PSA: You don't go straight from being "young" to being "old"
You are not a "boomer" if you aren't in your twenties. You are not irrelevant if you aren't in your twenties. You don't go straight from being a kid to being "old". Stages of life are fluid and vary for each person, and should be savored to the fullest of your means to do so.
Stop letting internet memes about age, height, and general state of being have an actual impact on your mental health. They mean nothing, and don't benefit you in any material way.
edit 1 part 1: this is the worst comment section I've even seen in any Hexbear thread in all my years, except for @Dirt_Owl@hexbear.net who is as always the best of us
edit 1 part 2: generationalism is also made up, don't let people put you into boxes and further don't put yourself into a box that someone else made up for you
People hit "old" at different times. Tim Rogers had an anecdote in one of his video reviews where he was talking about his two co-workers at Sony Entertainment Japan that were around the same age - one was cool AF and doing gigs in a jazz fusion band and the other was a boomer.
I gotta say that having a kid definitely speeds up the aging process a bit. All that extra responsibility tacked on at once is some "weeks where decades happen" shit lol.
Oldness can come in big lurches. I suddenly went from being carded for alcohol every time to maybe 2 times a year. During the last 20 months I added 1:30 to my mile time, my cognitive activities decreased significantly, I lost a 3" patch of hair off the top of my head and the rest thinned 75%. I have to stop myself from telling my adult kid to make sure they're getting regular sleep whenever they tell me they've been up late studying. I haven't been asked by a stranger if I have any weed for several years.
Age is just a number until you look up a condition you have and the internet is all "primarily affects middle-aged . . ." and that's when you become old. That and realizing that they're playing "Complicated" at the grocery store because you're the target demographic and it's on the oldies station meant for you and will stay there for as long as stores can play music at people.
There was literally a 1 year period where i went from "young" to "okd". Like in 2016 i was young and virile and then the next day i woke up and it was 2023 and i was old. And it'll happen to you!
My knees hurt, my kidney stones are acting up again, the image of that guy in the mirror is like a badly cut hair loss commercial, the damn kids bug me with thier minecraft every day but suuuure tell me again how age is just a number and it's the internet memes that make me feel bad Mr. Chapo.
Turning 40 really is like hitting a brick wall. You stumble, remember how easy it was to smoke a blunt, drink some beers and then go for a run the next morning just 10 years ago. And you can see where it's all gonna end up just 10 years from now. Fuck.
My favorite Madeline Pendleton rant is the one about how “you look so good for your age” is not a compliment. She’s in her late 30’s. She looks good and is almost 40. She does not look 22. You don’t have to be 22 to be attractive. And our culture’s association between young age and attractiveness is creepy af. Or at the very least, the threshold being so low is creepy af.
I think the memes are a consequence of the confusion of the people reaching or nearing thirty. They realize they're no longer 'young' and try to find a new identity by trying to appeal to their peers. But since all their peers are algorithmically suggested all they can think of is 'hello fellow old people how about those knees eh?'
The way people talk about when they turned 30 honestly makes it terrifying to us younger folk, which is pretty weird when you consider that 30 is actually still a pretty young age compared to the 80-90 years that you can get nowadays (and who knows how much is possible by the time we're all seniors).
Ok but I think it's more a matter of the reality that an older or shorter person's body has a material composition which is different than that of a younger or taller person's body.
Then, mainstream soyciety assigns such material traits abstract value based on its consumerist, hypercompetitive, capitalist, anti-human norms. And these sets of values, reinforced by the media and advertising, create a framework through which we see the world, kind of like propaganda.
This unfortunately can also translate to people being treated differently IRL due to these material traits, i.e. ageism in the workforce and the greater likelihood for shorter people to be bullied or dismissed.
I agree that internet memes can reinforce these attitudes, but first and foremost, they start as a reflection of such realities faced on the daily.
Therefore, although one can individually recognize the framework for what it is, and in certain situations (NEEThood, low competition high trust workplaces, for example) transcend it to an extent. What is really needed is a focus on more collective subjectivities in a movement away from capitalism on the community and national level, such that social value is not prescribed using the twisted anti human framework that is currently the default.