It feels so scary getting old
how should a 28-year-old be?
Yesterday I turned 28, which means I am unequivocally In My Late 20s now. I love my birthday; it’s like your own personal new year’s, complete with celebration and reflection. I also — why lie? — enjoy the attention.
Aging has always been something I’ve welcomed. As a child, I looked forward to the day I would become an adult; I wanted people to take me seriously and to leave my hometown. I can fortunately say that in many ways my young adulthood has been better than I could have imagined as a depressed teenager listening to Sufjan Stevens alone in my bedroom. However, as I prepare to enter the next epoch of my life, new dreams and anxieties emerge like cicadas who have been lying dormant yet gathering strength underground.
My mother was two years younger than I am now when she and my father got married, and by the time she was my age, she was a homeowner preparing to welcome me into the world. For a few years, she had already been working at the hospital which she would stay at for nearly 30 years, working her way up and becoming indispensable to her unit. In contrast, I am perennially single1, I have moved seven times between four states in the last six years, with no interest in ever having children, and I put my career on pause to go to grad school,2 with a hazy idea of what to do next.
To be fair, I am almost finished the aforementioned graduate program, I have a decent resume, and most importantly, my mother and I do not want the same things in life. But it continually shocks her how, despite the fact that I have “done everything right,” I am living under such precarious conditions. While some of that is due to my own poor decision making — I have certainly been blessed with a favorable spawn point — it is difficult not to think about the larger sociopolitical factors that play into these differences.
I was born a few months before Google was created and five years after the first World Trade Center bombing. In the nearly three decades since I came into the world, I’ve lived through Y2K; the September 11 terror attacks and the subsequent War on Terror; the founding of YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter; the Great Recession; Obama’s election; Trump’s election; COVID-19; the repeal of Roe v. Wade. The tumultuous political landscape and the rapid exponential growth of the internet have fundamentally reshaped our world beyond recognition. Yes, culture is always changing, and politics have historically often been fraught, but the advent of hyperconnectivity and all that comes along with it have supercharged movements and initiatives in unprecedented ways that we are still trying to understand.
None of this is news to anyone reading this, but I find it helpful to remind myself when I try to compare my life to older friends and relatives. Not to say that every generation doesn’t have its idiosyncrasies and challenges, but people in my age range especially have really had to grope around in the dark; it feels like there’s no precedent for anything anymore.
Right now in America, people are putting off marriage and even dating for a myriad of reasons. The average home value is over $365,000, and the job market is abysmal. Even if you’re lucky enough to get or maintain employment, your wages likely won’t outpace inflation. And everyone wrings their hands about declining birth rates! Who would want to bring a child into this world right now??
One of the best aspects of being alive right now is that these benchmarks aren’t seen as requirements anymore3, which is great for me because I don’t see a lot of them as necessary milestones for my personal ideal of a fulfilling life. However, that unfortunately has not made me immune from worrying about my adherence to traditional societal standards, or at least about my ability to attain a level of stability and success that I feel is on par with those standards.
I still measure up my life against my mom’s, and against the people I grew up with or went to college with through social media. This person bought a house with their partner. That person already has a daughter in Kindergarten. This person traveled around Europe. That person lost 30 pounds and lifts weights regularly now. This person is working their dream job and seems to be financially stable. And here I am, pushing 30 with a month’s worth of laundry making a small mountain on my bedroom floor, click clacking away on a newsletter post rather than a job application.
I know I don’t have to follow the path my mom took. I know social media isn’t always a reflection of real life (mine sure isn’t), and that comparison is the thief of joy. But I suppose it is human nature to understand these things and fall under their spell regardless.
Being online4 and reading widely has always helped me to put some things in perspective. Though I have to be careful not to get into doomscrolling territory, staying on top of the news and even pop culture have given me valuable, if at times painful, insight into the world around me and helped me foster connections both real and parasocial with people across the country and world. Literature has shown me how patterns of thought and action have repeated throughout the centuries. There are so many different ways to live. And I love that!5
My life right now feels a bit like I’m standing at the edge of a precipice, but it’s so foggy that I cannot see what lies beyond. This year, more than ever, I have absolutely no idea what I am going to do next or where I’ll end up by the time I am 29. But things are increasingly more difficult to predict with certainty, anyway, so I might as well “live deep and suck the marrow out of life.”
Not that this is of particular importance or concern to me at the moment
She would eventually also go to grad school and earn her masters degree when I was in high school, which heavily informed my decision to get my masters at this point in my life rather than wait an indeterminate number of years. But I digress.
This is highly dependent on where you are in the United States and what your community is like, obviously, but even in those places it’s possible to pull a Bartleby!
I know I just said that I like to self flagellate using social media, but I can contain multitudes.
With notable exceptions e.g. JD Vance,