I used to be twenty-something

Investing so much in youth seems to have taken its toll on me. In my twenties, I thought of myself as a part of the generation. Forget about Boomers and The Greatest and the Gen-Xes. I was the one whose job it would be to define my generation. I read Dorian Gray and thought I had some essence of eternal beauty. My opinions mattered most, while those of my peers were a distant second. Out of the picture were opinions of TV talking-heads, dead philosophers, people who liked Jazz or Classical music, people without a TV, people who talked about mortgage rates, law-school students, people who smiled too much, and anyone over thirty.

I befriended a thirty-two-year-old man with a sober view of life, but he had a wife and a son, and he was born ten years before me. I wanted to make our friendship work, I really did, but there was no way a guy like me, with so much of his identity determined upon seeing himself as a part of a particular generation, with so much invested in his twenty-somethingness, could hang out with such an old man.

I tried once. I went to visit him in Cambridge and met his wife and son. His wife didn’t love him, and his son scared me, so we went for a walk in the university. All around us were young people riding bikes, with their sparking eyes, full of ambitions and dreams, and I thought it must have been so sad to be him, surrounded by mirror images of his youth, the train passing him by every waking hour. We sat in a bar and he had a sad laugh. He talked about his wife. His friends didn’t like her. He asked me, “Isn’t my son beautiful?” I nodded, and he said, “I guess every parent thinks his son is the most beautiful kid in the world.”

I believe pity is partly a matter of power over others. When I pity poor starved kids in Africa, I acknowledge my situation is better than theirs, and with my pity comes at least the possibility of helping them. As long as I can help them and they can’t help me I maintain my power over them. And so, my pity over my friend's perceived dead-end world was perhaps an attempt by me to reinforce my superior position in life.

I had no idea.