with it, my strategy in my 20s was to keep my life very light and lean. Like one time I remember saying to a girl I was dating that if I needed to, I could pack my life up into my car in 15 minutes. She dumped me shortly thereafter. Now of course I couldn't pack up my wall of memorabilia in 15 minutes, let alone my whole life. And of course I'm gonna tell you that I was underestimating adulthood because I have to, right? Adults can't think of adulthood as a prison from which there is no earthly escape. We have to trick ourselves into thinking that we're having a great time and not at all being slowly strangled to death by homeowners association meetings. And who knows, maybe I am tricking myself, but for the record, I love being in a place that's hard to leave. I like having roots in a place and friends I've known for 25 years, and that wasn't possible 20 years ago because, you know, I hadn't been alive for 25 years. Now sometimes I do feel overwhelmed by the obligations of adulthood, but even so, I would not want to be 15 again or for that matter 25. I know that's easy for me to say because I've been incredibly lucky in both my professional and personal lives, but I know a lot of middle-aged people who are leading a wide variety of lives, and I honestly think that my experience is more the rule than the exception. Adulthood is so underrated, but more importantly, it turns out that adulthood is not a destination. Like, I don't think my life has grown less interesting as it has grown more settled. I used to think that nothing stank of failure quite like living in the suburbs with your spouse and your two kids, that such an existence was a tremendous waste of what Mary Oliver called your one wild and precious life. But I find it 40 that my life feels wilder and more precious than ever. That's not to say that my way of being an adult is the only good way, or that it's right for everyone. It's just that it's right for me, and if this is 40, I'll take it. Thanks so much to everybody for their birthday wishes and turtle cakes. Three more things. First, look, look, look, look, look, I have finished signing all 200,000 copies, and the boxes are gone. Those 200,000 sheets of paper are now at the printer in Virginia being bound into copies of turtles all the way down. Amazon and Barnes and Noble.com have both sold out of their allotment of signed copies, but there are still lots of other ways to get them more info at probablysignedturtles.com. Secondly, my video next week will be me reading the first chapter of Turtles All The Way Down. That video will be over four minutes, but that is not punishable. There are precedents set in 2011 and 2008 when I read the first chapters of The Fault in Our Stars in Paper Towns. And lastly, I want to say to our friends and viewers affected by flooding in Texas and Louisiana, and also in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh that we are thinking of you. Nerdfighters, if you're able, I hope you'll join me in donating to relief organizations. There are links in the doobly-doo below. Hank, I will see you on Friday.