How To Become Old And Boring

This is not a love blog post. This is also, it should be stated, not a fuck-a-stripper-on-a-mink-rug blog post. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Today, we're here to discuss truth—the cold, hard, perhaps offensive, but definitely infanutable truth. Specifically, you may very well be old and boring, and that's terrifying. What's even more terrifying is that this is just the natural order of things. This is a wake up call to all of you, except if you're still in college, or you're out of college and don’t have a "real job," in which case you should consider this not a wake up call, but instead a vision of your own unavoidable future. Let us begin.

Consider the person you are at this very moment. Yeah, you're living better now. You've got a job and wear clothes that scream "I have a 401K and/or a dog." You can no longer survive off of coffee and cigarettes, and you may even have found yourself cutting back on those things in favor of real food. Not ramen or pasta, but actual, real life sustenance with nutrients and shit. In college, you went to bed whenever the fuck you wanted. Now, you have a bedtime that's set, and it's probably before midnight. You drink less because suddenly hangovers have become completely unbearable.

Welcome to adulthood, motherfucker. While the road to it was paved with optimism and infinite possibility, now all you can see is the grim crush of reality settling in, obliterating any and all signs of hope. Having a real job and living in the real world is like finals week in college, only it lasts until the day that you die. Unless, of course, you manage to save enough money throughout your career to retire. Which, if we're being frank, seems more unlikely by the day. The trade-off to all of this is you now have money—more than ever before, more than you thought you'd ever know what to do with, and it's all yours. You even start looking for ways to save, like cooking your own food most nights. But with this comes the opportunity cost of time and energy: cooking, then packing your lunch for the next day, then doing your dishes. Suddenly, it's 10:00pm and you have to go to bed at 11:30. While they were once a last resort—a consolatory chill—weed and Netflix have now become a viable Thursday or even Friday night option.

Because you're stuck in an office all day doing your job, the things you love become less available to you. Your interests tend to filter out because you have less time to explore them than you once did. That which you leave behind become mindless fodder for conversation with people you meet who you'd normally have nothing to talk about besides work. The things you love no longer compel you the way they once did. Your social life moves online because most of your friends are in the same boat. Everyone you know is grinding, doing them, unable to make it out with the ease that they once could. Meanwhile, the things you once thought you outgrew have taken on a special significance. So, you close your eyes and put on that Taking Back Sunday song you loved, then hated two years later. Where you once hated that you loved it, you now love that you hated it because it's a very real way to mark epochs in your life through the media you consumed. This is a little thing called "nostalgia." You're not dying, even though death is surely certain, but, in a certain sense, all this all be looked at as a type of death.

Now, for the flip side to all of this because I'm trying to become an optimist in my old age. With the death of your former, fun self, you have been reborn into a new, way more put together version of you. With this realization comes a whole new set of growing pains, where you discover the boundaries of the real world, not just whatever bubble you've been insulated in as a wild and free individual with nothing to lose. Casually smoking weed in the privacy of your own home is pretty tight. Getting so drunk you smack a rando for looking at you sideways is not. And you become OK with that, slowly but surely. You learn what truly matters to you and stop caring about what's hot just to stay current. Your relationships—romantic, platonic and whatever zone occupies those often blurred lines—become more important to you because your time is at a premium and it's a privilege to be able to spend it with those who truly matter. People filter out of your life, sure, but you begin to realize they barely mattered in the first place. You might not be able to hang out with your bros as much anymore, but, given the scarcity of your turn up sessions, they begin to take on a new and very real meaning as a result. And that shit's magical, as long as you don’t realize how lame it is. Eventually, your perspective shifts completely and you won't think about it being lame at all. That's something called balance. And it's boring as fuck and totally fine.

Drew Millard wrote this while drinking sake on a Suzuki in Osaka Bay. You can read more of his work over at Noisey and follow him on Twitter here.