Get back in your box!

I'm thirty years old and by many I am still considered young, but by some I am considered old.  I think I have come to an age where I would personally class it as a generational shift.  Up until now, I have still found an interest in many things that were current, and part of pop culture and for lack of a better word, mainstream.  What I have noticed however is that the divergence is growing between what I experienced myself and what I am now experiencing vicariously.

One of my cousins is heading off to University, something I did twelve years ago now.  While much of the process has remained unchanged, e.g. student finance forms, and all the bureaucracy that goes with it, things have changed quite a bit in all other aspects, to the point where I don't think most of my advice I would have given my freshman self would even be relevant now.

Your late teenage years are when you first become aware of paperwork, when you first start having to fill out forms for all manner of things, and when for most people, they come across those boxes where you tick which age bracket you fall into.  As you grow older you move up through these brackets and the first time you do it there's always a novelty in that moment, but when you start moving up again you start to realise time is moving forward whether you're completely conscious of that fact or not.  Time really does feel like it speeds up with age, those moments of transition from one bracket to the next seem to come quicker each time.  You think back to when your school holidays as a kid used to feel like they lasted an eternity, but by the time you hit your thirties a year passes with ever increasing rapidity.

The awareness of the limits of your generation become more apparent with age.  It starts with language, words begin to creep in which you don't know or don't understand.  Even when you learn what they mean you don't feel confident using them and have to second-guess whether you're actually using it right.  That causes an awkwardness that makes the whole thing feel unnatural to you.  You begin to recognise it as a language that you don't speak.  You might understand it but still, it doesn't feel like a language that is "yours" anymore.  At least this is my perception, and even going beyond my perception of myself and extending it to others, not for want of judging, the same awkwardness is felt for other people even if they show no sign of it themselves.  You start to see people your age using those words and it becomes amusing, the apparent pursuit of everlasting youth becoming evermore pronounced the greater the divergence becomes.

After language for me it comes to fashion, perhaps this speaks more of my priorities in life than anything.  Maybe for other people the order would be reversed.  For me personally fashion has always been a matter of personal taste, not something I pursued in the aim of following a trend.  For those that do perhaps fashion would be their first awareness of this divergence.  Nevertheless, you start to see lines being released by stores that take on a new style that doesn't appeal to you.  Styles evolve and you become increasingly aware of how out of place you look when you try on these outfits.  Again perhaps this is all my own experience and other people don't identify with this at all.  For me personally the last two or three years now it has become harder for me to find clothes I actually like.  I refuse to conform to stereotypical styles associated with ageing, more so because I never liked them in the first place, I'm not going to suddenly develop a taste for corduroy, plaid jumpers, and tweed - no offence if you like that sort of thing, each to their own, but to me that's hideous.

I know the style of clothing I like, and I know that it's now absent from the high street, and it's hard to define it in searchable terms which makes finding it online difficult.  That in itself is a topic for another post.

Despite how this post might read, I am not bitter about this whole experience.  I'm merely pointing out that demographics aren't just things that are used to define us, they are used to target us and entire industries centre around narrowing down their target audiences to the most lucrative.  You become more aware with age how much attention businesses, and industries in general, write you off as a consumer based on arbitrary numbers and statistics which, despite their arbitrary nature, do develop into full fledged divisions of the population which reinforces the divergence between generations.  Each generation in essence is groomed by corporations and intentionally segregated to create distinct markets.  Content producers and product manufacturers don't want universal markets, they want segregation the more segregated we are as a society the easier it is to target us, they don't like it when you step outside of your box and become something they don't know how to classify and categorise because they can't market to you as effectively.