I remember my childhood mostly as a happy, oblivious one, affordable food, the usual disagreements between liberals and republicans, but nothing unhinged (say taxes, migrants or abortion). At least it looks reasonable today.
Now it’s like everything is unhinged: politics seem to be based on purely emotional reactions and the other side is hell bent on destroying the country: texas starts heavily gerrymandering to secure 5 extra republican seats at the next midterms? california starts lobbying for doing exactly the same and dismantling an independent redistricting commission texas never had.
When I was younger it seemed politics were more rational and cruelty never seemed to be the point of doing nothing. Now we execute people with nitrogen gas, meaning a conscious person has to breathe something he knows its going to kill him during 4 minutes. This is somehow not cruel and unusual. And nobody bats an eye.
I still don’t get how populists can be so popular now, they simplify complex issues most people without a degree in the matter, cannot grasp. This includes me.
I’m now 35 and wonder if I’m already talking like an old person who misses his young days so hard. I see that in people in their 60s and hoped never to become one of them, but here I am. To a younger person I may look like one of those old guys who lives to rant.
Am I going to feel even more detached and depressed with each passing day?
True, but how the world actually changed due to arrival of the world wide web and it’s commercialisation became apparent in those years.
And I do have to admit that I have slight skew of perspective.
It’s in the age of 25-30, when your career takes off and your children are born, your world kinda freezes. Mentally you see yourself as 30 years old till you’re well over 50. Your memories kinda clump together and time runs faster and faster. Song that’s playing on the throwback show feels like it was released last year.
Not sure if your brain clocks your memories in relation to life lived.
Realities of old age and appearance of new generation finally makes you wake up. You have arrived to your midlife crisis. This is what people older than me tell me. I’m still not 50, although first grandchildren are probably not far off.
The thing is that your world view also freezes. I notice that I’m still dragging along somewhere in the early 2010s
I’m 35, probably won’t have children because I’m queer, and I’m already meeting younger generations and being violently shaken awake by my appearance and that my country is full of people who don’t seem to exhibit signs of self awareness.
I thought stupid people were relatively rare, but it’s like there’s a neverending supply of ignorance, hatred, vitriol, and the same bad logic/rhetoric that I’ve been trying to undo for the past 25 years. It’s like every year, there’s a new crop of some dumb myth that I haven’t heard since 2010, each time I hear it, it’s being parroted more and more confidently and belligerently.
My life stretches out in sisyphean walls of rhetoric at every front. Gaming, art, exercise, sexuality, politics, philosophy, or all number of micro topics like how to not use wet oven mitts or that if you own a car you have to actually maintain it. It’s like I’m witnessing the speed of evolution and have too high of expectations.
Maybe this expectations came from early internet and my world view is also stuck in the early 2010s. But if that were the case, then how does me as an American at my age, you who is Nordic at your age, and a friend of mine who is ten years younger and an immigrant all have overlap? That makes no sense and leads me to believe a lot of these things are NOT inherent to our age, but maybe to the state of the world itself.