The Turning 30 Blog

"I came up with a new game-show idea recently. It's called The Old Game. You got three old guys with loaded guns onstage. They look back at their lives, see who they were, what they accomplished, how close they came to realizing their dreams. The winner is the one who doesn't blow his brains out. He gets a refrigerator."

--Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

Working at Magic Time Machine I saw thousands of people—no kidding—celebrating their birthdays. Sometimes they were happy to be celebrating; sometimes they seemed to have been dragged by an earlobe and forced to get a little love from friends and family. Of the people who didn't feel like celebrating, sometimes it was because they didn't want the attention (which I can support), and sometimes it was because they were feeling old.

A trend I noticed is that nobody feels more upset about their age than someone in their early 30s. Ten years younger someone may say "I'm getting so OLD!" but without the heart of someone who feels the desperation associated with failed life goals. Ten years older people tend to understand the progress and pitfalls that accompany age, and they're more capable of accepting where they came from and where they're headed.

Many people have an idea where they're headed by their early twenties. They have some idea of what they want to achieve in a career, in a relationship, and many of them seem to think that by the age of 30 these plans will have at least begun to take shape. It is, after all, 50% of their lives away. Why can't they do that much in that amount of time? And if they should happen to fail what they once thought they could do, their view of the world can distort beyond their ability to accept and adapt.

Eventually I came to realize that people in their early 30s are, for the first time, able to see the sheer scope of their time on Earth. For the first time they can clearly remember things that happened 20 years ago. Perhaps they thought themselves adults at age 20, and now 20 year-olds seem like children with no idea of what the "real world" is like.

And now I find myself on the precipice of my 30^th birthday. I always felt rushed in life, like things needed to come to me NOW. 30 is just around the corner, which isn't far from 40, which is really close to 50, the age things should start slowing down, the age you have more days behind you than ahead of you, and if I don't have it by then I never will. But a few years ago someone said something to me that calmed me down immensely. One of my TKD instructors, in the middle of a conversation, randomly asked me my age. I was 26. "That's amazing," he said, "you're exactly one half my age."

I saw the scope of things to come in a new light. Looking forward things had always been just around the corner; but looking back seemed like an eternity. I had time to live my entire life over again—including the first few years I don't even remember, and the years after that spent growing up—before I reached this man's age. And he was by no means at the end of his life, nor was he slowing down. He was vital, he was excited, and he was always trying new things in new ways. I had a new perspective, full of hope.

And my parents reminded me recently that when they were my age, married with three kids and grad school in the past, they still had to work as security guards to make ends meet. Better things are on the way, they said, things I cannot currently imagine. Worse things, too—put simply, my life is going to be much more dynamic than it has ever been, with greater rewards and pitfalls than I've ever experienced. Such is true for us all.

My only regret during my first thirty years is that I learned nothing of how to be an adult before I became one. There are things I want in life so desperately that it wears me down and I weep, secure in the knowledge that I am intelligent and creative enough to have made amazing strides compared with what I actually did. But in my despair, the words and experiences of my parents echo through my mind and calm me. Better things are coming. Just wait.

And to keep me moving ever forward toward what I want, I remain motivated by the simple words of a song.

"You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older.

And now you're even older.

And now you're even older.

You're older than you've ever been, and now you're even older.

And now you're older still."

--They Might Be Giants