Fortysomething in Spain lays out plan to live on minimum income and travel to Indochina

Fortysomething in Spain lays out plan to live on minimum income and travel to Indochina

There is a paradox that repeats in every generation, and this time it comes with a locker room photo: a man pushing forty who says he looks better than ever, claims he gets more attention than at twenty, and yet curses not having been born in 2010. His complaint is not aesthetic, it is economic. At 16 and 188 centimetres tall, he says, he would have "the whole damn manliness ahead of him". Now he has to settle for a second youth, the gym and twenty-something lads.

The trigger was, according to his account, a photo in the gym locker room, in boxer briefs, pumped arms and "showing off hard". Two months of eating like a pig and a well-lit mirror were enough, always by his version, for the post to top **200 reactions** and **50 comments** afterwards. In the comments section, some second cousins renamed him "El Wardaespaldas". Far from taking offence, he reads it as a "budding" self-esteem boost.

From complex to life plan: IMV, gym and Indochina

The conversation quickly drifts towards the economic model. The protagonist's thesis is that the "slaves" who pay social contributions will fund his contemplative life. He will vote "for Pedro with both hands", collect the ingreso mínimo vital (Spain's minimum living income), have his fill of sens and, with what he saves from the benefit, go **to Indochina for three months in the winter of 2028**. It is the contemporary version of the Greek ideal another participant evokes: eat, work out, philosophise and enjoy, while the slaves work.

The problem is that the maths does not add up. The IMV does not fund three months in Southeast Asia or a jam-packed Instagram. The gap between the story and the payslip is the same one separating the "alpha male" from the man who brags that a 21-year-old Czech gave him "a good shag with a hairy stud" in a residence overlooking the Danube. Virility, in his definition, is something else: two males "fused, giving themselves to each other". One school of analysis buys it; another dismisses it in two lines.

The forties crisis dressed up as a second youth

The counterattack comes from the age flank. "You obese, grey-haired fifty-something chasing young blonds at the gym and making a fool of yourself," sums up one comment. Another verdict: "The forties crisis is hitting you hard." And a more surgical one: "You old guys trying to relive your youth are lost souls, you have to live each stage in its moment."

The protagonist does not deny it. He reframes it. He admits that in his twenties he enslaved himself "out of shyness and stupidity" and that now he wants to collect what he lost. At bottom, it is a thesis about the opportunity cost of youth: whoever spent it working reaches forty with money and no time; whoever spent it living arrives with no money and just as much time. The mirror photo is the attempt to prove there is still room left.

The résumé nobody asks for: bixero and apelero

Between the praise and the insults, a subtext of vocabulary slips in. One participant asks what "bixero" means; another tells him to find out "tonight in the dark room". The term, tied to certain LGBT community slang, is used both as a thrown weapon and as a wink. The conversation jumps from the gym to the closet with an ease that says a lot about the tone: nobody here is scandalised, but everyone has a label ready.

The protagonist closes with a defence of pleasure as a philosophical category: "It is an ecstasy of physical and philosophical pleasure fit only for superior beings." The others, he says, are not up to it. Arrogance is the last resort of a man who knows the mirror will not always be there.

How many of those who today boast of a second youth will have the photo, the income or the nerve to show it when the third one arrives?