for real tho – konekorambles

rosa-buachaille:

elencaorange:

Twitter

[Image description: Images are of a thread by twitter user @dynamicsymmetry.

Thread starts by quoting a tweet reading
“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”.

@dynamicsymmetry responds:

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.

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.

and please don’t respond to this with “other people have gone through this too” because

A) I know, I do social-historical academic work
B) Every generation experiences similar trends in different ways and we are experiencing *radical* differences from what our parents did.

I’m not going to go into an even longer Twitter essay about atemporality but please just understand that this is not something about which I am prepared to argue. It’s just true.

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.

AND quick denouement: just to make things nice and confusing for me personally I’m 34 and this is my hair and no it is not dyed

[mild laughter emoji] [photograph of short, uniformly mid-grey hair].

End of thread. End of image description.]