30 is the new 5, 70 is the new 30, and death is available for a limited time at McDonald's
I was probably 13 when I first heard the phrase, "Never trust anyone over 30." "Wow, that's cool," dumb / impressionable 13-year-old-me said to himself.
To the best of my recollection, it was in an issue of Spin magazine - Rolling Stone's then-much-cooler main competition - in an interview with Iggy Pop, circa 1989. I didn't think about the fact that the journalist / interviewer was likely nearly or past 30 himself, nor did I realize that Iggy Pop himself would have been 42 in '89. (It's kind of funny in Wikipedia-havin' retrospect how many of my childhood cultural icons could have gone to high school at the same time as my dad, maybe even graduated years before he did. But in my defense, compared to said childhood cultural icons, my dad sure was incredibly square.)
Anyway, that particular catchphrase - which I would gradually hear attributed to every other pop icon under the sun - became my mantra, my self-contained philosophy, my personal outlook on life. Never mind that, being the progeny of my super-square dad, I was the type who insisted on wearing business casual to death metal shows by the time I was 23. But even that was intended as a statement.
See, I was different. I was edgy. I was awake, enlightened, experimental, something like that. Anyone with more safe, stolid, established interests was immediately non-credible in my eyes.
Normal American "grown-ups" and their inexplicably shitty taste in just about everything were the enemy, the force holding back all of society from anything interesting ever happening. Being over 30 didn't automatically make you a total wank, but if you were already kind of straddling that fence as a lame young 'un (as was the case for 99.9% of the populace)... yeah, the big 3-0 was definitely the end of the road for you. Congratulations, you were now totally irrelevant to the bits of society that actually mattered.
Yeah, man, sheesh... did 30 ever sound... old.
Now, with precisely 3/4ths of a decade of perpetually disorienting experience being in my thirties, I still haven't successfully reconciled my age with my lifelong, carefully-constructed, deep-rooted yet absurdly substance-free "identity." I built that whole sham of a self-image on a bunch of pop-media / conventional-wisdom lies and moronic oversimplifications I should have been plenty smart enough to see through even as a 13-year-old.
Subsequently, I feel like I've fallen into some black hole of... I don't know, non-self-knowing or -understanding. I definitely haven't been able to trust myself re: anything for seven-and-a-half years now. Gee, thanks, Spin magazine and Iggy Pop. By the way, Iggy, how's 66 treating you? What regimen of life-extending medications were you on when you recorded that new Stooges album a year or two back? Did you have to find a doctor under 30 to get scripts you could trust? I imagine such doctors must be difficult to find.
Make no mistake, I'm actually having a blast as a "grownup" in many ways. The last several years have been as wonderful as they have been utterly horrible. I feel like I've finally been able to reconcile myself with the fact that I'm probably never going to do anything remotely history-making or world-changing, a painful process of recognizance that I believe began about 18 years ago and which has been a never-ending, incredibly painful, crushing defeat hanging over my once-idealistic and awfully arrogant head. For many reasons, with every additional life experience, I'm finally learning to be OK with that "unexpected" and "catastrophic" personal failure.
In other words, growing up has largely meant that I've finally learned to get the fuck over myself. And that's a very good thing. I only wish I could have learned it much, MUCH sooner. I could have had a much easier time in life. I was seemingly born to self-criticize to the point of self-paralysis, to tear down every good thing I even start to build, to make endless fucking trouble for myself. It's a personal quirk that has been the source of much self-hatred and -torment, but I'm finally realizing that it doesn't have to be. I just kind of am what I am at this point, so I might as well learn to say "oh, YOU" to myself on occasion and move on.
And, despite being closer to 40 than 30 and dressing more dowdily than ever (because if there's one thing I can't fucking stand, it's a guy who is way too old to be hip still desperately / obviously trying), I'm still a pretty interesting guy to know. My inner child is still alive and well, maybe more alive than ever (because I repressed him so horribly as an uber-serious child).
