First, you’re born. Then, you’re “young.”
Though you don’t realize it as you live it, the period in which you are young stretches from sometime around a year or two old all the way until you’re somewhere in your mid-30s.
This is only becomes visible in retrospect, and that visibility is consolidated as a particular kind of sensibility and worldview comes to replace the one that has been with you throughout the entirety of your previous life.
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“Being young” is a way of understanding the world and your place in it.
In a young life, the future is full of promise and the past recedes quickly. You live in eager anticipation of, planning for, and striving toward all the good times to come. You dream; you hope; you “can’t wait” for what’s undoubtedly ahead. The past is largely uninteresting; all you did was eat your vegetables and do your homework and work that fast food job and so on. All of the “you” things, the ones that will be your “life,” are yet to happen.
It’s when this view gives way to a new understanding of the world that you are no longer young.
This new understanding of the world is rather difficult to confront. I’m still learning to live with it. It’s perhaps more realistic, but that’s small comfort.
You are no longer young when it begins to dawn on you that the truly happy moments in life are vanishingly rare, few and far between, and so painfully and tragically fleeting that once they pass it can take rather a lot of courage to permit yourself to remember them.
Now understanding just how unutterably precious the tiny collection of happy moments were over the years, how rare and how important, you are cross with yourself for not understanding their value as you lived them—for taking them for granted and for wanting to race through them toward the future, toward your “plans” in life.
You realize only to well that you didn’t realize that the future, your plans, all of that stuff is nonsense. Your entire life is and always was just a forward projection of whatever amount of momentum you managed to gain very early on; intertia carries you forward until you run out of it, and there you stop. Almost no one really has any control over anything that happens over the course of adulthood; it’s all just steering and reacting as you roll forward—quickly at first, then more slowly, until you finally creep to a stop, and there you stay.
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Once the past is so bittersweet that you can’t look directly at it without the risk of going blind, you’re no longer young. Its bittersweet flavor comes largely from the fact that each of these small moments of happiness are lost forever, never to return; that you can only half-grasp them in memory, hazy and indistinct, though at times you will try so very desperately to bring them back to clarity if only to try to feel again what you wance felt; and that despite this haze and indistinctness, and the fact that they are merely ghosts, they are at the same time the most important things you will ever own until you die.
And you know that you are no longer young when you’re fully aware that you’re closer to the “die” end of things than to the beginning—and that from the list of things that you “could decide to do with life” in your youth, few to none of them will happen before then.
In short, you’re no longer young when you understand the bleak and rather tragic nature of life, and you realize that there are likely only a tiny handful of truly good times to come, and you become determined to try to seize and savor them—even as you know that with your increased responsibilities and loss of momentum, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to.
— § —
When the optimistic anticipation and presumption of control is replaced by regretful longing and presumption of limited influence—that’s when youth has ended and you’ve officially reached middle age.
First, you’re born. Then, you’re “young.” Then, you try to hold back the storm and hold on to the few precious moments you’ve collected along the way. Ultimately, you fail to do so—because all of us are mortal. Then, the end.