Age is a Waterfall
I had a conversation a few weeks ago with a friend who felt pressure having recently entered the “twenty-five club”—his words—whereby most of the achievements of people with Wikipedia pages begin enumeration at the age of twenty-five. Much later, I thought this phenomenon sort of made sense, epistemologically, because anyone famous enough to have a Wikipedia page of the ilk my friend was referencing is likely to have had the entirety of their life reconsidered in light of later achievement, increasing the odds whatever frivolous activities were undertaken at one’s quarter century mark would be retrospectively imbued with meaning by future omniscient Wikipedia editors. That pool game you just lost because you tried to skip the cue ball over a solid and instead it careened off the table and nearly broke the toe of the guy who had just politely asked if I was gay and then told me the only reason I liked “Challengers” was because I answered no, I thought, might be included in your Wikipedia page someday, if only you become notable enough later in life to tell the tale. But I didn’t think of this point until after I’d left him, and by then I figured it would have been strange to bring it back up. Anyways, I’ve heard the fast-twitch synaptic connections which really would have helped me in the moment only really start to kick in around forty.
I’ll admit it: occasionally, I feel really proud of my age. Which is a weird thing to feel proud of, if you think about it. Being proud of your age is like being proud of a waterfall or the sand on the beach. Certainly these things are notable in their own rights. Much like one’s age, however, they are the end results of processes which have occurred naturally and unceasingly over set periods of time. Sometimes (as with, I’d argue, the two erosion-coded examples I’ve selected) these results are even profound. But no one is singularly responsible enough for their existences to warrant any level of pride. Much as one might enjoy visiting or appreciate living near it, no one is personally proud of Niagara Falls.
My age is not so different, in that it is both totally out of my control and inevitable, yet at times—I keep saying at times, but the more I think about it the more I realize how profoundly my preoccupation with age underlies my relationship to the world—I am completely transfixed. My age centers my conception of myself. For reasons only a little different from each other, it is the first thing I think of when I go on a date or drink too much or watch Luka Dončić play basketball. It is a power I can alternatively wield remedially and masochistically, often at the same time and even to achieve the same perverse end. Yesterday my age was the reason why I didn’t apply for a job, because I’m too old for it, and tomorrow my age will be the reason why I won’t apply for that same job, because I’m too young for it. I can fuck around and write whatever I want now because I’m young. I’m too old to be fucking around and writing whatever I want.
I’d guess you’re in the same boat. “He’s thirty-six, so I’m not sure it’s sustainable.” Pretty explicit. Less so, from the television last weekend: “The best thing about watching Carlos Alcaraz play tennis is we’re set for another ten years of it.” “I’m not sure how to write because I don’t have a ‘Gen-Z voice,’” she said over clanking glasses. If anything, that’ll probably help you down the road, I respond. But what the fuck do I know? Other than my suspicion these are all morbidly boring excuses serving to avoid facing the irreconcilable contradictions the world seems to relentlessly present, I can’t pretend to have many profound thoughts on the minutiae of these apparently pressing age-related concerns. They’re total dead ends. But I’m no expert here. I am, after all, only sometimes preoccupied with my age. And, anyways, I’m probably not old enough to understand them.
I sense you follow, but I can’t be entirely sure, or, if I’m being honest, lean all the way in, because accompanying what can only be described as a relentless downpour of age-shaded discourse, both internal and external, is a sort of counter-discourse meant to undermine the existence of these concerns, the entire conversation, in the first place. Age-gap relationship truthers, for one. Just-a-number-ers. The ones who are cool with whatever. I told him I thought it was strange the mother was staying in the bunk above her daughter at our hostel. “Shit,” he replied. “I just turned thirty. I’m not one to judge.” I felt horrible, partly for judging but mostly because I realized that in my mind the only difference between us had been our ages; since this distinction was clearly irrelevant to him, I was forced to consider our actual relationship. I realized I was practically him. The same night, he made out with that mom, in front of the daughter, on the dance floor at one of those clubs playing poppy EDM (what do you call that genre of music?) inside the walls of a medieval castle.
I cannot pretend to speak to the broader motivations which drive this infatuation. I can only speak for myself, and as I grow older (there it is again) I find myself more convinced that deep and honest personal reflection may in fact be the quickest path to—oh, shut the fuck up already. You’re not old enough to preach. Stick to yourself. Right. My experience. Me. Sorry. From the top:
My newfound faith in self-reflection as a means to connection contrasts with the perspective of my younger self, who wasn’t exactly trustful of “systems” (this younger and dumber person, by the way, chided his past self as younger and dumber, viewed his former self, in fact, to be a shriveled, weak, and spineless man-child—though I’m sure his future self will avoid falling into that trap while discussing his present one), but who accepted “systems” as prime movers responsible for the changes clearly occurring all around him. Today, while I depend on so-called systems more than I ever have (the MTA, healthcare, etc.) I’ve come to understand, and perhaps this is a tragic realization given how I’ve always viewed the world, not to mention how the world operates, that the deeper I dig into myself (NOT, as I’d always assumed, the more uncompromisingly selfless I am) the more significant my capacity to affect change around me is. The more people will listen. For those whose brain tissue hasn’t been whittled away by the vicissitudes of the passing decades, and therefore are still following, it is with this axiom in mind that I feel obligated to share the real reason I think I sometimes feel proud of my age.
I feel most proud of my age when I am in denial of death. How else to read the obsession with age than as a socially acceptable, shadow obsession with death? A compensatory force making up for the near-total unacknowledged eternity, before and after, which awaits? Squeezed between forevers there’s a blip, a *geological blink of an eye*, a phrase equally rote and understated, so understated, in fact, that when faced with the choice between fretting over, on a scale stretching beyond terrestrial, the total and imminent obliteration of the rushing rivers and howling winds and bloating freezes which carved the Grand Canyon OR whether I’m still young enough to wear crew-length socks, I choose the latter, every time, and I wait for the depths of the night to punish me for my bargain. I could lament western culture’s ignorance of the very end, the way we shove it off to the side with lusty repudiation, save it for later, pass it off to mercenaries, avoid it until there’s no time left on the clock, OR I could go into a two-week spiral because my waist size has increased half an inch since college, though I wear different styles now and who knows whether they’re sizing with the same measurements. I gave up religion, a flawed institution to say the least but one that’s at least explicitly designed to deal with the long befores and afters, and all I got back was a passing remark from a colleague that life elapses in eleven-year cycles, one of which happens to correspond with your thirtieth birthday, so obviously approaching thirty conjures a period of consternation. I didn’t bother doing the math, but I was reassured knowing I had some time to go before hitting that destitute point in my life cycle. Lest you think this whole thing is some on-the-edge-of-thirty coup de grâce.
I’m proudest of my age, in other words, when I have nothing else to feel proud of.