The one thing I've finally figured out, as I've struggled against time / age in my own way and inevitably lost, is that a lifelong thirst for learning is what keeps you alive more than anything. I don't worry that I will ever lose that natural curiosity about damn near anything (even if my now-self-destructing brain refuses to grok new concepts quite as easily or quickly as it once did). Thusly, I need not worry about soul-death, which was my biggest pre-30 fear for my post-30 existence.
Now my biggest fear, and the one that is definitely / gradually coming true to an extent, is that I won't have any peers to actually talk to meaningfully when I start throwing myself into a new course of study (as I am wont to do) and need to bounce my subsequent crazy ideas off people. I'm not becoming boring or giving up on the things that are important to me, but a fair number of my friends sure as hell are and/or sure as hell have.
And that, so far, is the most frustrating thing about being a grown-up. It's often a lonely place, everyone retreating to their insular family world or whatever. Family is great and all, but having good friends and making use of those friendships is a very important part of avoiding soul-death too.
I still can't figure out how or why so many people lose the ability to "be real" as they get older. In the case of most of my friends, good people leading apparently great lives, it's surely not because they hate what they've become. I've tried calling a couple of very close friends out on this unfortunate change a few times, but they never seem to quite get what I'm saying.
Incidentally, in "researching" this post, I found the origin of "never trust anyone over 30." It was one Jack Weinberg, most notable for being held in a police car for 32 hours in 1964 on the UC Berkeley campus. Jack was part of a campus movement with significant positive repercussions not only for the 60s as a whole, but for college campuses everywhere.
Best I can tell, Jack is still alive, was 25 when he made this highly resonant, oft-stolen quip about "grownups," and from the pictures taken during his day-in-a-half in the back of a cop car, he looks to me at 24 JUST like a guy in his early 30s would look today. People definitely grew up faster then, for whatever reason(s).
Weinberg is roughly 73 now. He is one of the last remaining "heroes" from the Berkeley movement of the mid-1960s. No word on how he has made sense of his last forty-three years or, really, what he's really been doing with them.
And Weinberg is still, apparently, giving speeches on top of (now-staged) police cars and giving sub-30 people advice on how to best stick it to the man. The kids are probably rolling their eyes at Grandpa, though... because what the hell could he possibly know about bringing down the system?
To the best of my recollection, it was in an issue of Spin magazine - Rolling Stone's then-much-cooler main competition - in an interview with Iggy Pop, circa 1989. I didn't think about the fact that the journalist / interviewer was likely nearly or past 30 himself, nor did I realize that Iggy Pop himself would have been 42 in '89. (It's kind of funny in Wikipedia-havin' retrospect how many of my childhood cultural icons could have gone to high school at the same time as my dad, maybe even graduated years before he did. But in my defense, compared to said childhood cultural icons, my dad sure was incredibly square.)
Anyway, that particular catchphrase - which I would gradually hear attributed to every other pop icon under the sun - became my mantra, my self-contained philosophy, my personal outlook on life. Never mind that, being the progeny of my super-square dad, I was the type who insisted on wearing business casual to death metal shows by the time I was 23. But even that was intended as a statement.
See, I was different. I was edgy. I was awake, enlightened, experimental, something like that. Anyone with more safe, stolid, established interests was immediately non-credible in my eyes.
Normal American "grown-ups" and their inexplicably shitty taste in just about everything were the enemy, the force holding back all of society from anything interesting ever happening. Being over 30 didn't automatically make you a total wank, but if you were already kind of straddling that fence as a lame young 'un (as was the case for 99.9% of the populace)... yeah, the big 3-0 was definitely the end of the road for you. Congratulations, you were now totally irrelevant to the bits of society that actually mattered.
Yeah, man, sheesh... did 30 ever sound... old.
Now, with precisely 3/4ths of a decade of perpetually disorienting experience being in my thirties, I still haven't successfully reconciled my age with my lifelong, carefully-constructed, deep-rooted yet absurdly substance-free "identity." I built that whole sham of a self-image on a bunch of pop-media / conventional-wisdom lies and moronic oversimplifications I should have been plenty smart enough to see through even as a 13-year-old.
