Older and Whiner
Because Not Enough People Talk About Feeling Old
After about a decade of settling into my professional field of internetering I’m beginning to absorb some stereotypical characteristics of the trade. I’m starting to prefer introversion over its complement, acquiring an awfully-liberal casual dress code, directly injecting caffeine into my veins every few hours—you know, run-of-the-mill programmer work habits.
Which is exactly my issue with the whole sitch—so far my life was a struggle to accept my differentness from others, and now, with some semblance of a grip on that, I’m harangued with nagging reminders of my more pedestrian elements.
I’m changing, I’m getting older. But am I getting wiser?
I remember growing up hearing labels like “quarter-life” and “mid-life crises” in adult conversation. Being the pure childhood ball of ADD energy, I found that subject matter boring and promptly ignored it. But now I’ve initiated a renewed interest. Mostly because I’m still not sure what it means but feel like I should. This time, though, I have a guess!
My guess is this: “quarter-life” and “mid-life” crises, the attributed cause of the impulse purchase of impractical vehicles like imported red sports cars and loud motorbikes, refer to the set of feelings that someone experiences when the brain plans & executes out a thought, while simultaneously having a stored memory that says, “You may have done it this time, but you’ve done it better, before. You know, when you were younger.”
Memories can be such dicks sometimes.
While getting older isn’t inherently indicative of performance on any given task (learning, exercising, sitting down for a short period of time without getting a lower backache), I find it funny the backtalk that my memories sometimes poke & prod me with, sabotaging me from actually performing at my best.
Knowing my brain works this way, it mostly allows me to refuse memory backtalk from getting under my skin. But I’m not sure if this is one of the differentness or pedestrian qualities of me. I’m hoping for pedestrian, because we’ve got a lot more growing older to do.
Older and wiser, not older and whiner.
