Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

PUNCTURED & DEAD DREAMS. 

Punctured Dreams, Dead Dreams, and a Birthday Game Called Life.

What men over fifty say when someone finally asks, and what to do once they have said it.

I attended a friend’s 50th birthday recently. The birthday man is permanently seventeen when it comes to games and pranks. He is fun, and he loves fun and he is not Peter Pan.  So he waited, with the patience of a strategist, until the guests were somewhere between tipsy and gone, and some were high on something, before he introduced a game he called Life. The rules were simple. Three questions, answered in turn. Every pause between answers cost you a drink.

The three questions.
Q1. Now that you are 50 or older, which of your dreams have come true?
Q2. Which of your dreams are punctured? Zine puncture. The tyre is still on the rim, but it has lost air.
Q3. Which of your dreams are dead? Zifile. Dood. Not even a Jesus – Lazarus moment is coming, and the only honest response is radical acceptance.


The birthday man would answer last, as agreed. His best friend of fifty years wanted to go first, and he wanted to start with Q3. He did what he always does when he drinks: wenza adume ngazo. He cried. The question knocked him out before he could find a single word. And his best friend, who has known him for half a century, had already brought tissues. He knew. That is not a small thing. That is a bromance with a supply chain. With our opening batsman retired hurt, and his nervous system not due to regulate itself until some time the following afternoon, someone else had to take strike. I have been thinking about that game ever since. About what men our age say when finally asked, about what we do with the answers, and about why it took alcohol, cannabis and a prankster to get us to say them.

First, the Arithmetic of Fifty.
I am 52. Stats SA’s 2026 mid-year estimates put life expectancy at birth at 65.5 years for South African men and 71.0 for women. That is a real recovery: male life expectancy fell to around 59 during the COVID years and has climbed back every year since. But the gap between us and the women we live with remains five and a half years, and the women are not the ones driving it. My first instinct on reading 65.5 was the one many men have. If we die at 65, then midlife in South Africa is 32.5, and fifty is not the middle of anything. It is old age with a gym contract. We should stop calling it midlife and give it an honest name.

I still want the new name. But the arithmetic behind it is wrong, and it is wrong in a way worth understanding. Life expectancy at birth is an average across everyone born, including the babies who do not reach five, the young men lost on our roads and in our streets, and the thousands taken by HIV before treatment arrived. A man who has already reached 50 has survived all of those. His expected age at death is higher than the birth average, not the same as it. The number that tells you how long a newborn will live does not tell you how long you will live. You have already paid some of the toll. The more sobering number is not how long, but how well. The WHO estimates that South African men can expect about 51.7 years of full health from birth, and that a man who reaches 60 can expect about 10.9 further years in full health. Look at those together. The average South African man will spend more than a decade of his life ill or disabled, and the healthy years after 60 are roughly a decade, not a retirement brochure. The instruction hidden in those numbers is blunt: get to 60, and get there healthy, because the healthy years are the ones you get to use.

The number that tells you how long a newborn will live does not tell you how long you will live. You have already paid some of the toll.
So what do we call this season? The formal English word for someone in their fifties is quinquagenarian, which sounds like a disease you catch from Latin. isiXhosa and isiZulu do not have a single word for it, and I think that is instructive. We do not name the decade; we name the man. Awusemdala. Umdala. Tata. Bhuti. Tatomkhulu. The title is conferred by the people around you, not by the calendar. My working English name for it is the sorting years: the season when a man moves from gathering to sorting, from collecting dreams to deciding which ones are still his.

Seeing in 3D.
Something else happens at this age, and the game exposed it. I have started to see myself in 3D. And I see other people in 3D too, no longer as the flat 2D figures of my youth, heroes, and  victims, villains, successes and failures. Everyone is flawed. Everyone is grey. Everyone has a punctured tyre somewhere. Some do not even have a spare wheel.  At 52 I also know for certain that you bring your own weather to the braai. The mood of the evening is not something that happens to you; it is something you carry in.

That is why I have grown wary of the Certain. Certain young people, and certain adults too, who speak with total confidence about how life works. The Certain are certain about: 

“3 things you need or should know to succeed, God spoke to me, I do not know who needs to hear this” 

What the f**ck!. Their certainty is a sign of over-confidence, at times arrogance dressed as motivational talk, not a sign of competence, and certainly and not of character. Only bad writers think they are good. I made a version of this argument in Odogwu!, drawing on Cameron Anderson’s research showing that overconfident people are often granted status they have not earned. The sorting years are when you stop granting it, including to your younger self.

