On understanding oldness and --purposely?-- misunderstanding the modern
I’ve been thinking a bit about growing older, now that I’m greater than 33 1/3 years old, my personal demarcator of the term.
I thought I’d be thinking about the usual things: success, bloodlines, etc. That’s not what I find myself balancing, however.
What I find myself balancing is a shifting relationship to the world, the awareness of myself as a market that is catered to differently, the awareness how my experience anchors me against foolishness but also dulls enthusiasm and novelty. I find myself having to make choices about how I want to have my voice, because in youth one’s voice carries triumph in being an upstart, but as one gets older one navigates a line between being a voice of experience and being someone who petulantly wishes for the world to center their understanding of ‘their’ times as if it was still ‘the’ times.
I find myself thinking that relationship between myself and the world, what defaulting paths people tend to lay down based on age, the correlations people lay down between age and intention and attitude.
In many ways I’m glad I’m confused by them moreso than holding myself to some evaluation of myself in my current state against them. ALSO, I’m glad this confusion lets me play around a bit with the things I observe that are created for or by the youths, that allow me to form my own relationships to those things in weird ways.
I recently took the butterfly meme to send well-wishes to a great co-op of mine, and the response they gave back was one of abject horror that I had completely ignored the point of the meme.
This was both hilarious and has given me a sense of purpose: whenever I need guidance, I will aspire to be an avid and enthusiastic observer of the times, to cheerful horrors and playful monstrosities can I produce as only someone tenuously attached to these times as I can be!!!
