On approaching middle age

A dirge for my cultural relevance

So I turned 36 yesterday. I don’t know how it happened. Suddenly I’m rocketing towards middle age at a speed my little millennial brain can’t comprehend.

I swear five minutes ago I was drinking booze from teapots and listening to bands dressed like 1900s railway hobos. Everything was sepia toned and we were all wearing black skinny jeans tight enough to cause fertility issues. But then I blinked and it was over. Suddenly everything is lime green and it’s all about being a seasonal brat. Everyone memorised complicated little dance routines without me and the memes became so deep fried I don’t understand them.

It’s all over for millennials. We’re yesterday’s news and it’s best we come to terms with it quickly. Cultural relevance is like wet soap, you see. The harder you try to hold onto it, the more it slips away. But at least we have our memories, right? We can reminisce about the shining moment when the whole world was obsessed with us. 

Celebrating 36. Photo (and cake!) thanks to Zoe Carvosso

Is it weird to miss the scrutiny? These days no one cares that millennials are a lazy, entitled group, spoiled by participation prizes. Our failings have stopped being symptomatic of a generational disease. If we’re assholes, we’re just assholes. I guess that means we’ve officially joined the milieu of proper adulthood. 

Adulthood! It snuck up on us so quickly! I didn’t even realise it had happened.

Many of my friends – my beautiful, trashbag friends – are having children. I remember when they would use Smirnoff Double Blacks to wash down MDMA caps on a non-descript Tuesday afternoon. Now they’re contributing members of society. They wake up on time, without a hangover and go to their jobs. They can be trusted to look after human babies. Intellectually I knew this would eventually happen, but it’s still weird to see it firsthand.

God, does that mean I’ve changed? Am I still the same person who hid goon sacks in bushes to drink between pubs? Who thought using a fetid dead snake to prank a housemate was funny? Surely that gremlin is still there?

But then again, I had a conversation about strata the other day which I found interesting. I suppose incrementally, imperceptibly, being young gets old. Our emotions feel less intense, we find joy in stability, and even if we think it’s still funny, we don’t torment our friends with dead snakes. 

Maybe that’s why everyone stopped paying attention to us – we stopped being interesting. So our gaze turns to the next generation and we disguise our jealousy of their time in the sun by fixating on their collective failings. Have fun, Zoomers. Get drunk, do stupid shit, keep the worst of it offline. Enjoy it while you can because it will all be over in a blink.