Yesterday, while talking to a friend, he said how much he liked the thesis and presentation of the theory I had constructed in the last post about football. Instead of taking the compliment and shutting up, I said this: ‘Wait for the next one! It’s gonna blow your mind!’
Stupid. So stupid. I am a staunch atheist, but nazars are very real, especially my own. Listen, I’m just mucking around with these posts, so these are very low-stake potatoes, which in turn enables me to produce good passable work week after week. If I attach any sort of self-worth to this, then it is as doomed as the rest of my writing projects.
So I present you this week’s grand unification theory brainfart:
“We should count age milestones in multiples of 11!”
Wait, hear me out. No, don’t go! You’re already out? And the others, too? Man, now you're all having ice cream together? This just sucks.
But it does lower the stakes a lot, so I breathe a sigh of relief and jog on to explain the inane statement.
I’ve been noodling around this thought for a while, the feeling that milestone years are almost always construed to be way bigger than they are. After 25, the multiples of 5s keep coming at you thick and fast. You are confronted by the versions you could’ve been looking down at you, and that anxiety bubbles into eventual acidity, which might also be the indication that you are getting older.
A 29 year old is no smarter than a 31 year old. Having been both these ages, I can quite confidently say that, in the grand scheme of things, they are both equally idiotic, but the amount of anxiety I had while turning 30 was unreal.
But it wasn’t unreal, was it? No, you all have had it and will get it every five years, and it will keep happening to us more and more until (if ever) we reach the ultimate zen mode of this game, say ‘yeh sab moh maya hai’ and finally be able to breathe better. The smarter ones are always the bunch who never compare themselves to others.
You should be doing this by this age and that by that age. You missed the boat, the ship has sailed, the shark has been jumped (old men and their nautical references, I tell you!), and all you have now to accompany you is the fear of loneliness that always haunted your periphery.
Fuck that! Let’s redesign the game to be in our favour, regardless of when we realize its machinations and wake up now like Neo in the third act of the Matrix.
And my solution is pretty simple. We should count age milestones in multiples of 11! You don’t have to change anything. Just reframe the existing things, and you can do it all in your mind! Crazy!
So step right up! Here is how I propose we count our age milestones:
Age 11: First foray into agency over your own life. You enter secondary school. You are allowed to use pens instead of pencils and try nailing down a signature. Sometimes, a half-giant Scottish man comes in from the storm and tells you that yer a wizard.
Age 22: Freedom! Done with college and all the nonsense that entails formal education. Bring on the real world and by real world, of course, I mean the 3.25 LPA mass-recruited IT job. Some of us do choose to be something different but you become a part of the circus one way or another.
Age 33: You finally realize that there is no such thing as true adulthood and everyone is just farting around in the dark, trying to solve a crisis that befalls daily and having the epiphany that maybe growing up is just solving problems.
Also, the age at which you start a Substack.
Now, I realize that this list is tailored specifically to one person (me), but given that I am an Indian engineering graduate, I bet that I fall squarely on top of the crest of that bell curve and probably most of you relate with this.
That is the extent of my TEDx talk based on my life experience. From here on, I will speculate/faf/bullshit and you apply it to your life if you want to or abuse me in the comments section with the hashtag #MuskWasRight:
Age 44: Proper age to have a mid-life crisis.
I’ve got bad news for you: most of you are going to live a long life, so this will be the actual mid-point and hopefully you’ll have enough wherewithal to finally get that tribal arm tattoo your biker friend had in collegeAge 55: This is the only point (unless you live to 110) where our rubric intersects with the traditional 5-year milestones, and if you are this French lady, you are just about ready to traverse the Himalayas disguised as a peasant and be the first Western woman to enter Lhasa. Or embrace your inner uncle/aunty and yell at the building kids making a ruckus outside, later smiling at the fact that kids still make a ruckus outside.
Age 66: Retirement is a holdover construct of the Industrial age where your muscles don’t pull on the machines anymore so it really is a shit concept when applied to knowledge work. But, if you had to retire, 66 feels like a good number
Age 77 - 99: Chill the fuck out!
If we had celebrated the 11s as they oughta be, there wouldn’t be that national bemoaning that happened when Sachin got out at 99.
Even though it may feel like it, I am not perfect. I’m really not. You guys, stop! *blushes*
I have caught myself on numerous occasions going through celebrity bios and the ages they achieved things, got married, had their first book or movie out. Comparison is inherent to us evolutionarily, but I think a major upgrade is needed, especially when you are constantly inundated by overachievers clogging your Insta feed.
And it’s not just birthdays and milestones. Even time itself, across the wider culture, has stopped behaving. Decades used to mean something, right?
The differences between the 80s and the 00s were stark enough for someone to have a severe cultural shock if they were transported forward. The only thing missing from someone from 2005 who came to the present day would be the presence of smartphones. And even for them, the first iPhone was just a couple of years away.
We don’t think in decades anymore. Except for technology, pop culture and major news events, we don’t have many cultural markers happening in our collective personal lives separating the recent decades. At least the early 00s had a 90s hangover to make them stand out.
Ever since smartphones, the last 15 years all seem to be squished together. The pandemic is 5 years old, yet it feels like we just got done with it.
So if even decades don’t hold up as markers anymore, what are we left with? Maybe we need to invent our own self-defined little checkpoints — like 11s!
Look, truth be told, it doesn’t have to be 11. The number is arbitrary. At this stage in my life, at 33, I’m saying that this feels right to me. You could be a cicada and count milestones in 17-year cycles. By that metric, I am to do something huge next year!
All this to say that we put a huge amount of pressure on these arbitrary numbers, which indicate nothing but a round trip an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet went around its small, unregarded yellow sun.
The time afforded to us is very limited, and so it would be better if we celebrated random small stuff too.
Like the completion of your 11th substack post.
Sidequests: BetterLate
This will be a quick one. Continuing from the above diatribe, here is a tiny little web app I built, which I hope will be populated later with many more examples, but for now, you can slide across and see that Jenkins! You still have time!
Check it here: sumitshetty.com/betterlate
Reccs
Again quick ones and related to this same theme.
First up, this website laterbloomer.com that chronicles the lesser-known but still significant late bloomers throughout history. I love sites like these that look like they took a lot of work to design and then write, compile and present the data. Proper passion projects. Old school internet vibes.
Next, I recently watched Billu (Barber) for the first time and it is such a sweet movie. Carriying on with our theme, it has comparison with childhood mates at its core but expands to be a telling satire on celebrity worship in this country. Can’t believe I hadn’t seen it before. Loved it.
That’s all folks! Cue Looney Tunes ending music