“Live your life and forget your age.” These wide words come from the late Norman Vincent Peale, the author of The Power of Positive Thinking. However, these days, especially if you’re someone in your 20s or even your early 30s, it’s quite hard to forget your age, especially with all the age-related, if not completely ageist, articles being funnelled to us over the Internet.
It seems like everywhere we go on the web, we’re presented with people telling us how we should think and behave, or even worse, how we do think and behave (as if outsiders have the inside scoop on all our lives), according to our age classifications. The biggest offender when it comes to this is likely BuzzFeed, which features titles such as “Life in Your Early Twenties vs. Your Late Twenties,” “Life In Your Twenties vs. Life in Your Thirties,” “Things Millennial Girls Love,” and “Things Millennial Guys Love.” If you aren’t familiar with the term “millennial” yet, it refers to people ranging from their late teens all the way up to around 30 years old.
While it’s fun to read these articles at times, it’s difficult to deny that they make sweeping generalizations and attempt to put us all into boxes. This can quickly make people insecure. For instance, some of the more insecure girls among us “millennials” may start to worry that because we don’t enjoy calling ourselves fat or being too tired to go out (two things the “Millennial Girls” article states that we all love), we’re anomalies who don’t fit in with the accepted social order. For those of us who could be referred to as non-conformists and enjoy marching to the beat of our own drums, this may not be a huge deal, but for others, feeling like you don’t fit in can seem like a huge hit to already-fragile self-esteem.
The articles that compare certain age groups, such as early 20s vs. late 20s, or 20s vs. 30s, are potentially even more depressing for those who fall on the older sides of those particular spectrums. According to most of these articles, people in their early twenties are energetic, fun, attractive beings who enjoy going out and exploring their world, but some sort of magical transformation happens somewhere between the more advanced ages of 25 and 35, turning virtually every human being into a fat, out-of-shape, Netflix-watching binge eater who can barely stand staying up past 11 p.m. (if you want to know exactly when this Transformation of Doom happens; well, that depends on which article you’re reading).
A wonderful gem from one of these articles is the example of running on the treadmill—in your early twenties, it’s easy-breezy, but after that, it will apparently wreak havoc on your whole body and cause you to fear that your feeble, decrepit knees will give out on you. I can’t speak for everyone, but running on the treadmill’s always put my body in a little bit of pain, even when I was 12 years old. Who knows? Maybe I’ve been “old” for the vast majority of my life.
It’s not only BuzzFeed that’s undoubtedly jumped on the bandwagon of perpetuating these ridiculous age-based stereotypes. Another culprit is PostGradProblems, a website for recent university and college graduates who have recently moved into the working world. While this website is amusing and has a semi-satirical basis, the jokes it posts about, for instance, recent grads realizing that they can’t walk up stairs as easily as they once could, or noticing extra fat rolls on their bellies as they sit at their desks, help reinforce the common message that’s out there for all of us able-bodied beings—after age 25, you’re basically over the hill. You’re lucky that you can still even move, so the best thing for you to do is forget about pursuing your dreams (who wants to use up those dwindling amounts of energy?), and just flop on your couch with a bag of chips.
Some of us, by filling our minds with more positive, uplifting messages, are normally able to fight this psychologically harmful mentality. However, when some of your fairly impressionable peers start repeating this drivel on a regular basis, and you also see articles making negative references to Gen Y’s “entitlement” and “narcissism” on LinkedIn, it may just start to creep into your brain more than you’d like it to. You may begin to wonder, even for a moment, if maybe you are as washed-up, worn-out, tired, and useless as the mainstream media seems to believe that you are. And then when you try to tell yourself otherwise, you may also start to consider the possibility that perhaps you really are so entitled, you’ve become a bit delusional when it comes to your perception of yourself. It truly is amazing how much some negative messages from outside ourselves can occasionally play with our brains.
Of course, it must be admitted that these now-popular views of people from certain age groups did not come completely out of nowhere. There is some truth to the belief that a person in their early twenties is different from a person in their late twenties. As someone who’s recently entered the latter half of their twenties, I can attest to the fact that perhaps a 27-year-old’s metabolism is generally a tad slower than it was when they were 21, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t lose weight or stay in shape, and it certainly doesn’t mean that we’ll all quickly morph into creatures that resemble belugas after hitting a certain birthday. In a similar vein, those of us who have left school and have started post-grad jobs are likely more tired after an eight-hour workday than we would have been after a couple of hours of afternoon classes, but that doesn’t mean we need to constantly bum around in our pyjamas during our time off and stop spending time with friends—we just need to adjust our routines so that we can fit in sleep and fun.
The incredibly scary thing about falling hook, line and sinker for media-induced, inaccurate perceptions about age is that this may make us give up on previously-held goals of leading fulfilling lives. If we already believe ourselves to be ancient, unfit and tired at 25 or 30 years of age, then we won’t possibly be able to see much for ourselves at age 40 or 50, besides more of the same weariness. If we’re already so spent, some of us might say to ourselves, then why not take the path of least resistance, and forget about bothering to try anything new? However, this is exactly the attitude that we need to get rid of if we want to become (or stay) successful and happy. It’s been proven to us time and time again that even 70- and 80-year-olds can do things like graduate from university for the first time, write novels, travel to space, or complete physical feats such as swimming the English Channel. Knowing that, why would we throw in the proverbial towel after having only been alive for about three decades?
“Trust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back / At photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now / How much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked.” Baz Luhrmann gave the world this advice in his hit single, “Everybody’s Free (to Wear Sunscreen)” in 1999 (when many members of the Millennial generation were still “tweens” or children), but it’s timeless advice. You’re only as old as you feel, and unless you’re suffering from a serious illness, feeling old is a state of mind. So drop those chips (or pizza, or doughnuts, or whatever), get up off the couch, get out into the world and start making some waves—in a gentle way, of course! When you finally stumble upon some goal or ideal that you’re able to passionately work towards, you’ll be amazed at how quickly you can forget about something like an achy knee.
[su_panel background=”#f2f2f2″ color=”#000000″ border=”0px none #ffffff” shadow=”0px 0px 0px #ffffff”]by Erica Roberts
