![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistThe other day I saw much of this Twitter thread in unreadable screenshots shared on facebook. I liked it enough I'll transcribe a bunch of it here:
It's also interesting that, even before I got to the caveat in the last tweet/paragraph, I was thinking about how race plays into this and also things like queerness and disability. I have struggled with this like a good geriatric millennial (I'll be forty this year, I'll have you know!), but I've struggled less by knowing people my age and older who did or would've missed out on these life markers like getting a degree, working full-time, buying a house, getting married, having kids, etc. or who did these things in ways that don't fit what I was raised to believe are normal. And having my own life go off the rails of its expected path in my late teens and early twenties, culminating in having to leave college without a degree when all my friends were graduating, was horrible in so many ways but the one good thing about it was that it meant I didn't waste too much of my adult life on pressure to follow this path, I quickly learned that life did not necessarily end outside it (even though I did feel at first like it must). And about a year after I left uni, my brother died.
Having a lot of horrible stuff happen relatively early did cure me of some of the perfectionism I suffered from (some is still there, though!). But it did leave me with a sense of "well if not that, what? Being such a geriatric millennial, maybe I found my disillusionment early -- anyone older than me, after all, was Gen X: the ultimate disillusioned generation -- but I wasn't sure what was beyond that for some years. I'm still figuring it out.
This thing about how we experience time too; like I said it's never been more appropriate than during quarantimes (is it Monday? is it summer? is it April?) but it's also something I think about as I'm turning 40 this year, and I remember big birthday parties for both my parents' fortieth birthdays, full of jokey terrible gifts and terrible jokes about being "over the hill." This was the beginning of the end, it was very clear; the decorations were black like it was a funeral except they were still crepe paper and balloons because it was a party.
It's very weird to think about now; it seems so foreign. My friends or partners who've had fortieth birthdays so far, a lot of them have been normal get-togethers if they've done anything at all. Many of us are still renting, in precarious jobs, childless. Many of us are living lives much like our younger selves. I remember a friend who's like eight or nine months older than me fretting when she turned 30 that she'd read this magazine article about everything you're not supposed to do/wear/etc. after you turn 30. The only thing I remember from the list is that you're not supposed to wear hoodies any more, and I think I remembered it because I'm always wearing a hoodie because I'm always cold (diffrentcolours took a photo of me tonight as we sat in the garden with beers; he said I had Big Dad Energy because my arms were crossed "in a paternal fashion" but I was really just cold in my short-sleeved shirt; after I saw the picture I went inside to get a hoodie). These things associated with youth persist because they're useful, or because there's nothing better to replace them; this is the millennial tragicomedy.
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.It was written in 2018 so it doesn't even take into account the atemporality of the last year, but it's really interesting in relation to that.
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. 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. 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.
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.
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. 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.
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. 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. 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.
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. 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.
But something else that happens - and I notice this so keenly in myself these days - is a sense of panic, that we’re getting older and running out of time and *we haven’t even grown the fuck up yet*. Think about that for a second. We’re not complaining about how we’re getting old, or at least I’m not. That’s not what makes my stomach quivery. It’s the sense that the world is speeding up and speeding up and I’m running out of time and I don’t own a house and I don’t have kids and oh my god what the fuck. We’re not in a mid-life crisis.
Millennials are experiencing a *goddamn crisis of temporality*. We don’t know if we’re old. We don’t know if we’re young. We don’t know what we’re doing. We’ve lost our guideposts, our benchmarks, our rubrics for life. And people blame us for it. And it really doesn’t help that we’re approaching middle age (WHATEVER THAT EVEN MEANS ANYMORE) in an deeply toxic economic system, with a global future currently very much in doubt, and our parents won’t stop fucking us over. So the next time you hear a Millennial in their thirties complaining about feeling old, maybe listen to the words behind the words. Because we are living through some shit. Also our knees and backs hurt and we don’t have health insurance.
Also there’s a very real prospect that many of us won’t be able to afford to retire. We’re not the only generation facing that, or the only generation that’s ever faced that, but you need to understand that we’re facing that in the context of having been lied to....
Oh, and additional caveat: I’m not even beginning to get into race and class here because this is a twitter thread not an academic paper and I don’t feel equipped right now to give that the attention it deserves; just be aware that I know I’m oversimplifying a lot here.
