Getting Older is About Turning Away from Ourselves

Thoughts about a landmark birthday year, and a very scary world.

Jan 31, 2024

Image from The Zone of Interest, 2023

On the last day of school, years ago, all of the teachers and administrators gathered us in the gymnasium. We sat in chairs, facing the back wall. They turned all the lights off and pulled down a large projector screen. They started a kind of video montage of pictures – pictures of us, from all ages, with a playlist jamming in the background. Many of the images were of us from that year; at recess, wandering down the halls, bent over desks with our hands in clay and paper-mâché projects. I felt no real pang of nostalgia for the recent clips. They were my then-life. I still had the crafts projects at home. But then the age of the pictures began to slide backwards. Suddenly groups of kids two, three, four years earlier. These kids had less teeth, bigger smiles, everyone was prepubescent and in their old bodies, the style of clothing in those pictures closer to that of the 1990s. The shorts rode higher up the thighs, many of the girls still wore colored bows in their hair, many of us had fanny packs. Everyone was unrecognizable. The parents must have loved it. Who could blame them: sixth graders, who were teetering on the edge of being hopelessly annoying and edgy for the next several years, were made cute and innocent again, and reverted back to their angelic pasts. It must have given them a respite, before the teenage angst that was about to erupt.

I remember ‘Santeria’ playing in the background. It was all music you could have heard in an Apple ad for the iPod Nano. So boppy, cheery, bright. It meshed perfectly with what the whole theming of elementary school graduation had been for us, which was: ‘Everything is going to be great! The world is so open! You can achieve anything that you set your mind to!‘ They had hammered this in explicitly when they made us 6th-graders stand on metal bleachers in the gymnasium, and sing a song that we had rehearsed over a few minutes. I have unsuccessfully attempted to purge this song from my brain. The lyrics creep back to me in random moments: “Set my course, set me free… Give me wings to flyyyyy, give me wings to fly!” I vaguely remember us having to cup our hands together and flap our straightened fingers, as if they were wings. But it’s also possible that I’ve entirely lifted that specific moment from the movie Napoleon Dynamite1.

The whole event was sentiment, nostalgia, ooey-gooey feelings that were meant to make us and our parents feel warm and at peace with the pace of change. Most of the people around me laughed, ooooed, and awwww’d. The boys would whisper, making jokes, pretending not to care. Calculated indifference, which is what boys of all ages do. But I remember being glued to the screen. I couldn’t have imagined turning away, it was as if I was pinned to the ground and my organs were being torn away from my stomach by a vacuum. The feeling intensified when the montage faded to a picture of four boys, arms dangled around one another’s shoulders. There were three boys that I knew very well, who I liked very much. And then there was me, but a me from Kindergarten or First Grade. I had a bowl cut, with straight blonde hair, and a grin that was probably punctured by one or two missing teeth. I was wearing a vest that I could vaguely remember wearing once. I think it had Tigger on it, or maybe Mickey Mouse. The four of us were standing in a patch of grass somewhere at recess. We were all smiling at the camera. Big, toothy smiles. We were all united, in that very sweet little moment, a quartet of happy American boys at the dawn of the new milennium, which is probably what everyone else saw too. But when I looked at the picture, I couldn’t see myself, even though I knew that it was actually me looking at the camera. There was a very pretty boy up there with gold hair, and a smile that I could vaguely recognize as mine. And then there was me, as I was in the chair then: gangly, browning hair, blackheads on my nose, acne on my forehead and lips that would begin to leak as I picked at them with fingernails, body hair growing on the flat plane of my chest, the little hairs on my arms and legs lengthening and darkening. The person up there was indistinguishable from me, even though it had been only three, four, or five years earlier. I’d changed so much in that time that I could only abstractly recognize that I had once been six years old, or seven.

