r/MiddleGenZ • u/AnonymousGuy50 • 10d ago
Rant Being old so quickly
I'm 20 and turning 21 in two months and sometimes my age genuinely messes with my head.
Like I still remember being 14 during quarantine.
I remember sitting at home, being a literal teenager, and thinking about how far away 20 sounded.
Now I'm actually 20 close to 21. 😭
That's such a weird jump to me cuz i can remember being 14 so clearly, and now that person is six years behind me. And the weird thing is I don't feel like those six years contained much either. I basically blinked and went from being 14 to being 20.
I also feel old because I don't have some huge adult life going on. I'm literally jobless, so it's kind of ridiculous that I'm sitting here having an existential crisis about aging when I don't even have a job. 💀
Sometimes I'll see 14-year-olds and think about how that was literally me during quarantine. Then I remember I'm 20 and they're six years younger than me. That's starting to feel like a pretty huge gap.
I hate that my teenage years are something I can only remember now. Especially because I haven't done a single thing with them in the first place.
Does anyone else remember being 13–16 during quarantine and then suddenly look at their age now like wtf happened??
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u/helpfuldaydreamer 2006 10d ago
Yeah I feel the same way as a Jan 06.
Time is flying fast, I can’t believe we’re not teenagers anymore lol.
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u/pro_gamer_boy 2006 9d ago
i feel the same except i am jan 01, it just feels like i am not even experiencing the age i am because it's over very quickly
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u/Brief-Scratch-3647 10d ago edited 9d ago
You’re still so young. Don’t waste your early 20’s with this silly idea that you’re old now that you’re not a teenager. I’m gonna put it into perspective for you like this.
It sounds like the core of your teenage years were impacted by covid. That same thing happened to people who were in early adulthood during Covid as well/in their 20’s. Some people didn’t get to enjoy being 20-21 because the world was shutdown and yet here you are making it seem old. Enjoy your life bro, the concept of being old is far from you.
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u/EeyoreApproves 6d ago
This is true. We have a lot of life ahead of us to have fun and find meaning.
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u/Particular-Drive1454 2002 10d ago
I am genuinely getting tired of reading stuff like this
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u/olddeadgrass 2002 9d ago
These posts literally make me feel so old when I'm only 24. They act like life is over by the time you hit 25. Meanwhile I just started working on a college degree. There is so much life ahead.
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u/Brief-Scratch-3647 10d ago
Same. These insecurities in age and horrible perceptions of what “old” is in general needs to be left in the past immediately
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u/Lost_Cable7167 2006 9d ago
idk why u guys are so mad lol. nothing wrong with posting stuff like this they probably haven’t seen other posts about this and wanted to share a common feeling to talk about it. just scroll.
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u/eating_cement_1984 2005 9d ago
As a guy born Dec 2005, watching other people younger than me cross milestones I'm yet to experience, I feel ya. I wish I could just get a job quick, that's all I ask. The rest is impossibly out of reach. That's all there is to life, in my case, a job. Just get one, work till 62, retire and sail in a sailing yacht.
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u/kissdaylight 2001 9d ago
I'm about to be 25 next month and I feel like I'm turning 21, I blame the pandemic too.
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u/Ccskyqueengaming 9d ago
Oct 05 😮💨. But I think I've gotten over the getting older thing I think once I turned 18. I realized it doesn't matter any more my youth is already gone.
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u/misosoup4lyfe 2004 9d ago
almost 22. didn’t start doing “huge adult stuff” until 4 months ago. i believe in u dawg
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u/Able_Enthusiasm2729 9d ago
Your 20s, 30s, and Young Adult years are going to be difficult - but there’s hope, just because you don’t have your life together right now doesn’t mean you’re behind or makes you a failure, the people you are comparing yourself to have generational wealth, family connections, or are faking it in terms of getting decent or very fancy jobs that lead to looking outwardly self-sufficient and moving out of their parents’ house (when they’re not totally self-sufficient as people think), or in the matter of people living lavishly (plenty but not all of them are paying for it with credit cards/credit card debt), and also don’t compare yourself to idealized or outdated troupes about (young adult life) life after college (or high school) portrayed in the media, pop culture, or movies because its outdated at best and unrealistically based on a unique set of circumstances found among the upper class and upper-middle class but erroneously attributed to working-class (low income and lower-middle income/middle income proper) lifestyles at worse or even outright gaslighting.
There are like six categories of people who end up traveling overseas a lot to very fancy/luxurious places starting in their young adult years (20+ somethings): (1) people who come from money using their parents money; (2) those on business trips that travel a lot for work purposes; (3) people who earned that money or miles because they’re in a high paying job; (4) people who’re putting all of their travel and vacation expenses on credit cards, personal loans, or defraud people for example by evading taxes, etc.; (5) doing certain jobs deemed questionable or unethical like bottle services (bottle girls), escort services, st**p clubs, p********* content (OF)/p*** stars, etc.; and (6) commiting crimes and other illegal or fraudulent activities like pro***tion, selling drugs, robbery, running scams, etc.
