The Year of Anticipating 30
or, Why 29 is not a COMPLETE death sentence
30 is an age that’s imbued itself within the collective American id to be synonymous with something akin to “half-dead.” Your responsibilities are at an all-time high, and people’s willingness to take your excuses when you don’t feel like being an adult and meeting those responsibilities is at an all-time-low.
It’s the beginning of the “Bootstrap Decade,” when you must be the harbinger of your destiny in a more conscious and consistent way than ever before. You think you need to minimize how often you ask for help while maximizing your steadfast isolation in the name of “self-sufficiency.” Die alone if you’re lucky enough.
At least, these are the lines we read behind when Decade Three rolls around.
When I turned 29 this past Friday, August 2nd, 2019, those anxious tremors of expectations I’ve allowed society to force myself to place upon myself began to vibrate in my brain again. Will I be hitting my “professional streak” this decade? Will I stop talking about a Roth IRA and start actually giving into one? Will I get married? Will that marriage result in children? Happiness? Financial water-treading (at least)?
It’s an anxious age, 29. I’m only 3 days into it and it feels like I’m auditing the next 5 years of my own life before having lived them.
But the truth is—and this has become clearer as I get much older and marginally wiser—is that the Internet has almost completely obliterated the notion of time.
I know this to be true simply for the fact of how old I and many around my age group claim to feel. In our twenties!
For many people in my age bracket, 9/11 was the catalyst that would inform us of our political and worldly awareness. I was 11. Since then, the terrorists have partnered with our news feeds to inch closer to a victory through the psychological onslaught of violent clickbait and up-to-the-minute BloodWatching. Extrapolate the sheer volume of terrible stories you see and hear every single day, and you begin to see that we are now more aware of daily events than ever before.
Compound this tragic daily clickbait with the less-tragic-but-no-less-concerning system of social media, where we all struggle to keep up with imagined Joneses—oftentimes with multiple posts per day. That can put some gray wrinkles on your brain once exposed to it for years.
Those gray wrinkles reinforce our perception of our own age (or “world-weariness”). It’s why so many need to detox from the news, and from the Internet in general; our minds are starting to get naturalized to the innumerable daily reminders that our lives are happening so quickly (just look at the 15 things that are trending on Twitter this hour).
So that’s my own resolution for 29—don’t let the Internet speed up time for you. Go to more concerts. Get more massages. Travel when possible. Keep nerding out on nerdy interests (a live-action Cowboy Bebop series?? Count me in).
The Information Stupor-Highway can put years on your brain. My goal for 29 (and beyond) is to do more de-plugging, detoxing, and de-aging to avoid early brain death. Keep your mind young and infatuated with non-serious things — just be sure you’re making your deadlines for all the serious stuff, too.
