Bernard O'Shea — The Dad Bod Diaries: My five-step guide to taking yourself less seriously

Rethinking the dad bod jokes, I’m starting to see that always looking on the light side of life might be the only way forward

'The dad bod jokes, the belly, the running commentary on my own slow physical decline — it's not just material. It's a pre-emptive strike.' Picture: iStock

I was standing in the green room after The Late Late Show last week, jacket still on, and my mum texted me: “You’re very hard on yourself.” She meant it kindly.

I texted back something deflecting and funny, because that’s what I do, and we both laughed, and I thought about it the whole way home.

She was right, of course. The dad bod jokes, the belly, the running commentary on my own slow physical decline — it’s not just material. It’s a pre-emptive strike. Get there first, take the sting out, move on.

I’ve been doing it for so long, I’m not always sure where the joke ends and the actual belief begins.

This was supposed to be my big transformative year. So far it’s been more ‘lightly rearranged’. As Beckett put it — and I think about this more than is probably healthy — “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Not transformed. Not fixed. Just still going.

It turns out taking yourself less seriously might be the only engine that keeps restarting.

Here’s what I’ve worked out so far.

One. You’re not the main character. Sit with that for a minute.

Nobody is thinking about you as much as you are. That thing you said at a work do four years ago that still wakes you up at 3am? Gone. Completely gone. Everyone else is running their own internal director’s commentary, their own highlight montage of humiliations, their own list of things they should have said differently.

You are a supporting role in most people’s lives, and, truthfully, once you really accept that, it’s one of the greatest forms of relief available to a middle-aged person. You stop performing. You start existing. The kitchen — and why you walked into it — is still a mystery, but at least you’re not doing it for an audience.

Two. Lower the bar. No, lower than that.

We’ve been sold the idea that everything is optimisable — mornings, bodies, mindsets, routines. In reality, getting out of the car without pulling something is a genuine win some days.

You don’t need to be your best self every day. Your ‘adequate enough’ self has gotten you this far and deserves more credit than it gets. This isn’t surrender. It’s holding the door open when things don’t go to plan, which — if your life-changing year looks anything like mine — will be most of the time. You don’t stop trying. You just stop treating every shortfall like evidence of something terminal.

Three. Make yourself the joke. But know what you’re actually doing.

If your belly arrives into a room a few seconds ahead of you, acknowledge it. If you’re out of breath tying your shoes, narrate it like a live sporting event. I’ve been doing this my whole career, and I’m only now being honest about the full picture.

Yes, it’s a release valve. Yes, it takes the sting out before it lands. But it’s also a way of not having to say the harder thing — that some of it actually bothers you, that the body you’re joking about is the one you live in, that the gap between who you thought you’d be by now and who you are is real, and occasionally sits on your chest in the dark.

Getting there first is useful. But every so often, instead of turning it into a punchline, it’s worth just letting it be true for a minute before you do.

Four. Go back to things you were never good at, and stay bad at them.

Play five-a-side knowing you’ll be a liability. Try yoga knowing you’ll look like a wardrobe falling down a staircase. Sign up for something with no realistic prospect of improvement and then don’t improve.

There’s something quietly important about doing something purely for the nonsense of it, without a goal, without a metric. The older you get, the rarer it becomes to be a genuine beginner at something — useless, uncomfortable, and completely fine about it. Turns out that’s worth protecting.

Five. Nobody gets out of this looking cool. Nobody.

The lads who once had everything together are comparing blood pressure tablets. The effortlessly stylish are discussing orthopaedic footwear. The ones who seemed certain are now as lost as the rest of us, but with better furniture. Time levels everything, slowly and without exception.

Once you really take that in — not as a platitude but as a fact — the stress of maintaining some version of yourself that was never going to last anyway starts to ease.

You’re not falling behind. Everyone’s arriving at the same place, more or less simultaneously, slightly creaky, slightly baffled, and trying to remember what day the bins go out.

Taking yourself less seriously isn’t about letting yourself off the hook. It’s about staying on it — showing up, trying, falling short, and not treating the falling short as the whole story.

The joy, when it comes, tends to live in the gap between who you thought you’d be and who you actually are. Not despite the gap. In it.

You’re still going. That’s not nothing. That’s actually most of it.