Subsequently, I feel like I've fallen into some black hole of... I don't know, non-self-knowing or -understanding. I definitely haven't been able to trust myself re: anything for seven-and-a-half years now. Gee, thanks, Spin magazine and Iggy Pop. By the way, Iggy, how's 66 treating you? What regimen of life-extending medications were you on when you recorded that new Stooges album a year or two back? Did you have to find a doctor under 30 to get scripts you could trust? I imagine such doctors must be difficult to find.
Make no mistake, I'm actually having a blast as a "grownup" in many ways. The last several years have been as wonderful as they have been utterly horrible. I feel like I've finally been able to reconcile myself with the fact that I'm probably never going to do anything remotely history-making or world-changing, a painful process of recognizance that I believe began about 18 years ago and which has been a never-ending, incredibly painful, crushing defeat hanging over my once-idealistic and awfully arrogant head. For many reasons, with every additional life experience, I'm finally learning to be OK with that "unexpected" and "catastrophic" personal failure.
In other words, growing up has largely meant that I've finally learned to get the fuck over myself. And that's a very good thing. I only wish I could have learned it much, MUCH sooner. I could have had a much easier time in life. I was seemingly born to self-criticize to the point of self-paralysis, to tear down every good thing I even start to build, to make endless fucking trouble for myself. It's a personal quirk that has been the source of much self-hatred and -torment, but I'm finally realizing that it doesn't have to be. I just kind of am what I am at this point, so I might as well learn to say "oh, YOU" to myself on occasion and move on.
And, despite being closer to 40 than 30 and dressing more dowdily than ever (because if there's one thing I can't fucking stand, it's a guy who is way too old to be hip still desperately / obviously trying), I'm still a pretty interesting guy to know. My inner child is still alive and well, maybe more alive than ever (because I repressed him so horribly as an uber-serious child).
The one thing I've finally figured out, as I've struggled against time / age in my own way and inevitably lost, is that a lifelong thirst for learning is what keeps you alive more than anything. I don't worry that I will ever lose that natural curiosity about damn near anything (even if my now-self-destructing brain refuses to grok new concepts quite as easily or quickly as it once did). Thusly, I need not worry about soul-death, which was my biggest pre-30 fear for my post-30 existence.
Now my biggest fear, and the one that is definitely / gradually coming true to an extent, is that I won't have any peers to actually talk to meaningfully when I start throwing myself into a new course of study (as I am wont to do) and need to bounce my subsequent crazy ideas off people. I'm not becoming boring or giving up on the things that are important to me, but a fair number of my friends sure as hell are and/or sure as hell have.
And that, so far, is the most frustrating thing about being a grown-up. It's often a lonely place, everyone retreating to their insular family world or whatever. Family is great and all, but having good friends and making use of those friendships is a very important part of avoiding soul-death too.
I still can't figure out how or why so many people lose the ability to "be real" as they get older. In the case of most of my friends, good people leading apparently great lives, it's surely not because they hate what they've become. I've tried calling a couple of very close friends out on this unfortunate change a few times, but they never seem to quite get what I'm saying.
Incidentally, in "researching" this post, I found the origin of "never trust anyone over 30." It was one Jack Weinberg, most notable for being held in a police car for 32 hours in 1964 on the UC Berkeley campus. Jack was part of a campus movement with significant positive repercussions not only for the 60s as a whole, but for college campuses everywhere.
Best I can tell, Jack is still alive, was 25 when he made this highly resonant, oft-stolen quip about "grownups," and from the pictures taken during his day-in-a-half in the back of a cop car, he looks to me at 24 JUST like a guy in his early 30s would look today. People definitely grew up faster then, for whatever reason(s).
Weinberg is roughly 73 now. He is one of the last remaining "heroes" from the Berkeley movement of the mid-1960s. No word on how he has made sense of his last forty-three years or, really, what he's really been doing with them.
And Weinberg is still, apparently, giving speeches on top of (now-staged) police cars and giving sub-30 people advice on how to best stick it to the man. The kids are probably rolling their eyes at Grandpa, though... because what the hell could he possibly know about bringing down the system?