When you start to feel old

I found this card whilst looking for a birthday card for someone else. I was born in 1989, and I remember how I tried to boast that I was born in the late eighties to my friends that were born 1990+. I tried to convince them that I was an eighties kid and they all told me I was just as much of a nineties one as they were. Now, I try to hide the fact that I was born in the eighties as there are now people in work that were born after 2000. I work with someone that has been in the company for 18 years. There are people that work with us that haven’t been alive as long. This is hard for me to grasp.

Most of us here on WordPress were born in the 1900’s. That to me already sounds so old, I mean it is the century that the first flight took place. I look at the above picture and feel old. The gadgets are nothing in comparison to the technology of today, who knew when that first chunky phone was put on the market that we would eventually laugh and take pictures of it on our sleek, tiny smartphones with incredible camera quality . The instant shots we take now are much better than the ones professionals had back then, meaning I only have a handful of baby pictures. Then I remember that many of you reading this were my age when the Berlin Wall came down and my old age turns to youth. It is all relative really.

Is anyone alive today really old? I mean we are the youngest group of people to have ever lived, in a way. We are at the very end of history’s timeline, carving out the future. If we are alive today we are in the present moment and the present moment is the youngest we will ever be. When historians look back at this New Elizabethan era, the babies born tomorrow will be in the same category as the proud grandmothers cradling them.

And how young is our youth? In 100 years from now, the kids of the year 2118 will look back at the ‘oldies’ born in 2018. Children today teaching the new generation about how hard life was with limited WiFi and not being able to make phone calls on airplanes. Talking of a time when space travel to the moon and Mars was only in the planning stage and cancer meant much more than just walking to the chemist and getting a cure over the counter. I like to spend my time looking around at what people of the future will consider old, although I can have no realistic idea.

So, when I freak out about how fast time is going, I try to remember that this is the youngest I will ever be. I need to make the most of this fact. If we are alive we are young, the only people in the history of mankind to be able to witness the present moment. Whether you are 16 or 116, it won’t matter in a couple hundred years. The main thing to remember is that we are the youngest civilisation, the one that ancient civilisations could only predict and fantasise about, the one they were too old to experience themselves. Let’s make the most of this youth.