The other day I was walking around in my neighborhood and I encountered something that drew me in. It was nothing, but a little poetic at the same time. On the sidewalk near the playground, in very neat but still childlike writing, someone had scribbled a number on each segment of sidewalk. It looked like they had one of those multicoloured chalk packs, and they were having a good time going through each colour. Each number got its own colour, and it made it pop each time. As a Michael Bierut fan and a guy interested in design, I loved the aesthetics of it, lol.
As I walked, it looked like this: 1……2……..3…..4…..etc. As you can probably imagine, when the numbers got closer to my age it got me thinking about life. 25….26….27….28…29….30…..And before you know it, I had reached 40. Then 50. And by the end of the block I’d reached 100. I kind of enjoyed walking down this sidewalk, because it made me think about aging and shit. Of course, real life does not go this fast. You don’t turn older by a whole year every couple of seconds. It was only a sidewalk with some scribbles left by children (or just one child, who tf knows, IDK, it sounds like I’m reaching with this one maybe). I’m realizing now that this piece kinda sounds like those people who read too much into certain lyrics, and then the dude who wrote it later confirms, “Bro…it was just a rap bar…I wasn’t talking about anything other than what I said on the surface. I was literally just talking about getting bitches….” But still, it was fascinating to experience that progression in such a short span of time. I know life isn’t really like that, but the sidewalk got me thinking about how long, yet short it all is.
Even though it feels like it’s really long, when you get to the end, you probably trip out and imagine the whole experience as one brief moment. That’s where the phrase “seeing your life flash before your eyes” comes from I guess, it’s that moment where you trip out and have that feeling that it’s all ending, and it wasn’t even a big deal, etc. A whole life compressed into one dying hallucinatory moment. Life is short as hell, but when we’re in it, it feels longer than it is and we’re all so heavily invested in our daily lives even though it ultimately doesn’t add up to anything other than dying of AIDS somewhere lol. Even if you somehow luck out and become super famous and influential and wealthy, at the end you’re still just gonna die and be nothing somewhere in a hospital, forgotten about like everyone else lmao. I’m reminded of my grandfather who said (on his deathbed), “Life….is nothing….we’re here today….tomorrow we’re gone….”
The thing about aging that is so strange is that it is partly about making room for the people who come after you. This can be hard to accept for a lot of older people, and I think this is where a lot of tension in the world stems from: older people not really wanting to get out of the way, and also not wanting to change shit they’re used to. It feels like right now we are kind of in a moment between eras; the old world and way of doing things is kind of coming to an end, whatever that means. The 2000s were not like the 2010s, and the 2020s will not be like the decade that comes after it. It seems like we can all sense that something big is about to happen soon.
I guess I have been thinking more about aging lately because I turned 30 and I’m having some annoying ass arm pain leftover from that car crash a couple months ago. But it’s also because I always seem to be around older people than myself (I’m talking 50s to 60s), either due to work reasons or family reasons. And one of the things I’ve picked up on is that (not all), but many older people don’t seem to realize it’s over for them and their way of doing things is not necessarily how the world will look by the end of this decade. They’re upholding this weird vision of the world that simply won’t exist in a couple years and we’re all forced to be “patient” with their horseshit.
This one is a very tricky thing to discuss without sounding like an agist asshole, but I will give you an example. In 2010, when I was 18 years old, I somehow got an “Internship” with CBC. It wasn’t really an internship, my mom knew someone working there, and asked them if I could watch the editor of one of their TV shows work for a week (because she knew that filmmaking is one of my main interests as a career, and was probably worried I was interested in such an unstable job). She didn’t really know if it would lead to anything (it didn’t) or what I would really learn, but she set it up for me anyway, and for a week I got to watch the editor of a sitcom work and learned some stuff about the process. The editor told me about Walter Murch and recommended all these cool books to me etc, and overall it was a great experience.
But the reason I’m mentioning this is because there was one moment that sticks out to me in retrospect. At one point we were editing a clip, and one of the actors said something a little risqué. I don’t even think it was that bad, they just messed up on a take and said a “swear” word that obviously would not make it into a televised episode of something. (This is funnier now, by the way, because this is before CBC started a show with the word “Shit” literally in the title. Times certainly do change). The reputation of this actor was not really one of a person who swore, so the outtake was doubly striking. At that point, the editor and I started cracking up, but they also addressed it by telling me something along the lines of (I’m paraphrasing here of course), “Just a word about this kind of thing. As an editor, you will see all kinds of stuff that you probably shouldn’t. Part of your job is maintaining privacy, and some stuff stays in the editing room.”
At the time I remember nodding, but I thought, “This is weird. I mean, this is really nothing. A swear word is not a big deal, why should a person be protected? Like, why does it matter? What other types of shit are being hidden that actually do matter?” Now, like I said, this happened in 2010. It’s 12 years later now, and sure enough: the whole culture of keeping shit secret (especially if you’re a famous person or in the public eye at all) has totally evolved. By the end of that same decade, in 2017 we all saw that open secret concept sort of collapse in on itself. And now in 2022, almost every week there’s someone bringing up something someone did a long time ago that wasn’t the best for their reputation now etc.
That was a tangential way to go about discussing this, but my point in all of that is to say: sometimes older people can uphold certain ways of life and patterns and things that are totally wrong, and not even realize they’re doing so. You should never fully accept anything anyone older tells you that you’re unsure of, just because they’re an adult and you’re younger. I think people should always reserve room for their own judgment, and no one should ever be considered the authority on anything. If you’re good at a job and you have a particular set of skills like Liam Neeson that you’re known for, that’s great, and you earned it. But that also does not mean you should be stuck with a certain way of living or doing things, etc.
Life is all about malleability, and this is the stuff progress is made of. People should be willing to accept the fact that they very well may be wrong about many things they’re sure of. Like I’ve said a million times already, this is the rough breakdown of how people age:
0-25 = Useless, immature, dumb
25-55 = These are the people who should be “leading” the world.
55 and over = These people need to chill and do less in society.
There are exceptions to this of course, but generally speaking, I think this is how the world should be. Unfortunately, partly due to capitalism and the system we chose for ourselves, there are a lot of older people hanging on for dear life in the working world and entertainment industry, etc, who don’t want to let go. Even though they may have brain fog, they’re not equipped to be using phones and shit, some of these people are still in charge and in positions of power. It’s like we’re living through some weird Benjamin Button syndrome where the oldest people are given more intellectual respect, when it should really be the other way around in some cases.
Anyway, to conclude this one, I want to go back to the image of the sidewalk and the numbers written in chalk. What would it take for some of these elderly people in power to give it up? I literally think it’s just death, a lot of these people are hanging in the game until they die (like I mentioned: partly due to capitalism and having to pay bills, etc), and I believe changes in the world might happen like collapse: slowly, then all at once. We’ve already seen big changes like marijuana legalization (which took a little too long, quite frankly haha), but stuff like that is just a sign of bigger things to come I think. Why stop there? Let’s do shrooms next. Then let’s have government issued girlfriends for all the LonelyMans out there and cure incel violence! I don’t mean Handmaiden’s Tale forced slavery stuff, I mean a real government job no different than anything else. The world is a spinning planet, it’s a transitory thing, people should be the same way and less rigid; it’s time people start remembering that.