I recently had a birthday which puts me in my late 30s. I understand I'm still not old, and by conventional standards I'm not even middle aged yet, but one thing that has been on my mind a lot over the last year or so is how people deal with getting older.
it's a strange thing coming out of your late teens, 20s, and even your early 30s and most things are more or less as you remembered them, but then you realize one day they're not. Your relatives you've had in your minds eye as being around a certain age most of your life are now several decades beyond that, you start to hear more and more about people you knew personally dying, and even you aren't the same person anymore. You don't have the energy you once did, your body has all sorts of random aches and pains you never used to have, and you could have sworn you were just renewing your plates or paying your taxes a few months ago, when it's actually been a whole year already. I guess the passage of time and the reality of how much time has passed is starting to finally catch up with me. Does anyone else have feelings like this or have you dealt with this and somehow come to terms with it?
Poorly. It’s been something heavy on my mind for most of my 30s, and it’s something that I’ve struggled with a lot. I’ve become an old man who yells at clouds mostly, I’m a very nostalgic and sentimental person these days. I cope with it by clinging to the last remaining shreds of people, places and things that still resemble what I miss so much about the past.
I have lunch inside of mostly empty irrelevant diners that are barely hanging on and feel like retirement homes, I shop in old school brick & mortar establishments that have neglected to necessitate tech and Internet into their operation, I visit childhood spots like my local parks to go hiking on the trails and just reminisce the whole time, I listen to my music on a CD player without the distraction of other activities, I play retro consoles on my CRT, I watch reruns of classic TV shows with what feels like a brand new set of eyes and ears (it’s the same but with a totally different perspective), listen to other sad millennials relate tales about the good ole days... I often think about people who I mistook for dinosaurs when they were my age and wonder how they felt about their life when they were at this same point, to come of age in the slower, more stable, more simple times. An experience that I can't and will never know. I've taken a greater interest in history as a whole, learning about the way things were before my time.
There’s nothing that I’m more apathetic and cynical towards than present day. All the garbage going on in the world, the politics, the economic system, the unending drama and noise coming from social media that I’m supposed to care about or get sucked into. I don’t want to be a part of it any longer. For the most part, I’m dead to that world. It feels like a waste of my time on this Earth, and everything about the present day system feels designed to make me feel less human and I want none of it. I desperately wanna recapture the way I felt when I was young, or at least how I felt as a young adult. I feel like I’ve seen enough change for a few generations in just the past decade and a half. The harsh reality is, the passage of time is just a process of watching everything you love wither away and eventually die. Anyone who hasn't already realized that is just refusing to pay attention, trying to live insulated inside of a false sense of security. Life is the ultimate tragic story.
As for me, I don’t feel like I’ve changed as a person, not the core of who I am anyway. It’s important to be true to myself, and preserve my principles and values and not let external forces to pressure me into capitulation. In other words, I’ll be insufferable by the time I’m a senior. I’m always gonna live like it’s still 1999 or 2006 and I’ll never apologize for it, no matter how fast the calendar shreds it's pages. I’m a product of my time, and my time was back then.