And while I was sitting in the gym, in the dark, it began to viscerally click in a way that it never had for me before. Three years from then I would graduate middle school. And then three years after that I would receive my high school diploma, and go to college. Life would be a long string of these little landmark moments, and I would have to look back from them, holding the pictures of past-me against the murky truth of present-me, and live with the differences between the two making less and less sense as I moved further along in life. I did mental math, then. I was maybe eleven, or twelve at the time. I would have maybe seven more of these new decades to celebrate. Eight, if I was extremely lucky and beat the longevity-odds of other American boys.

We’d been given a schlocky, goofy presentation to make us eager and excited for the futures that we had. We were sold the enthusiasm of endless horizons, endless possibilities, endless anything’s, and wrapped up tightly in that sentiment like a straitjacket. But sitting there, it did not feel endless. I saw how turning the sentiment just a few degrees led me to the opposite end of the cheeriness. We were not really celebrating the future, I thought, but mourning the lives that we could not get back. Childhood innocence, scraped knees falling on the hopscotch court, the easy way that boys and girls and everyone played football together on the dirt field without thinking about what we ought to do. These were facts of our actual lives, being consigned to the past, being torn away from us. There was only one direction now: further and further away, until the very end.

According to the Georgian calendar, I’m reaching another landmark life-event today. I am moving from my second decade of life into my third, into the sort of mental-math where I have to figure that I have maybe five decades ahead, six if I am careful and good towards myself, seven if I win the genetic lottery and optimize my body like a software program, eight if somehow the productive forces of society lead to both incredible medical advances and the allocation of free quality healthcare to everyone (Utopian Space-Socialism, essentially).

You can tell by now that the tone of this essay is god-awful, morose, not at all what you want to get from a person about to celebrate another candle in the cake. You’d probably assume that it’s jitters about turning 30 and getting older. But strangely enough it isn’t about that.

Because of that dark gymnasium, and having a family with good values, and all the other things that have happened in this little life, I don’t really fear getting old. Nor do I really worry about what comes after old age. Just a few days ago, I went for a long walk from one end of the city back home, as I often do. By the time I walked up the stairs, and through the door, there was a twisting ache in my kneecap. I had to hobble into bed, and calculate how much it would hurt to get up in the middle of the night if I needed to grab water or a late-night snack. When I woke in the morning, and rolled out of bed, all I could feel was the splitting pain in my right knee. I could barely walk. I sat in my chair and closed my eyes and… smiled. I laughed when I mentioned the story to my father, on the phone. I laughed when I thought about it later, while writing this. I wouldn’t have laughed several years ago, or maybe even last year. But now there’s something deeply funny about it all to me. And, strangely, there is something beautiful about knowing that your body is headed in a direction that there is no turning back from. It was always like that, of course, but the illusion of youth for many people is that we can go about our lives as if nothing else is happening, as if we will always be like how we are now. Well, I’ve turned the corner. I see what’s ahead of me. It is not so scary after all. It could even be lovely.

What is explicitly not-lovely right now is the world. Saying that is so self-evident that it’s probably insulting to me and to you to have to say it. But still it has to be said, because it feels like something is shifting beneath our feet, in real-time, and I want to brace myself before falling.

In 1994, when I was born, the world was only a few years past the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nelson Mandela was elected as South Africa’s first president, effectively ending Apartheid. NAFTA was implemented. Bill Clinton played the saxophone for the Russian President Boris Yeltsin2. It was the new American world-order, ‘Pax Americana’, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History. The crystal ball in Washington DC revealed that the whole world would soon come to adopt American style democratic-republics, with money-hungry economies that would knit the world into a worldwide net of free-trade and everlasting peace.

In 2004, at the beginning of my second full decade, America was caught in bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. An estimated 4.5 to 4.7 million people would die directly and from the aftermath of the War on Terror3. It was also the year of Abu Ghraib. Ten-year-old me walked through the halls of my elementary school in November, trying to convince everyone to vote in my school’s mock elections for Senator John Kerry. Kerry, it turns out, won the Horace Mann Elementary vote. But he lost the country.

In 2014, at age 20, Israel bombed the Gaza strip in a months-long seize that left 2,250+ dead4. A mini revolution began in Ukraine, and then the quick beginnings of a protracted conflict in the country. ISIS seized large parts of the Levant, and the United States began to forcefully intervene in the Syrian Civil War.

