Fighting the Last War
By the time you understand a decade, it's already over.
2025 was a changing-of-the-guard year for me. I’m about to turn 35. In January my first nephew stepped into my life; in November my grandfather stepped out. For most of the last decade, my life has felt relatively stable, but time itself feels like it’s accelerating. Ages 20–25 felt longer than 25–30, and 30–35 passed faster still.
Everyone knows that time speeds up as we age. We talk about it all the time, but we don’t really have cultural institutions that make this acceleration felt in an embodied way. There’s no ritual that prepares us for how quickly the years go by.
One of my big fears is that I’m still fighting the last war, trying to win my twenties even though they’re behind me. We all know the archetype: The jock who peaked in high school and can’t let go of the dropped pass that cost them the state championship, the forty-year-old who hasn’t realized they’re the oldest one at the club. As someone who is still spinning on my head once or twice a week, this is probably an important question to ask. It feels important to challenge my body and to have a place in my life for play but maybe that’s a cope.
I’m not busting my skills out on Friday nights trying to attract women at parties anymore. I’ve traded that for 30 seconds of fame at the couple of weddings I attend every year. When my parents were my age, they had three kids, the oldest of whom was almost twelve. There are ten-year-old professional bboys doing skills I’ll never be able to learn to do. I could be busy taking my own kids to sports practices and living vicariously through their achievements.
I saw winning my twenties as building my potential. it was about taking risks and trying hard. Exploring possibilities and seeing what I had a knack for, trying out different identities and seeing how it felt to be in different crowds. I wanted to craft a sense that I was going places.
The rules changed in my thirties. Optionality is valuable, but it was time to start choosing. It was no longer enough to have a bright future ahead of me. I needed evidence that when faced with a fork, I chose a good path. If my twenties were about creating more branches on the tree, my thirties were about starting to prune it.
Thinking something isn’t the same as doing it. I don’t feel like I’m really nailing my thirties. Sure, my body still works and I believe I’m taking great care of it in ways that compound over time relative to my sedentary peers, but I’m the only one of my 5 college roommates who isn’t married. I got engaged this year, but more than twenty couples we want to invite to the wedding have children. I’ve achieved good financial stability but I’m not clearly on a path to make a meaningful professional contribution. In many ways, I’m still someone with great potential rather than someone walking their path.
It feels like remedial extended twenties bonus time, as if I got myself diagnosed with ADHD just to get extra time on the tests. Only here, it costs me some of my thirties to do it. Given how fast time is moving, by the time I really understand how to win my thirties, they’ll be over. Maybe the move is to start putting energy towards really nailing my forties.
This resonates a lot. When I was young, I imagined achieving a positive impact early on and then…nothing. I didn’t really have a vision for my 30s and now that I’m “in it” and still feel like I’m trying to walk the path rather than have done everything I dreamed of when young and seeing such a range in my peers and decline in my elders… it’s challenging and unexpected to say the least.
For me, I am trying to embrace learning and the journey more and focus less on outcomes and relative success but it’s easier said than done.
And as someone who is fundamentally ambitious and still wants to make a large positive impact on the world, how do I reconcile that?
This is a lot of half-baked thoughts but to sum it up: I hear and see you. And your words and journey resonate a lot.
I've had this open on my browser for a bit, thinking about how to react to it.
I don't know if you need to hear this, but you are right where you need to be. I understand the desire to compare oneself to others. But I don't know if anything good has come from it.
If you want to spin on your head, go spin on your head. If you want to get married, go get married. We chase our curiosity as life unfolds in front of us.
I got married at 35, and am 39 now getting ready to introduce a baby boy to the world. Definitely later than my parents, and if we're talking peer cohorts, on the later side of that too. I take the good (wealthier, less financial stress) with the bad (I'm going to physically slow down as they hit peak childhood).
Just keep going, even if it means you find your curiosity take you elsewhere.