Teetering on midlife crisis

Sometimes I think I am the only one who has aged in my generation. As we are growing older I see my friends clinging on to memories and habits that we adored or admired during our college days. But the truth of the matter is now that we are growing older and more responsible we have to let go of those memories and habits. Admittedly, some of us are cool and hip enough to continue in the same way, but unfortunately they are very few in number and others are just setting themselves to be criticised and mocked.

We are straddled between the young and the old that the cool twenties don’t want to be friends with us and we are not yet ready to be friends with the grey-haired and wrinkled fifties. This is the time that most of us would like to befriend people younger than us. To us our contemporaries are boring and old, but we conveniently forget that so are we! Those of us who are do not have any children are in another kind of limbo- we can neither fit into the group of young couples who are starting on the adventures of married life, nor can we be the part of conversation of couples who could talk all day about their kids.

It is hard for us to accept that we are not hip anymore. We are now outdated in respect of technological knowledge and the latest in-things. The newest social media platforms and happening places are beyond our knowledge. We think that the changes we have seen from record players to ipods are enough to last us a lifetime. We have almost seen the full cycle of fashion, the pants that our dad wore are now again in fashion albeit the gender has changed.

This is the time when we find that the friends with whom we had promised never to lose touch with have created a distance that neither of us acknowledges but which nevertheless exists and extends with our secret realisation. We suddenly find ourselves reminiscing about the past like our fathers and uncles whom we used to mock for their affection for their past.

We have learned to live alone and be responsible, do our duties even if we don’t like them. In other words we have become the person whom we dreaded and criticised. We ourselves become the part of the querulous marriage, which we abhorred. We learn to live with this altered self. Once we get down from your high horse nothing is beneath us anymore.

We have achieved a level of independence that now we wish someone was there to admonish us. We can come home any time we want to but now we wish that someone would set a curfew time. We buy whatever catches our fancy and then discard them because there is no pleasure in buying those things, it is more of a duty to keep up with the latest fashion.

Death too doesn’t seem to be a weird or unimaginable thing anymore, every visit to the doctor makes it more imminent. We would for once like to know when we die so that we could plan accordingly. We treat everything with a sense of detachment, at the same time trying desperately to cling on the bonds. The point is that this is the phase in our lives when we are reinventing ourselves and we are going through some changes that we don’t realise or like. But Cest la vie…….