By 2024, now age 30, the world is truly asunder. Israel is bombing Gaza in a war that many, including me, believe to be a genocide. A bloody conflict of attrition and trench warfare drags on in Ukraine, with no real end in sight. 25 Republic-led states are using the same legal arguments that the confederate states used to secede from the Union in 18615. The Prime Minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, who has publicly complimented Benito Mussolini in the past, did not condemn a gathering earlier this month where hundreds of fascists stood in Rome and raised the fascist salute6. The second most popular party in German, Alternative für Deutschland, was caught having a secret meeting with explicit neo-Nazis, where they promised to expel all migrants, asylum seekers, and Germans of foreign birth who ‘failed to integrate’7. In America, Trump is polling far and ahead of Biden, and using explicitly blood-science language in his stump speeches8, and the mood of everyone here in the United States is essentially resigned to him likely winning.

It’s tiring to write this, just as I imagine it sucks to read it. It’s not what I want to write, frankly. I’d much rather talk about the good books and authors that I’ve read lately, like Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgård, Alice Munro, Sally Rooney, or the good movies that I’ve watched. But the movie that first comes to mind is one that I saw in the theater on Saturday, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, which is all about the domestic life of Nazi Kommandant Rudolf Höss. It follows his wife, Hedwig, and their children as they frolic through the garden, and lounge in the crisp summer breeze, as just outside the compound walls scattered gunshots ring out over a constant background noise of wails and screams in the next-door Auschwitz concentration camp.

And even if I tried to talk about my favorite books, all of them would connect right back to the mess of the world now, because all meaningful art is fixed to the world. Sally Rooney writes novels about obsession and sex, but her characters go to rallies for Gaza and argue about capitalism and socialism. Rooney, herself, is a Marxist9. Knausgård’s 6-part memoir-novel touches on his father’s struggle with alcoholism and death, but the series is really about the emptiness of modern life and the allure of turning-away from oneself and the world, through addiction and distraction. In the original Norwegian, the series itself is titled Min Kamp. My Struggle. In German, it would be Mein Kampf.

A real and normal part of me wants to shut out all this noise and retreat to my private comforts. I would like to hike around, drink beer, read a few books, write silly little things about how lupine looks in mountain meadows, travel around a bit, do the bourgeois-rigmarole of hopping from one café or bar or brunch place in the big city to another, and pretend that the world was generally hunky-dory, and that there was little impact that I could have on its affairs. I’d like to write little essays that are very inward gazing. I’d like to do as Voltaire urged in Candide, when he told all of us that “we must cultivate our garden.” That is something I believe, genuinely – that we must cultivate our own garden. After all, who knows how much time one has. I’d like to live a halfway good life, with nice things sprinkled throughout. But cultivating one’s garden can quickly become like the bulk of The Zone of Interest, with Hedwig Höss hacking away at rose bushes, and admiring her dahlias, as off in the distance the black smoke rises from the chimney of the crematorium. There’s a point where individualism, and retreating into oneself, morphs into narcissism, which is indistinguishable from terror.

So in a roundabout way, at age 30, I’ve reached the mindset of Robert Jordan, the protagonist of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Near the end of the book, as he is almost certainly about to die in a pitched battle with Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War, Jordan thinks; “The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.”

That’s exactly right. It would be a shame to not celebrate as many landmark birthdays as I would like. I would love to do all of the things that life could possibly offer. But it would be far worse if I amassed a life of little pleasures, and pretty flowers, and a long carefree life, without attempting in any small way to fight for the goodness of the world that both exists now and could possibly be. I would still be breathing if I made that trade. I would increase the odds that I make it to 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, even 90 years old, especially with the headaches and the stress that I wouldn’t feel. But I would already be dead, in many small ways. One’s garden will never be enough, on its own. Even if the ash from the chimneys fluttered down to the garden, fed the soil, and led to the prettiest bloom that a rose bush had ever seen.

Three Chairs

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