Over 25? Well now you’re old

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The boomers didn’t trust anyone over 30. Gen Z is ready to lower to the bar. And they have done, by acting like life ends at 25. This is all over social media. You’ll see younger people acting like 30 is old and 40 is practically at death’s door. However, I don’t think that this is young people being ignorant. I think it reflects an interesting change in culture perception.

Online pressures

I think the bulk of this phenomena comes from online culture. Digital culture has always been the purview of the youth. Youth culture has thrived on the internet, especially since the advent of social media. For Millennials, social media didn’t really hit its stride until high school and college. Although Myspace and even Friendster (aww, remember friendster?) we’re around, Myspace was the first network to get really common. It was a domain of the youth of the day. When Facebook arrived in 2006 and then went public in 2008, this tended to happen long after the fraught youth of Millennials who made the services popular. The smartphone raised the game and now even our youngest citizens often will find themselves on Tik Tok, and Instagram.

When a 12 year old as 2.5 million followers for doing dances and funny videos it is hard to appreciate the accomplishments of your own life, no matter the age. The world happens faster and younger. Getting popular seems to be a game of how soon you can get attention and how you can monetize it. For those who didn’t managed to create a hit Tik Tok, getting older can seem like a death sentence of irrelevancy. In a world increasingly driven by this kind of attention, it can leave some young people, already insecure, feeling left out. This also adds to the perennial idea that if you’re going to be successful in life, you have to do it when you’re young.

No access to adulthood

The other aspect of this is that it is difficult to make adulthood milestones. Millennials feel this especially. How can you feel like an adult when you’re still living with roommates in your 30s? How can you feel like an adult when buying a home or having children are simply out of reach? Gen Z arrived onto the scene with these conditions already well in place. For them, adulthood seems like a series of problems and pitfalls. Hope for the future seems like a folly. Every passing year is just an uncomfortable reminder that the world is spinning around, some folks are making it and others just can’t keep up.

How can you feel good about growing up and getting older and feel a sense of your own personal success? When you can’t access the things that are the usual symbols of that, it is hard to wonder what you’re doing wrong and why someone on Tik Tok is making millions while you’re figuring out how to pay rent and hoping that you can pay the electric bill with your tips. It’s not fun, it sucks, and it’s a grind.

No access to a meaningful life

This last one contributes to this whole “over 25? Old!” phenomena. It is much easier to pat young folks on the head when you have your own meaning and purpose in life. You might not make the most money, but you might at least have something to show for your years on the planet. Most folks under 40 likely don’t have that. There are a few but for the vast majority, this simply isn’t the case. Adulthood in these modern times has become a slog of managing student loan debt and not having much of a future. Pile on top of domestic issues, things like climate change, the war in Ukraine, the pandemic(s), and the rest and it is hard to scratch out any meaning and positivity from life. After 25, it just seems like washing dishes and issues until a sad death. I’m not saying that this perception is accurate or representative of anyone but it is easy to see how some people would think about things this way.