Forty AF
One thing no one tells you about getting old is that you don’t feel old. One minute, you’re sitting with your friends on the floor at three am, rolling up a twenty-dollar bill and telling yourself two hours of sleep before work tomorrow will absolutely be fine, and the next minute you’re in sensible comfy pyjamas, watching trashy reality tv and telling yourself that you’re not a pervert for finding the cast members attractive, even if they are young enough to be your children.
It sneaks up on you, middle age. The signs were there, though, looking back … you signed up for TikTok and were toying with the idea of trying the ‘Buss it’ challenge, then you see a line in an article on Medium saying something along the lines of ‘as cringe as a 40-year-old on TikTok’, which gives you pause. You catch yourself saying, ‘We should use the bathroom now so we don’t have to stop later’ to your friends before embarking on road trips. Comfort is now a top priority when buying shoes. The thought ‘Get a job, you fucking hippie’ crosses your mind more often than you care to admit. You spy something in a shop that you’d consider to be Grandma-style, but you try it on, thinking it will look cute and ironic on you — but it looks neither cute nor ironic, and in fact, makes you look like a Grandma. All these little signs creep by until, one day, you look in the mirror and realise you’ve been wearing leggings and a hoodie for weeks now and maybe it’s time to admit the inevitable. Your ass is old.
Making things more confusing for people in my age group is the nebulous manner of defining our generation. Are we Generation X? Are we Millennials? I still think of Gen Z as being infants who eat laundry detergent pods, Millennials as being young, and Gen X’ers as being the cool older kids who wear all black and listen to Morrissey. So which one are we?
We take those quizzes on Buzzfeed — you know the ones, ‘Are You More Gen X or Millennial?’ — and get conflicting results, then we see a quiz that says ‘What Hogwarts House Are You, Based on Your Favourite Food?’ and we’re halfway through that before we remember JK Rowling is a TERF so then we put down our phones and wander into the kitchen looking for a snack, but a gluten-free snack since lately gluten doesn’t agree with us, then we remember we’re on a strict diet and then we wonder if these lapses in memory are a sign of oncoming Alzheimer’s so we pick our phones back up to google ‘symptoms of Alzheimer’s’ and then we remember we were trying to figure out what generation we were, but by this point, we’re exhausted so we decide to go to bed early.
Don’t you dare tell me I’m alone in this. I see you.
We’re the oldest generation to have come of age during the rise of the internet. We had dial-up. (And I’ll bet that sound of the internet connecting just ran through your brain.) We remember when Netflix sent DVDs in the mail. We went to Blockbuster on Friday nights with our parents. We went to the library to do research for school projects. We had Friendster, then MySpace, then Facebook. We spent hours downloading songs off Napster and Limewire then burning mix CDs. And now we moan when Instagram changes its algorithm, and we spend far too much time on Urban Dictionary trying to figure out what words like ‘peng’ and ‘snatched’ mean.
We’ve been called Xennials, The Oregon Trail Generation, and now, Geriatric Millennials. (Geriatric?! Fuck all the way off.) Whatever they call us, the simple fact is this: We are now OLD. This is fine. Getting old is a privilege. I love my badass witchy grey hairs (for reals). And this old girl can still clean up quite nice when she can be bothered (which isn’t often).
The issue I have is this: I always imagined that by the time I decided leggings and t-shirts were acceptable day-to-day wear, I’d have some shit figured out. I’d have a savings account. I’d have a proper grown-up career. I’d own a car. I’d know what the word ‘escrow’ means. Things of that nature. (Note I never planned on having kids — I’ve known myself to be decidedly non-maternal/not to be trusted with children since I was young.)
But, sitting here in my early 40s, that is very much not the case. Am I alone in this? I don’t think so. I refer you to the ever-increasing number of articles by Millennials bemoaning our inability to afford a house (must be all that avocado on toast we eat) or how those university degrees haven’t done shit except leave lots of debt. (Maybe I was being super clever and showing remarkable foresight when I dropped out of USC to work at Disneyland.)
The point is that no one knows how this story ends. No one knows how we, the Millennials/Xennials/Spice Girl Generation (that’s my new favourite one) are supposed to grow old. A lot of us sure as fuck can’t afford to retire. A lot of us don’t own our homes. We work, we rent, we scroll social media, share memes, sleep, repeat, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
Will we still be talking about ‘adulting’ when we’re 60? 70? Will we be attempting to keep up with the kids and their TikTok dances (or whatever the next big thing after TikTok is)? Will we laugh bitterly from our care homes (if we’re so lucky) as we watch Gen Z grow up and realise that not all of them can be influencers and some of them have to, in fact, get ‘real’ jobs? When they realise that those jobs don’t pay as much as they feel they deserve? When they do the math and realise that they’ll be in student loan debt for decades for a degree that might not do them any good? Will we shake our heads knowingly as we watch their hopes and dreams slowly die in the harsh light of reality?(Will they blame us?)
Gods, that got grim really quick. Point is — what next? How do we do this? Seriously, does anyone know?
Erm, asking for a friend, obvs.