What Men Over Fifty Actually Say.
No one has run a national survey of this particular drinking game, so treat what follows for what it is: ten themes I would expect any circle of fifty-something South African men to produce, drawn from the research on midlife and from the patterns I see in men’s work. They are grouped by the question they tend to answer.

Notice the imbalance. Q1 gets three themes, Q2 gets four, and Q3 gets three. Men over fifty have more punctures than funerals. That is good news, and it is also the problem, because most of us treat both the same way. We either pump every flat tyre forever, or we declare everything dead out of exhaustion. The skill of this season is telling the difference.

Punctured or Dead? The Science of Telling the Difference.
Psychology has a surprisingly precise language for what the birthday game was probing.
– Developmental deadlines. Jutta Heckhausen’s life-span theory of control argues that many goals come with biological and social deadlines. Before the deadline, the healthy strategy is to pursue the goal hard. After it, the healthy strategy is to let go and redirect. In one well-known study, women who had passed the age where childbearing was realistic and who had disengaged from that goal fared better than those who kept striving. The deadline is the line between Q2 and Q3.
– Tenacity and flexibility. Jochen Brandtstädter distinguishes two modes of coping. Assimilative coping changes your situation to fit your goals: you train harder, save more, try again. Accommodative coping changes your goals to fit your situation: you revise what counts as success. His research found that accommodative flexibility tends to grow with age and protects against depression. A punctured dream calls mainly for the first mode. A dead one calls for the second.
– Letting go, then picking up. Carsten Wrosch, Michael Scheier and colleagues showed that the ability to disengage from unattainable goals predicts better wellbeing and even fewer physical symptoms. But they found a second ingredient that is easy to miss: re-engagement. Letting go only helps when the freed energy is invested in a new goal. A buried dream with nothing planted in the grave just becomes a hole.
– Lost possible selves. Laura King and Joshua Hicks studied what happens to the people we once expected to become. Being able to describe a lost self in rich detail was associated with greater maturity. Still being preoccupied with it was associated with lower wellbeing. In other words, you should be able to tell the story of the dead dream vividly, while it no longer runs your day.

The Puncture Test: is this dream punctured or dead?
Q1. Is the deadline real (biological or structural), or did I invent it at 25?
Q2. If I gave this dream my full effort for the next three years, is success still realistically possible?
Q3. Is it the dream that is dead, or only its form? The dream of being a professional athlete is dead at 52. The dream of mastery in my body is not. I did Hyrox with my nephew this year.
Q4. Who else is paying for me to keep pumping this tyre?
Q5. If I let it go, what would the energy be spent on instead?

Why It Took a Drinking Game?
I want to be fair to the birthday man. He knew his friends. He knew that men of our generation rarely answer these questions sober, in daylight, with our names attached. Indoda ayikhali. Men do not cry. So he built a structure where crying was permitted because it could be blamed on the brandy. Claude Steele and Robert Josephs called one of alcohol’s effects alcohol myopia: it narrows attention to what is most immediate and most emotional, and weakens the inhibitions that normally hold it back. That is why the man with the tissues-ready friend was knocked out by Q3 before he could speak. The feeling arrived without its usual bodyguard.

But notice what the rules actually rewarded. Every pause cost a drink. The pause is exactly where reflection happens. A game designed to open men up quietly punished them for thinking before they spoke, and the disclosures that come out at midnight often have nowhere to go at breakfast. I am not diagnosing my friend. I have argued in Diagnosis by Group Chat that we should describe behaviour rather than label people. I am describing a pattern that many of us will recognise: for too many men, alcohol is the only permission slip for tears.

A game designed to open men up quietly punished them for pausing. The pause is where the thinking happens.

So here is my amendment to the rules, for anyone who wants to play the sober version. Every pause earns a sip of water, and the circle waits. Nobody rescues the silence with a joke. And the person who brought the tissues is thanked out loud, because that friend is the real answer to Q1.

How to Answer Without Dodging
1. Speak in 3D. Do not give the curated LinkedIn answer. If a dream is punctured, say where the nail went in. I wanted financial freedom by 50. I am still grinding, but the patches are holding.
2. Separate dead from defeated. Declaring a dream dead is not a confession of failure. It is triage. Radical acceptance, in Marsha Linehan’s sense, is not approval. It is simply refusing to fight reality while the clock runs.
3. Name the grief properly. Kenneth Doka called it disenfranchised grief: loss that society does not recognise as worth mourning. A dream is exactly that kind of loss. Nobody sends flowers when the business you never started finally dies.
4. Answer Q1 as seriously as Q3. Men will spend twenty minutes on a dead dream and two seconds on a living one. Do not rush past what went right.

