Since I’m turning 34 in a few weeks (the advantage of a January birthday is a compounded sense of change and turnover), I’m reckoning with the onset of middle age, or what may be worse: the perpetuation—because I haven’t a built a life-structure capable of bearing the weight of middle age—of youth past its expiration date.
It’s very hard to alter the operating systems that are installed in our childhoods; what we call generations—Boomers, Xers, Millennials, Boomers—are really different versions of the same basic program (like Windows 95 et al) and our obsession with generational differences is largely are nascent awareness that something has been implanted from without. Each socio-geological strata is marked and shaped by various shocks—entertainment, technology, politics, drugs, now memes—which have arrived from the larger-than-human systems (corporations, governments, artistic movements)... I suspect…