“I see the younglings post things like “are you still on tumblr at 30?” and “go take care of your kids instead of reading fics” and i just feel sad because you have a bunch of young people who are terrified of getting older.
They think age is going to change them, into something boring, something different, something grey, and i just want to tell them, reassure them, you will still be the same person.
Isn’t it wonderful?
You will love the things you love for so many years. you will find joy in the same things, decade after decade. you will feel the same inside, through all this time.
Yes, the body will change. Yes there’s more responsibilities, less time, even less energy.
But there’s no magical age where you stop enjoying that specific story, that specific game, that specific hobby.
But you know what also comes with age?
You have less fucks to give.”
I turn 50 in July. I had this HUGE list of things I had to do, that I absolutely KNEW I had to be, before I turned 30, or I was a total failure.
I didn’t do any of those things, and it didn’t matter.
I was CONVINCED that by the time I was 40, my life was basically over. All the fun stuff I liked, all the music I liked, the games I liked to play, all of it was done for some reason, and I would be a Boring Adult.
ALL OF THIS IS BULLSHIT.
I am here to tell you that when you get older, it’s fucking AWESOME. You don’t put up with anyone’s bullshit. You figure out who deserves your time and attention, and you have the fucking BEST TIME EVER with them. All the time.
I still play video games. I still go to concerts. I do everything I can to see and validate and celebrate young people when they come into my life, because I want an entire generation to know that the lies media and advertising tells you about life basically ending at 40 so you’d better buy all the shit they’re selling you is GARBAGE.
The older I get, the cooler and more awesome my life is.
I am still the same punk rock weirdo I was when I was in my 20s, I’m just wiser and more comfortable in my own skin than I was then. Getting older did not do ANY of the things I believed it would do.
If I may offer two pieces of advice on the small chance a younger person than me is reading this: take care of your core strength. When you hit middle age, your body is just weaker than it was, and it’s easier to hurt yourself. It takes longer to recover from injury, and if I could change one thing, it would be paying more attention to my physical strength.
And the only currency, the only thing the ultimately matters in our lives, is choosing to be kind. The world is a cruel place full of awful people. Don’t be one of them.
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Here’s the list:
Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite.” ~ Christopher Hitchens
