This thread about how people grow old today went viral because it nails it so well
This is just a great thread by someone called Spoopy Moraine about how people grow old today compared with their parents (and their parents before them).
It was inspired by this post by Ross Enamait – a ‘boxing coach, trainer and beast mode aficionado’ according to his bio – telling millennials to stop moaning and cheer up.
People in their 30s need to stop bitching about how they're getting old. You aren't getting old, but your depressing outlook sure as hell is.
— Ross Enamait (@rosstraining) October 1, 2018
And this is how it went.
1.
Okay, I actually want to talk about this for a second, regarding millennials and how really goddamn difficult it is for us to make sense of our own age sometimes. https://t.co/1ZdWibw9w8
— Sunny Moraine (now on Bluesky) (@dynamicsymmetry) October 1, 2018
2.
I haven’t done, like, a Sociology about this, but I strongly suspect that a significant percentage of us are struggling with the fact that many of the benchmarks for different stages of adulthood that we grew up with no longer apply to us, and it’s causing us to feel unmoored.
— Spoopy Moraine 👻🎃 (@dynamicsymmetry) October 1, 2018
3.
Adults are supposed to get married. A lot of us aren’t getting married. Adults are supposed to have kids. A lot of us aren’t doing that. Adults are supposed to get past college and get a Real Job. A lot of us aren’t doing that.
— Spoopy Moraine 👻🎃 (@dynamicsymmetry) October 1, 2018
4.
Adults are supposed to stop playing with toys, or at least to switch to different toys, like tools and cars and boats. And. Well. Uh.
— Spoopy Moraine 👻🎃 (@dynamicsymmetry) October 1, 2018
5.
Add to that the fact that we literally don’t experience time the way we used to. Time is both stretched and collapsed, especially right now. Years feel like months. Weeks feel like years. The past is smashed into the future which folds into the present.
— Spoopy Moraine 👻🎃 (@dynamicsymmetry) October 1, 2018
6.
Yeah, THIS. What even *is* a “job” anymore? What the hell is a “career”? How does one get those?
We’re a generation of underpaid and unpaid labor. https://t.co/Rlc7mnXtr9
— Spoopy Moraine 👻🎃 (@dynamicsymmetry) October 1, 2018
7.
Labor and its stability and the identity it gives you is one of the ways we were always supposed to know we were GROWN THE HELL UP. Where is that for us? Some of us have it, but it does not define our adulthood the way it did for our parents.
— Spoopy Moraine 👻🎃 (@dynamicsymmetry) October 1, 2018
8.
I was having tea with @phippsdontlie last year and talking about all this stuff I buy and wear, and wondering if there was an age when I wasn’t allowed to have it anymore. Is there an age when I can no longer wear skinny jeans? But I *like* skinny jeans.
— Spoopy Moraine 👻🎃 (@dynamicsymmetry) October 1, 2018
9.
And please spare me “YOU’RE ONLY AS OLD AS YOU FEEL” and “WEAR WHATEVER YOU WANT”, because my dude, that is useless and entirely beside my point.
My point is that I don’t know what adult means.
— Spoopy Moraine 👻🎃 (@dynamicsymmetry) October 1, 2018
10.
I’m looking around for clothes, for *anything* that is a cultural benchmark of what it means to be 40 year old Sunny and 50 year old Sunny and I swear to God I have absolutely nothing, I don’t know what that looks like.
— Spoopy Moraine 👻🎃 (@dynamicsymmetry) October 1, 2018
11.
One of the things this means is that a lot of Millennials feel stuck in arrested development, and you see the reinforcement of our infantilization through the thinkpieces about us.
— Spoopy Moraine 👻🎃 (@dynamicsymmetry) October 1, 2018
12.
People write about us like we’re still barely in college, when a lot of us are entering our mid and even late thirties. *A lot of us are close to forty goddamn years old.*
You see? The world itself doesn’t know how old we are.
— Spoopy Moraine 👻🎃 (@dynamicsymmetry) October 1, 2018