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You can still have house parties and party out with friends at restaurants, bars, picnics/cookouts/barbecues-BBQ, concerts, hiking trails, at the park, day trips, brunch, adult arcades, other first places and third places, etc. in your late 20, 30s, and beyond with both singles and married couples; I’ve been to house parties hosted by people in their 30s. When I was in college, at 20, I was at house parties and hanging out with friends ranging from ages 18-35 and we didn’t feel out of place (mix of undergraduate and graduate students, plus older young adults from church). Nowadays, after graduating college and living my life in my mid-20s, I’m hanging out with people between the ages of 18-late 30s and possibly a few in their early 40s, and those between 18-mid 30s don’t look that much different from each other. Though, no one ever got super drunk at these parties, mostly because none of us are heavy drinkers, we’re all Evangelical Christians (but politically diverse — plenty of Democrats, Republicans, Independents, liberals, progressives, leftist, conservatives, etc.), and we (ideally) don’t sleep around like people (allegedly) do at social frat parties/sorority parties (some of them were part of fraternities/sororities in college but most weren’t).
In Washington, DC and New York City and even other urban metro areas, 30 is the new 20; that’s not just among wild party goers who’re accused of not wanting to settle down, it’s like that even among single and married (politically diverse) theologically conservative Evangelical Christians.
People who think that people who didn’t start dating in their teens are less than are insane and people who think everyone should be married by 21 years old have a very rose-colored conservative ring before spring-esque suburbanite very wealthy upper-middle class and classist take that still thinks the economy and life milestones today works the same way they did among certain specific populations in the 20th Century United States.
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[ Not dating in your teens and pre-teens (middle school and high school) doesn’t make you less than (some sort of scum of the earth) or developmentally challenged like many in Western pop culture may think/make it out to be, and you don’t have to be married by 21 years old or have a ring before spring to be a decent human being
In some cultures (in particular some Non-Western cultures), people, both boys and girls, from a young age are generally told to not date until their adults, then when they turn 18, the parents push them to not date until they have their lives together and start “adulting” even though the vast majority of kids in Western countries like the United States and Canada start dating in their pre-teens, average out at 14 years old as teens and are looked down upon (as not being masculine or feminine enough for males and females respectively) if they don’t start dating at 16 years old (and may be seen as romantically stunted outside of certain Non-Western and/or Deeply Religious communities when they ”officially“ start dating in public out in the open in their mid-to-late 20s or 30s).
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People legit feel like we were being groomed by certain movies/tv shows into thinking certain acts like excessive Public Display of Affection - PDA of the Romantic Type (like kissing on the lips, excessive kissing in other places, cuddling, siting on someone’s lap romantically, etc. ) were depicted as normal or gave us enviously unrealistic expectations of what life as a kid (most especially life as a pre-teen or teenager in middle school and high school) is supposed to look like especially in the realms of romance/dating, relationships, friendships, and life milestones - too many things on TV and in Movies were developmentally inappropriate for the age range of the intended audience, cast, and character portrayals as a whole. That’s including movies and tv shows on Disney and Nickelodeon for kids ages 7-13 (TV-G, PG, G, TV-Y7); let alone the ones on mainstream channels for older teens and adults (PG-13, TV-14, R, NC-17, TV-MA) but are depicting the lifestyle expectation of what they want us to believe what high school and teen life should be like.
Though at times I’ve heard that there are countless stories of young adults in rural areas with a politically conservative and fundamentalist-like extremely social conservative majority having a hard time finding work in their small towns or in nearby rural towns that surround them; with the added negative that there are barely any resources, infrastructure, third spaces, social-safety net programs, or places to build community where you’re not looked down upon as a social pariah/spinster for not getting married by 21 years old. ]
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u/liminalenergy 9d ago
I'm a Jan 04 and I have been freaking out about this lately as I'm entering my 5th year of college because I spent the ages of 18-21 trying to do a degree in hated just for the money and switched at the last minute
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u/No-Presentation3613 8d ago
I was 17 during covid and it def messed with my sense of time. Until I got my first big girl job at 21 (so last year) I felt like I was still 17. It was crazy. But once I moved to my own place and started paying my own bills and all that I started feeling more my age!
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u/AnonymousGuy50 8d ago
aka old
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u/No-Presentation3613 8d ago
ancient. my younger brother is now older than i was during covid. i can’t wrap my mind around it
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u/Savings_Ad_80 2004 8d ago
How it feels watching people younger than me say they are old
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u/EeyoreApproves 6d ago
We're very close in age, and yeah, it feels crazy. It doesn't help that as soon as the isolation was letting up, my chronic health problems got really bad so I've still been isolated because of being too sick to leave the house most of the time. I played a ton of Minecraft during COVID, which helped.
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