Ageing slowly

On the day of writing this I am turning 23, and now probably need to become a terribly serious individual, or something like that. I say this because that is what happens as you get older: you become all grown up and proper. You use words like “whom”, have food that has been “drizzled” with olive oil, and listen to BBC Radio 4. Admittedly, I love things drizzled in olive oil, but that’s not exactly my point. I won’t bore you too much with a “never let the inner child shrivel and die” type spiel, but I really think it needs to be said. I feel like nowadays a lot of people just take life, themselves, and everything in between a little bit too seriously.

Birthdays are usually fun, if not spent feverishly trying to finish and compile a paper on time (as this one is for me). However, there is the slightly morbid sense of “yay, I’m one year older! Uhoh, I’m ONE YEAR OLDER. I’M SO OLD”. For me, it’s not too bad... yet. I’ll start the tantrums about my age when my NatWest Young Person’s Railcard runs out. That’s the moment when you know you’re really an old person. Then again, I’ve stopped being ID’d when buying alcohol, so that’s a bad sign already.

It’s funny how when you get older you flip round with your younger self. When you’re younger, it’s cool to write evrythng lyk dis izn’t it. When you hit 6th form, that’s suddenly really lame. At the age of about 19, being ID’d is basically tantamount to the person at the checkout slapping you in the face with a baby’s bottle and telling you to go back home to mummy. The second 21 rolls around, you start trying to talk loudly about upcoming SATs in a bid to make someone ask you for proof of age. Of course, when actually asked, you always have fake “I was drinking bad white wine since before you were born son” indignance.

The strangest thing that happens as the years roll on is that you lose touch with your former generation. You forget who you used to be. You start being confused by younger generations and start to distort and twist memories of who and what you were at that age. The amount of people saying “oh, the youfs are terrible” is a testament to how you forget what you were like. Perhaps young people today have become a bit worse than before. Or, maybe, they are just as rowdy etc but in a different way to how you remember being crazy. What seems like straight up debauchery to you now, may not actually be as bad as what you did. In fact, it may not even be that different, but you’re just misremembering (usually caused by an affliction know as rose-tinteditis), or you are unable to draw parallels as their culture seems so alien. E.g. Common complaint: the kids today spend all their time messing about with silly, new technology, they deserve a good thrashing (and not in the kinky way). Answer: you were the exact same as them. It’s just the technology has changed. What seems to you to be acceptable technology to obsess over is just old news to the kids today. It used to be a TV that everyone would want, now it’s the latest iPhone.

There’s no way that in a column of this size I can go into as much depth as I would like to on this subject; there’s definitely no way that I can protect myself from the internet hatred by arguing everything in a nuanced and carefully deconstructing way. Therefore, I will just ask every single reader of this text to think about one thing. I’ll assume you’re all at university: what is the latest craze that 10 year old kids are in to? Can you answer it? Remember crazes: pogs, Pokémon, football stickers, Aliens that could “mate to produce children” (they couldn’t bythe way)? I can’t say what it is. Think about what that means: you are technically out of touch with them.

So next time you think an older person is just out of touch, remember that we all are in a way. Don’t shout at them for being ”ancient”, help them regain touch. I’ll leave you with that, now I need to celebrate my birthday by updating the website. I’m living like a rock star.