I AM at least half way down the path of life today. It’s my birthday. I’ve just turned 50 years old. If I’m lucky, and medical science keeps on keeping on, then I might, with a good wind behind me, have another 50 years to go. If I’m not lucky … well, who knows. Twenty-five on average? Thirty tops?

I haven’t liked birthdays since my childhood. Once you hit 18, they’re just a way of marking another step towards the grave. The presents and champagne are nice – but not the countdown to oblivion. I can do without that.

So I tend to ignore my own birthday. But 50 feels gravely momentous – no pun intended. The number 50 gives me severe intimations of my own mortality. The Great Beyond beckons with bony fingers.

I think I’m supposed to take stock of my life at this point – weigh myself in the balance like one of those ancient Egyptian souls being judged for the afterlife on a set of divine scales.

Like most people, I hope I’ve done more good than harm in the world. I’m not dumb enough or a big enough liar to pretend I haven’t done bad in the world at times. But I think the nice things probably outweigh the wicked. Probably. Who can judge themselves honestly?

I’ve at least consciously tried to be good most of my life. That doesn’t mean I’ve succeeded, though. I do realise when I’ve messed up, however, and made mistakes or hurt people – I don’t lie to myself about that. And I’ve always done my best to admit my failings as I go along.

So maybe St Peter, sitting up there in his big counting house in the sky, will be inclined to forgiveness. Or at least turn a blind eye to the many errors of a bumbling, flawed, petty human who was mostly just making it up as he went along, and hoping for the best.

It’s not just myself I’ve been tentatively, unconsciously, measuring, though, as this birthday approached. The gravity of that half century milestone looming before me has made me measure the world as well. It’s certainly easier – less personally painful, at least – to judge the world rather than your own soul.

Is the world a worse place or a better place since I came squalling into it on February 3, 1970? Maybe I should start by thinking about the parents who brought me into this world in the first place.

I find it strange to think that when I was born the Second World War had only been over for 25 years. In 1945, my mother had already been born, and my father’s birth was just a few years away.

To a child born today, my 1945 is their 1995. If my parents were the products of an era of nuclear bombs and death camps, the parents of a child born today are products of Cool Britannia and the dawn of the internet. As a crude way of measuring society, those changes look pretty good.

And what of the era I was born into, compared to the one I now live in, with my greying beard and burgeoning belly?

Atrocities in Vietnam, Nixon in the White House, the atomic paranoia of the Cold War, terror and religious murder in Ulster, genocide in Cambodia, famine in Biafra, eastern Europe under Soviet occupation, civil war in Lebanon, war in Afghanistan, repression and dictatorship in South America, horror in Idi Amin’s Uganda – these were the stories of the seventies.

The three-day week, power black-outs, inner city riots, racism, the rise of the National Front, urban decay, mass unemployment, heroin, AIDS – these were the stories at home as the seventies progressed and turned into the eighties.

With Brexit and Trump, the rise of populism in the west, and bloodshed in the Middle East, we think we’ve never had it so bad. That’s not true. It’s bad – has it ever been anything but bad on the face of planet Earth, for poor creatures like us? – but it’s better than it was.

There are reasons to be cheerful, or, at least there are reasons not curl up into a ball and scream. Not so long ago, more than 20 million children died each year. Today, the number is around 6.3 million. More people are literate. Far fewer live in extreme poverty. Fewer go hungry. Fewer die in wars.

Humanity has taken incremental baby steps forward. Of course, these tiny advancements might all be for nothing. The planet might burn to a climatic crisp. Some mad nuked-up leader might blow us all to smithereens. A pandemic might come and kill us all. An asteroid might bid us all goodnight. But at least we’re conscious of those threats, and our brightest minds are trying to do something to mitigate it all.

Progress has been made. But all we do is lament and wail as if we’re the only people to live through times of stress and fear and uncertainty. We should really try walking in the shoes of our grandparents, a century ago.

Perhaps, it’s social media which makes us seem such a bleating, tremulous bunch. It allows everyone to groan their confected concerns into the ether. Social media gives the impression we’re all in a state of terrorised grief and shock. We aren’t. We get on with our lives, pay the bills, gets the kids to school, go to work. Eat, sleep, repeat.

The world is not the aching, unremitting horrorshow, we say it is. Life can be monstrous and cruel and blind on a grand scale – wiping out innocents and destroying thousands of us in a moment – or it can be vicious in forensic detail, tormenting individual humans like God tormenting Job. But it can also be good. It can even be fun.

All that matters is the friends and family who you love and who love you in return. If you have those, life is okay.

For me at 50, life certainly appears more of an absurd comedy than a tragedy. People suffer in absurd comedies for sure, it’s just that unlike in a tragedy no-one knows why. And what can you do with that but laugh – even if the laughter sounds a little horrible when you hear it.

Neil Mackay is Scotland’s Columnist of the Year