For punctured dreams: patch, re-inflate, re-route
A puncture means the structure is still there. Adjust the timeline, change the vehicle, or reduce the load. Health punctures are the most urgent, because the WHO numbers above say the healthy decade after 60 is the one that makes every other dream possible. If the knees say no to running, the heart still says yes to walking, cycling and swimming. If the nest egg is punctured, revisit what enough means, which I wrote about in Kwanele. You may need less status to enjoy the braai than you thought.

For dead dreams: hold a funeral
We are a nation that knows how to bury people. We have the tent, the programme, the tea, the speeches, the long drive home. We have no ritual at all for burying a dream. Michael Norton and Francesca Gino found that people who performed rituals after a loss reported less grief, even when the rituals were simple and private. So make one. Write the dream’s obituary. Say out loud what it gave you while it was alive. Then, following Wrosch, plant something in the grave: name the new goal that will receive the energy the dead dream was consuming.
And watch the story you tell afterwards. Dan McAdams distinguishes redemption sequences, where a bad event leads to something good, from contamination sequences, where a good thing is spoiled by what followed. Men who tell their lives in redemption sequences show higher generativity and wellbeing. The dead dream is a fact. The sequence you place it in is a choice.

Holding Achieved Dreams, and Using Them for Good
Achieved dreams are the evidence that you are competent, not merely confident. But they are dangerous if they become trophies. In The Trophy Cannot Pay Rent, I  argued that recognition which is not converted into something useful simply sits on a shelf.
– Turn trophies into tools. If you achieved stability, lend it. Back a younger man’s plan. Be the reference, the introduction, the quiet investor. That is Erikson’s generativity and it is the reason CMB and African Men Care exist.
– Let achievement produce gratitude, not pride. Gratitude keeps you in 3D. Pride flattens you back into 2D, the hero of your own poster.
– Spend your discipline on your body. Whatever discipline got you the house, the degree or the promotion, redirect it to the next decade of health. You built the house. Now live long enough, and well enough, to enjoy the view.

The Life Game Audit: play it with yourself this week
1. Write three dreams that came true. Next to each, write the name of one person who helped.
2. Write your punctured dreams. For each, name the nail and one patch you can apply in the next 90 days.
3. Write your dead dreams. For each, write a one-line obituary and the new goal that will inherit its energy.
4. Choose one achieved dream and decide how you will lend it to someone younger this year.
5. Tell one trusted  friend your answers without a drink in your hand. Then ask for his.

Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu
A person is a person through other people. The game worked because it was played in a circle. Dreams usually die alone, in a car at a red robot or awake at 3am. But at that party, they were buried in company, and one man’s grief was held by a friend who had brought tissues before anyone else knew they would be needed. That is the answer I keep coming back to. The best achieved dream on the table that night was not a house, a title or a bank balance. It was fifty years of friendship, sitting on the couch, holding out a tissue.

My name, Mzamo, means try. At 52 I have dreams that came true, dreams with punctures, and dreams that are dead. I intend to keep trying on the first two, to bury the third with dignity, and to play this game again, sober, with the men I love.

Sources and notes
– Statistics South Africa, Mid-Year Population Estimates 2026 (P0302). World Health Organization healthy life expectancy (HALE) estimates for South Africa.
– Heckhausen, Wrosch & Fleeson (2001), Psychology and Aging, on developmental deadlines.

– Brandtstädter & Renner (1990), Psychology and Aging, on assimilative and accommodative coping.
– Wrosch, Scheier, Miller, Schulz & Carver (2003), Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, on goal disengagement and re-engagement.
– King & Hicks (2007), American Psychologist, on lost possible selves. – – – – McAdams (2006), The Redemptive Self.
– Steele & Josephs (1990), American Psychologist, on alcohol myopia. Linehan on radical acceptance.

– Doka (1989), Disenfranchised Grief. Norton & Gino (2014), Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, on rituals and grief.
Erikson on generativity.

– Anderson et al. (2012), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, on overconfidence and status.
– Related Between Thoughts posts: Ukuguga Yinyhweba; Ukuzisola; Isiva Asilibali; Kwanele; How to Let Go Without Getting Bitter About the Time You Stayed; The Trophy Cannot Pay Rent; Odogwu!; Diagnosis by Group Chat; The Giver Has No Stop Button; I Run Before They Run Me; Hyrox Lessons for Life.
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Dr. Mzamo Masito

Between Thoughts – Intellectual Musings

Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table.