Evidently the major revelation of 2019 is that I am getting old.
When they started having 1990s music as a distinct category, and “90s nostalgia” became an unironic trend in the same vein as people dressing upon the styles of the roaring 20s, or whatever the 50s were, I was able to brush it aside. After all, most of the 90s were safely before I was born. Besides, I told myself, there are clear cultural and historical delineation between the 90s they hearken back to, and my own era. I mean, after all, the 90s started still having the Soviet Union exist, and most of the cadence of them was defined by the vacuum created immediately thereafter.
If this seems like an odd thing to latch onto, perhaps it’s worth spelling out that for me, growing up, the Soviet Union became a sort of benchmark for whether something is better considered news or history. The fall of the Soviet Union was the last thing mentioned on the last page of the first history textbooks I received, and so in my head, if something was older than that, it was history rather than just a thing that happened.
Anyways, I reasoned, the 90s were history. The fact that I recognized most of the songs from my childhood I was able to safely reason away as a consequence of the trans-Pacific culture delay of living in Australia. Since time zones make live broadcasts from the US impractical, and VHS, CDs, and DVDs take time to ship across an ocean, Australia has always been at least a few months behind major cultural shifts. The internet age changed this, but not fundamentally, since media companies have a potential financial benefit if they are able to stagger release dates around the world to spread out hype and profits. So of course I would recognize some of the songs, even perhaps identify with some of them from childhood, that were listed as being from an age I considered mentally closer to antiquity than modernity.
The first references to “2000s” culture I can recall as early as 2012, but most of these struck me as toungue-in-cheek. A witty commentary on our culture’s tendency to group trends into decades, and attribute an overriding zeitgeist upon which we can gaze through rose-tinted retrospect, and from which we can draw caricatural outfits for themed parties. I chuckled along and brushed aside the mild disconcertion. Those few that weren’t obviously tongue in cheek were purely for categorization; grouping songs by the year of release, rather than attempting to bundle together the products of my childhood to put them on the shelf next to every other decade in history, and treat them with about the same regard.
A few stray references to “new millennium” or “millennial” culture I was able to dismiss, either on the grounds that it was relying on the labels provided by generational theory, or because it was referring not to the decade from 2000-2010, but that peculiar moment right around January 1st, 2000, or Y2K if you prefer, between when the euphoria of the end of the Cold War made many proclaim that we had reached the end of history, the the events of September 11th, 2001 made it painfully clear that, no, we hadn’t.
This didn’t bother me, even if the references and music increasingly struck home. It was just the cultural delay, I reasoned. The year 2000 was, in my mind, really just an epilogue to the 1990s, rather than a new chapter. Besides that, I couldn’t remember the year 2000. I mean, I’m sure things that I remember happened in that year, but there aren’t any memories tied to a particular date before 2001.
Unfortunately for me and my pleasant self-delusions, we’ve reached a tipping point. Collections of “2000s songs” are now being manually pulled together by connoisseurs and dilettantes with the intent of capturing a historical moment now passed, without the slightest wink or trace of irony. There are suggestions of how to throw a millennial party in the same way as one might a 20s gala, without any distinction between the two.
Moreover, and most alarming to my pride, there are people reading, commenting, and sharing these playlists and articles saying they weren’t born yet to hear the music when it came out, but wish they had been.
While I’m a bit skeptical that the people leaving these comments are actually so young (I suspect they were already born, but just weren’t old enough to remember or be listening to music), it’s not impossible. For some of the songs I remember watching the premiere of the music video with friends, a person born that year would now be old enough that in many states they could drive themselves to their 2000s themed party. In parts of Europe, they’d be old enough to drink at the party.
We’ve now reached a point where I can no longer have my entire life have happened recently, in the same historical era. Much of the music and culture I recall being new, cutting edge, and relevant, is not only no longer hip and happening, but has come out the other end, and is now vintage and historical. In a single sentence, I am no longer young, or at lest not as young as I would like to think myself.
In a sense, I knew this was coming. But having it illustrated is still a gut punch. It’s not so much that I think of myself as young and with it as a part of my identity, and this shift has shaken part of me. I know I’m not the life fast die young party animal our culture likes to applaud and poke fun at. I never have been, and probably never will be. That ship hasn’t so much sailed, as suffered failure on launch, with the champagne bottle at the ceremony causing a valve to come loose in the reactor room.
I might have held out hope that it could someday be salvaged; that a few years from now when my life support technology is more autonomous, I would have the opportunity to go to parties and get blackout drunk without having to worry that between medication side effects, and the risk of life support shenanigans while blacked out, the affair would probably kill me. But if that goes down as the tradeoff- if I never go to a real five alarm teen party, but instead I live to 100, I could grit my teeth and accept it.
What does bother me is the notion that I am getting properly old. To be more specific, the notion that I’ve stopped growing up and have started aging is alarming, because it suggests that I’ve hit my peak, at least physiologically. It suggests that things aren’t going to get any better than they are now, and are only going to get worse with time.
This is a problem. My back and joints already ache enough on a good day to give me serious pause. My circulation is poor, my heart and lungs struggle to match supply and demand, and my nervous system has a rebellious streak that leads my hands to shake and my knees to buckle. My immune system puts me in the same category as a chemotherapy patient, let alone an elderly person. In short, I don’t have a lot to lose should y faculties start to decline. So long as I’m young, that’s not a problem. There remains the possibility that I might grow out of some of my issues. And if I don’t, there’s a good chance that medical technology will catch up to meet me and solve my problems.
But the medical advances on the table now promise only to halt further degradation. We have some ideas about how to prevent age-related tissue damage, but we still won’t be able to reverse harm that’s already been done. People that are still still young when the technology is discovered might be able to love that way forever, but short of another unseen and unimagined breakthrough, those who are old enough to feel the effects of aging won’t be able to be young again, and might simply be out of luck.
A clever epistemologist might point out here that this problem isn’t actually unique. The speculative technology angle might add a new dimension to the consideration, but the central issue is not a novel dilemma. After all, this existentialist dread at one’s own aging and mortality is perhaps the oldest quandary of the human experience. I may perhaps feel it somewhat more acutely relative to where my chronological age would place me in modern society, but my complaints are still far from original.
Unsurprisingly, the knowledge that my problems are older than dirt, and have been faced by every sapient being, is not comforting. What solidarity I might feel with my predecessors is drastically outweighed by my knowledge that they were right to fear age, since it did get them in the end.
This knowledge does contain one useful and actionable nugget of wisdom- namely, that if the best minds of the last twelve millennia have philosophized inconclusively for countless lifetimes, I am unlikely to reach a satisfactory end on my own. Fighting against the tide of time, railing against 2000s nostalgia, is futile and worthless. Acting indignant and distressed about the whole affair, while apparently natural to every generation and perhaps unavoidable as a matter of psychology, is not a helpful attitude to cultivate. The only thing left, then, is to embrace it.