It's also interesting that, even before I got to the caveat in the last tweet/paragraph, I was thinking about how race plays into this and also things like queerness and disability. I have struggled with this like a good geriatric millennial (I'll be forty this year, I'll have you know!), but I've struggled less by knowing people my age and older who did or would've missed out on these life markers like getting a degree, working full-time, buying a house, getting married, having kids, etc. or who did these things in ways that don't fit what I was raised to believe are normal. And having my own life go off the rails of its expected path in my late teens and early twenties, culminating in having to leave college without a degree when all my friends were graduating, was horrible in so many ways but the one good thing about it was that it meant I didn't waste too much of my adult life on pressure to follow this path, I quickly learned that life did not necessarily end outside it (even though I did feel at first like it must). And about a year after I left uni, my brother died.
Having a lot of horrible stuff happen relatively early did cure me of some of the perfectionism I suffered from (some is still there, though!). But it did leave me with a sense of "well if not that, what? Being such a geriatric millennial, maybe I found my disillusionment early -- anyone older than me, after all, was Gen X: the ultimate disillusioned generation -- but I wasn't sure what was beyond that for some years. I'm still figuring it out.
This thing about how we experience time too; like I said it's never been more appropriate than during quarantimes (is it Monday? is it summer? is it April?) but it's also something I think about as I'm turning 40 this year, and I remember big birthday parties for both my parents' fortieth birthdays, full of jokey terrible gifts and terrible jokes about being "over the hill." This was the beginning of the end, it was very clear; the decorations were black like it was a funeral except they were still crepe paper and balloons because it was a party.
It's very weird to think about now; it seems so foreign. My friends or partners who've had fortieth birthdays so far, a lot of them have been normal get-togethers if they've done anything at all. Many of us are still renting, in precarious jobs, childless. Many of us are living lives much like our younger selves. I remember a friend who's like eight or nine months older than me fretting when she turned 30 that she'd read this magazine article about everything you're not supposed to do/wear/etc. after you turn 30. The only thing I remember from the list is that you're not supposed to wear hoodies any more, and I think I remembered it because I'm always wearing a hoodie because I'm always cold (
diffrentcolours took a photo of me tonight as we sat in the garden with beers; he said I had Big Dad Energy because my arms were crossed "in a paternal fashion" but I was really just cold in my short-sleeved shirt; after I saw the picture I went inside to get a hoodie). These things associated with youth persist because they're useful, or because there's nothing better to replace them; this is the millennial tragicomedy.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-05 09:31 am (UTC)Those lists annoy me SO MUCH!
They make me want to actively go out and wear the "forbidden" clothes!
(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-05 10:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-05 11:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-05 03:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-05 09:00 pm (UTC)I'm about to turn 51 and I still have to note and celebrate many types of "adulting."
A smidge of that is learning new approaches well into adulthood to help overcome the challenges of previously undiagnosed ADHD, so I call them out to reinforce them, but... yeah. My theoretical "career" never happened.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-05 10:05 pm (UTC)I did get rid of a couple of my shorter dresses recently, but it was more because I didn't wear them than because I thought I shouldn't. Going grey early has probably made a difference, too - I just stopped giving a fuck.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-06 03:23 am (UTC)It's a giant holding pattern, and when it breaks, it should be awesome for everyone, but there's still so much waiting.
Which is to say: mood.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-06-07 03:07 pm (UTC)I hate the fucking housing market inflating faster than I can ever save up to afford my own place, stuck in a not-bad rental but still holden to landlord stuff and not allowed to make it our own...
Age is funny. My parents were at least 10 years younger than most of their friends so their 40ths weren't too "omg old" and they aren't really the "omg old" types. I think mum felt young compared to how old her parents (WWII survivors) seemed at the same age.
Definitely weird thinking about traditional things and non traditional things. Cos even those like my younger sister who has the marriage, mortgage and children, doesn't have the same experience as Mum. My mum never expected to work when we were small (delayed longer cos of my disability stuff) whereas sister had very little choice although the pandemic gave her some freedom not to work and enjoy her children. Generations before ours didn't expect to work while children were young cos living on a single income was often doable which it now isn't as easy to do.
We also have the internet and mobile phones from our teens/early adulthood onwards which I think has changed a lot about society, expectations and so on. Old people grumble about "if only the youngsters didn't buy big tellies, posh phones and avocados" whereas we all know a telly is less than 1-2 months' expensive rent and houses cost a lot more... Very different cultural views about money, saving, credit, subscribing rather than owning services... And even within "millenial" attitudes vary hugely.