Gen X is 45-60 years olds, who look 30-40 years old, but mentally are still teenagers

There’s a popular “Gen X meme” going around that says, “Gen X is 45-60 years olds, who look 30-40 years old, but mentally are still teenagers.”

It’s lighthearted. It’s representative of how many Gen-X-ers feel, apparently. When it passed my feed, the other day, I had two streams of consciousness:

1. We do not look like 30-40 year olds. Have you seen 30-40 year olds? We don’t. That’s OK. We are not meant to look 30-40 years old when we are in our 50s and 60s. Perhaps, what is meant is we look like 30-40 year olds, 30 years ago. But, even then, that’s not true. Sure, hairstyles and clothing may have aged people back then but we also had the perspective of young people (back then) perceiving them to be old when they were not. We perceived certain hairstyles as “old” because at 15, 42 seemed “old” and that was the hairstyle they had.
   
   Why do we want to look 30-40 years old? Reality is, we live in a superficial world. We are surrounded by people getting fillers at 30-40 years old (OK maybe that is starting to make us look similar). We also live in a society that often tells people that they are only valuable while they are young (but not too young. There is a small window between too young and too old). Sure, I pass a mirror, on occasion, and, I think, “Who IS THAT?” It doesn’t matter “how fit” or “young” we feel or how lucky we are in our genetic make-up and/or how lucky we’ve been with our health, after a certain age (maybe menopause is the great equalizer?) we just look different. Even if someone has Botox and fillers (I do not but subscribe to the “you do you camp”) it does not take away the change in the overall shape of a person that starts to look older as they age. If you are a runner, you can often tell how old a person is, from behind, even if they have an athletic build. There is just a different way people carry themselves as they age. I digress, because, what I really am thinking about here, is, why do we want to look like we haven’t laughed thousands of times? Why do we want to forget all the tears that made us more resilient but left a few etches in our faces? Many of us love recounting things we experienced over the years to others – to our friends – young and old – we get value from having friends of all ages – but why do we value the experience and the stories and not how our body holds those experiences and stories? I fully believe we would help our society’s feelings about aging and older people if we valued all parts of aging, the wisdom that comes with age, but also the way age makes us look – like we have lived!
   
2. I am not “mentally still a teenager.” We can feel different ages at different times of our lives. In some ways, I felt like an “old soul” when I was a teenager. At a certain point of young adulthood, many of us discover that, as we get older, our “inside voice” doesn’t change that much. It may be very similar at 10, 18, 25, 50 or 80. But – you cannot be 53 and still “be mentally like a teenager”. As a teenager, you have not experienced the ups and downs of a long life, whether close to home – with family and friends, with career, with the fragility of life all around us – OR – in the larger world around us. Perhaps, what is meant is that we still feel youthful, in some ways. We still have youthful hope about certain things. Perhaps, hope is not age-specific. One can be old and be hopeful. We may have great days, physically. Regardless, people who are 45 to 60 years old do not feel “mentally like a teenager” unless they have not learned anything. Unless they have not taken what life offers, processed it and then proceeded to think about those things as the fully grown middle-aged person they are.
   
   This meme reminded me of my thoughts about age, these days. On my recent birthday, an acquaintance asked me what the number was? I responded that it was, “a good number” – because – it was a number. It is an age. It IS. I am alive. That is what we learn at 53. That is how I “am mentally”.

Finally, I would argue that this meme isn’t representative of how Gen-X-ers feel, overall. Gen-X-ers often like to remind others about how we were raised on independence. We were sent out to play in the morning and told not to come back until the lights came on. We drank water from the neighbours hose when we were thirsty. We fended for ourselves when we came home after school, when our parents were at work, and we didn’t die from mulnutrition by eating too many cans of “Chef Boyardee” or “Flakies” as snacks. We learned to trust our senses, whether crossing the street or sensing danger from a stranger. We survived a society that wanted us to shrink ourselves and accept injustices and we found ways to fight for what was right and led the path for greater understanding of how to do these things in more meaningful ways. So – why would a Gen-X-er want to look younger and feel younger mentally? Gen-X-ers pride themselves on surviving hard knocks, defining cool, all while changing the mechanism by which we listen to great music, dozens of times. Gen-X-ers should pride themselves on showing all our pride in our faces as we age. Gen-X-ers should be proud to be aging, if we are to be so lucky.