Tempering My Youth: Getting Ready to Kiss My 20's Good-bye!

As I am approaching 30, I often ponder over how I both intentionally and unintentionally strive to preserve, cultivate, and seek youth, or “youth” as such, an imagined ideal of it. I strive for youthfulness (though part of what defines youthfulness is its un-self-consciousness), to maintain substantial physical and mental energy in and for life. I am not talking about botox or diets, but rather inner-youthfulness: I envision having not just a wellness of being, but a sense of vitality, radiance, and passion in my life. I crave that sense of fullness, of seeing life as beautiful, exciting, and ripe with possibility and the future, with no immediate urgency or even desire to settle down or figure things out, but to just be happy in the moment, in the present. But do I feel that now? That happiness and sense of joie de vivre? I am not exactly sure that I can give a resounding yes.

Especially as I am about to end my decade-long experience of being in my 20’s, I am conscious of how my age and cultural experiences have defined how I perceive myself and my life. Living in NYC has helped me draw out that sense of being forever young, forever charmed by the sense of limitless possibilities, distractions, and directions. Perhaps I have let NYC preserve me as a sort of adult child, having refused thus far to focus long-term on one full-time career or romantic partner. Funny, it seems as suddenly, in the flash of seven years of living in New York, I now see my 20’s and NYC as cohorts, each part angel and part devil, fostering and enabling this love-hate addiction to so-called youthfulness.

As I approach 30, I hear increasingly that things start getting calmer and one starts to feel more grounded and less pressured to be forever socializing, exploring, and partying and rather begins to forge roots and stability. These latter ideas, mind you, I have dreaded and derided for most of my life; I have equated being grounded with feeling suffocated. And yet, I am finding now that the freedom, the lack of anchor, has actually been stifling other parts of myself, that all my indulgences may be causing other parts of myself to atrophy. So here I am, determined to happily kiss my 20's goodbye, determined to find more stability, to apply myself more fully and to seek some grounding. NYC, I hear you offer a lot of opportunities in those departments as well.

Funny, the New York Times just had an essay, "What Is It About 20-Somethings?" that discusses this very phenomenon, the new prolonged youth that endures through the 20's, and even the proposition that the 20's is a separate growth stage, one of "emerging adulthood." And so, I am hoping to emerge as a more mature adult, one who knows how to temper my youthfulness with a more well-developed, balanced perspective.

New York Times article apologizes to Williamsburg: "You are not as cool as you think"!

Take that, oh blog of mine.

The New York Times article, "Mapping the Cultural Buzz: How Cool Is That?", discusses a new study whose research has sought to locate and measure "the geography of buzz."

The study was performed by the Association of American Geographers, which has located culture more around Times Square, Rockefeller Center, SoHo and so forth as much more heavily concentrated than in the so-called hipper neighborhoods of the Lower East Side and, yes, Williamsburg.

OK, but what kind of cultural "buzz" are they talking about? The article discusses the perspective of Ms. Currid, an assistant professor in the School of Policy, Planning and Development at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who discusses "an economy of scale" in terms of the so-called significance and size of the cultural activity. Enough said.

I am not generally seeking a buzz from pop culture or mass media; culture to me is precisely largely located in what is independent, emergent, under the larger cultural radar, and so on. Yes, I like to keep my cultural activity local when I can. How can a study purport to delegitimize and dismiss this type of culture? This is not to say I didn't enjoy seeing Madonna or purposely try to avoid the MoMa or the Met; but smaller-scale cultural activity is significant in its own way! NYTimes writer Melena Ryzk agrees with me; as she said, the study did not in the end give the researchers a better idea of where to find culture. To quote her: "Rather, like pornography, you know it when you see it."