What people don’t tell you about life is that the edges of it’s stages aren’t as clearly defined as the rest of our measures of time. At least with days, at 23:50 when I’m sitting in my bed 17 episodes of anime down, unshowered in a sea of crisp packets and no longer able to smell myself I can admit that today is a write-off and I’ll start again tomorrow and I’ll know when that is, it’ll be in 10 minutes. Quite promptly at 00:00 I clear everything away and end my day of sloth. This isn’t how life works. The boundary of ‘when I’m older..’ and ‘older’ is less of a boundary and more a slippery gradient in a cloud of fog that you kind of zig-zag blindly till one day you’re there — You’re ‘older’ thinking ‘when I was younger…’ or at least that’s what I did.
Personally, I think there should have been some warning about this (there was, I didn’t listen) or maybe they just haven’t had this experience but I feel like blaming somebody for this so I’m gonna say they — those residing in adulthood, a place I seem to have woken up in with all my belongings but no recollection of moving here — kept it a secret from us — those considered the young and future of the world. I am rapidly realising I am no longer in this category. You can tell you don’t belong in this category anymore when you don’t qualify for any discounts, everything is full price and you decide whether you can go out or not by how long it’s going to take you to recover. If you have recently found out, and are outraged, that it is £14 for a single cinema ticket and you’re reading this on a Saturday at 9pm with no plans on painting the town red because you’ve got an appointment on Monday afternoon you’d like to be “fresh” for then you too have slipped ever so silently from the giddy future of mankind to the very sobering present.
Here, unlike the disappearing ‘there’ of life before bills, taxes, pension, healthcare, serious relationships and responsibilities, everything is your problem and they all need to be addressed now lest you incur late charges that total 3 times whatever the charge is for. Here, not knowing something is an act of contempt (I’m serious. You can be charged for it, I have!).
Here, you find out somebody has been following you around your whole life, spying through bushes and peering through matte black binoculars at you whilst tutting and jotting down all your misdeeds and wrongdoings in a leather bound notebook. This persons name is Experian and every three months he carefully tears out the pages from said notebook then sauté’s them with mixed veg and olive oil on high heat. He then enjoys his carefully prepared meal with a glass of Montoya Cabarnet (not the only wine I know the name of thank you very much… I also know Blossom Hill) and waits diligently for the meal to be throughly digested before ejecting the contents of his bowels from a height of precisely 10.75 metres onto plain A3 paper. He then examines his artwork for particular signs and patterns — not unlike palm and tea reading — and translates his findings to a number. Whether you choose to admit it or not, this number, you credit score, defines much of your life and up until a while ago you had to pay to see it. You pay for everything when you get older. An airport in Venezuela taxes you for breathing. Not a joke. Look it up.
Another side effect of age is that you start to consider your time a lot more pragmatically. This is a good thing when it comes to your approach to work and stuff (I’ll talk about work in another post soon) but it kinda sucks the fun out of everything. Back in the good old days I could spend hours watching a TV show I liked or simply scrolling through Tumblr or having a good old chin wag (can we make thumb wiggle the texting equivalent of this?) about everything and nothing but these days about 10 minutes of scrolling down my feed (pick any of the social media’s) and I get to thinking ‘is this the best use of my time?’ I usually decide it’s not. Reading is about the only pastime my old man brain will allow outside the realm of work (design & development). I don’t really see this as a problem but it causes a disconnect between me and the world. It means I do feel a tiny pang of envy when I see people around me finding the new face filter absolutely hilarious and I just don’t get it. I would’ve just appreciated a clearer line between being the one explaining the new slang word and being the one asking what it meant, appalled by the abuse of the english language.
Gone are the times I could spend days doing absolutely nothing and feel nothing but satisfaction.
Another thing that happens when you get older is time moves faster. I’m not joking, this is a real phenomena that requires immediate attention. It’s Christmas every 2 months and somebody’s birthday every 20 minutes. Somebody do something about this.
Getting older isn’t all bad though. It’s like God knows you’re getting a pretty shitty deal so hands you some powers to deal with it. The greatest of these is a conscience, not the voice of conscience that you try to shut out before and after visiting the kind of websites that require this screen
but an actual conscience. An awareness and knowledge of yourself, your surroundings and what you think about them. This gives you power, it gives you the choice and ability to change yourself and your life for the better (or worse, you’re an adult. Things can go both ways now and it’ll be your own fault). As we all know;
With great power comes great responsibility.
- S.p. Idermann (Poet & Playwright)
The power that comes with freedom can be daunting at first. The realisation slapped me in the face when I stepped out of the world of work. Everything I had ever done before that point had been done with the sole purpose of eliminating the need to work everyday then *alakazam boopity-boo* it happened. It was like reaching the end of the train tracks and being expected to continue. I suspect this is how people feel when they graduate and had only planned up to that point. The world really is your Oyster but who knows how to catch or cook an Oyster? Do you even ‘cook’ Oysters? What if I just want fish and chips instead? James Baldwin put my thoughts in a nice sentence:
Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your world*.
*he actually said society but I doubt he’ll mind me paraphrasing.
Precisely at the point my conscience developed further (I got older) I wanted to set everything I had around me ablaze and start again. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. I just finally had more time to give more shape to exactly what I wanted and found that I am still a while away from it. It’s not that I didn’t have a plan, I did. I do. It’s a very well thought out plan in fact but it’s a plan for who I was then not who I am now. I’m definitely grateful for my current situation but I’m still looking for something. I’m still not satisfied and the plan I had will not satisfy me.
The good news is I have a new plan. This plan feels like less of a race. My old plan felt like an intensive training program, like the insanity workout. This plan feels like a lifestyle choice, like subscribing to a religion. Not one of the serious fundamentalist ones, one of the nice easy going ones like Buddhism or Rastafari.
I don’t want any confusion, I don’t see any of this as a problem to be solved. Life is more about defining than finding and I’m enjoying using my new found old man powers to define my version of a comfortable life. I think this life will include tea, lots of tea and silence. Writing, design and art too. Maybe less development… yeah, less development. These are the things I am conscious of now. The things I thoroughly enjoy. I have something resembling a plan for how these will mould together and I hope you guys enjoy whatever form that takes. I certainly will.
A slightly less enchanted but happy Andrew, signing out.
