A Case for Getting Old(er)
The orcas are back in business and so is … Osama Bin Laden!?
Hi friends!
It seems that sailors in the Strait of Gibraltar have taken a tip from my upstairs neighbor and are blasting heavy metal in an effort to deter the orcas, our fave finned folk heroes, from doing their life’s work. Better luck next time, it’s just making us stronger!
While we’ve been distracted by other existential threats, AI was sidelined from the collective anxiety lineup. Well, there’s actually some huge drama going down in that world. The CEO of OpenAI, the company that brought ChatGPT to the masses decades too late to do my math homework, was suddenly fired.
Apparently nobody knows exactly why this all went down and now he might be rehired and lord help us because this is a man who has been accused of abuse and is open about how this technology could very well evolve to kill us all and yet has never advocated for its development to pause.
The tech world is chock full o’ lunatics. What is it that makes these people the worst? Is it the nerdy hubris? The plentiful monopoly money? Or maybe it’s that people who think we’ll be better off more machine than human are a little off their rockers when it comes to the task of … being human?
Speaking of, Elon Musk — self-appointed main character and/or villain in the Age of Unhingement™️ — has decided to put his weight behind antisemitic hate speech again. We need to organize to stop paying attention to him en masse. Attention is his oxygen and he’s a grease fire that needs a pot lid.
Back in my day we had the joy of getting 11 likes on a weird Valencia-filtered pic. Now the youths are into Bin Laden, whose “Letter to America,” a manifesto published a year after 9/11, had a moment this past week when TikTok creators, um, praised his take on U.S. involvement in the middle east. The panic that followed amplified the whole situation so it’s hard to say how viral the trend actually was but it had enough legs to move a transcript of the letter originally posted in 2002 up to top story on the Guardian’s website before they took it down.
I refused to do my own research while all this was going on, lest I damage the carefully cultivated zen of my FYP, so I can’t really weigh in on whether Gen Z is being radicalized towards jihad or not, but I will say this, when the kids are into Bin Laden, I know that youth culture has officially lost me and I am ready to be old.
Youth was not wasted on me. I have already lived at least five crazy lives across three different cities. My hobby for the better part of two decades was vodka soda. Baby, I have stories. I would not go back in time if you paid me and I love getting paid.
I don’t actually think I’m old, just closer to 40 than anything else and choosing to embrace this era: spending what could have been my life savings at restaurants, taking scenic walks, enjoying a night in, and finding the simple joy in being cozy. Turns out as you age you get to discover a whole new world of satisfying activities — I recently spent an hour shredding a huge stack of old papers and it was sublime.
Aging comes for us all, if we’re lucky, and despite what the faces of Beverly Hills insist, I don’t think fighting it is a good idea. Like, I get it, my generation is wildly emo and we were the young guns ruining everything for a very long time. But that torch has been passed and let’s let them have it. They don’t remember life before the internet and that is enough horror to bear without constantly having to deal with insecure millennials worried about which jeans to wear.
This is all very easier said than done. Despite the fact that the country I live in is run by a literal octogenarian, the culture is beyond youth obsessed. It’s way worse for women since ageism and sexism are allies in the war on our sanity — I’m single and childless, I’ve heard it all and I’ve thought it all — but I refuse to buy into the bullshit.
The older I get, the better I know myself, and the better I know myself, the less I have to prove. Also, being a contrarian is extremely fun, you should totally try it sometime.
I know being old isn’t cool, but as I’ve been saying for years, being cool is for teenagers and cokeheads. And even though the temperature of this planet is hot hot hot, the vibes are decidedly not. So maybe we should all focus on being warm for a bit? It couldn’t hurt.
There’s no bigger advantage when times are tough than the resiliency that comes from lived experience and I don’t believe that youth trumps wisdom, especially not now when we need to hear wise words more than ever. I’m thinking we should all just embrace where we’re at and try to make the most of it. Plus, I once saw a screenshot of a headline (our greatest source of truth these days) that said we’re all gonna live to 120 so, yeah, who even fucking knows anymore.
Less Lessons More Blessin’s™️
Liz