I had this realization, the other day, of my age. I joke about being old, some random old man, past it and the wrong generation to get insert whatever reference here, but the truth of the matter is, I don’t actually feel old, most of the time; in my head, I still feel like I did back when I was in my 30s, as if I emerged into some sense of personality and existence at some point, some definition of maturity and just… stayed there. The birthdays mount up, the body slows down and aches more, but for the most part, I still feel like I’m thirty-something, not 50 years old.
And then I was talking to the kid about the Transformers; he’d made some reference to Autobots and I was trying to explain to him about Transformers and how much I’d loved them as a kid — and also, amusingly, what their whole deal was, because he didn’t actually know; he was aware of the bits that had turned into online memes and gags, but the actual context, what they were beyond robots that screamed dumb things and maybe turned into other things, was beyond him. As I was doing this, and he was responding in a way that was both amused and just confused, I realized: all this shit came from 40 years ago. When I was the kid’s age, 40 years ago was the Second World War.
Later that day, I was listening to Billy Bragg — because, again, I am an old man etc. — and his song “Mid-Century Modern” came on; it’s a song about, in part, realizing that you’re not the young firebrand anymore, and that subsequent generations have moved on and evolved past your progressive politics. That’s something I’ve thought about a lot, about the need to keep challenging your preconceptions and beliefs because culture shifts and you should shift with it.
The surprise for me was in the name of the song, and specifically the term “mid-century.” I’m mid-century now, literally: a century is 100 years, and here I am at 50. The things I grew up with, the music I still listen to, were three or four decades old — that’s the distance between my youth and the 1950s and ’60s, which seemed like ancient history at the time. The older you get, the more time flattens, and expands; the more you realize what your perspective looked like years ago, and how wrong you were.