 I know what you're thinking. There's no way that that's real. He's faking it just like Bo Burnham did. Well, unfortunately for me, this is... this is real. I decided to actually turn 30 on camera for content. So let's watch that happen, shall we? I shouldn't have done that. Over the last six months, I have made many references to a review I was writing about John Green's collection of critical essays, the Anthropocene Reviewed. It was supposed to complete a spiritual trilogy of filmed existential crises, beginning with my videos on Derrick DelGaudio's In and of Itself and Bo Burnham's Inside. It was a massive undertaking longer than both of those combined that would perhaps serve as the week air reviews series finale, or at least it's Aventures Endgame, a video whose contents would forever change the channel as a whole. If nothing else, it would be the closest thing to a memoir I would ever write. My numbers never really recovered from the hiatus I took to finish a draft of that script, which was made all the more frustrating by the fact that I didn't like it. 22,000 words, the longest thing I had ever written, and when I read it, start to finish, I felt nothing. I began asking some new questions, harder ones. What did it say about my writing that a work so personal felt so insubstantial? What did it say about me? I'd originally hoped to get that video out on the third anniversary of this channel back in August, where it would also serve as the retrospective I wanted but didn't have time to do otherwise. Then I thought maybe I could fix it in time for this birthday I'm having right now, but no. I'm not even really convinced that I'll make the current plan of next May when it could celebrate the anniversary of the book's release. Many of the ideas present in that script exist here in a far more condensed form, and I'm hoping that I can figure out some shit that would render even more of it irrelevant. By the time I'm ready to dive back in, there may be nothing left to say. I don't know. 2021 has been a deeply weird year in a different way than 2020 was. Fear has been replaced with confusion, pure stasis with general unsureness. Every step forward also feels like half a step back, but then again, I'm not even sure what forward means right now. Can you tell that I'm turning 30? I feel like even if it hadn't been in the title and probably the thumbnail too, you can just tell. For a long time, I thought I wasn't going to care about this arbitrary milestone of completing three decades as a variably autonomous entity. Certainly, it did not hit me like it did an old friend whose same birthday was last week. He couldn't even make it through inside. He got to that song, shut it off, and never went back, whereas I ended up in the top two percent of Bo Burnham's listeners on Spotify this year. Honestly, both of those are pretty bad. I obviously knew it was coming, but it's only been in the last couple of months that I really found myself ascribing any sort of meaning to it. A 30th birthday is just one day that represents one year that represents one decade, but it's just a day. Am I fundamentally different than I was yesterday? Of course not. Milestones stopped mattering five years ago and stopped affecting me long before that. To be honest, nothing has changed about my life as a result of a birthday since I was 18, when I could suddenly vote and die from my country, and also feel really uncomfortable with the two-and-change-year age gap that I had with my then-girlfriend. But I don't drink, so 21 was a wash, and I rarely rent cars, so those extra fees incurred by being a driver under 25 were purely theoretical. The moments that defined the last 10 years of my life centered around times of active choice. The reality is that while people make dozens or hundreds of choices each day, they're mostly subconscious and rarely meaningful. And inertia is a powerful force, and our brains tend to keep us on a track until we hit something and are forced to confront exactly where we've gone. But when you're young, you're also hugely limited in the choices you can make. Like, if you're not going to just straight up leave your situation, anything you do will ultimately be determined by the authority figures with whom you live. I only made one real decision before I turned 20, and I had no idea how far-reaching its impacts would be. My attending Sarah Lawrence College was the catalyst for everything that has come after. A research project I was doing for a film history seminar resulted in me reaching out to the editors at Flixes.com, which eventually resulted in me coming on board there, which resulted in me getting other writing opportunities, which set me up for the day job that I have had for more than six years, and also this YouTube channel. The co-ed dorms meant that I lived next to the person who became my significant other for more than five years, and their mother's apartment on the Upper West Side was my home during the summers and also after graduation until I finally made another decision and blew the whole damn thing up three days before Christmas 2015. Being able to live in that apartment quite cheaply gave me a level of flexibility and freedom that was critical as I found my feet in post-collegiate life. Sarah Lawrence was also the only school I applied to in the New York metro area. Had I not been rejected from Johns Hopkins, who the fuck knows where I would be right now? Like, it's so foundational that it's not even worth thinking about. Who cares what my life would have been like if I had gone to Brandeis, which was the other school I was seriously considering? There's no lesson in that. There's a lesson in that December decision, several in fact, including two classics that I had heard a million times without ever actually understanding either. But maybe you can learn from my mistakes. Sometimes love isn't enough. Always communication is key. I loved my partner well past the end of our relationship. I don't know that I was in love with them at the end, but I unequivocally loved them. It didn't matter. We'd been together for five years. I needed to know if our lives were going in the same direction, if we were going to be together in 50, because if we weren't, what were we doing? We met as college first years. We started dating three weeks later, and they moved into my dorm room with my two other roommates pretty much immediately. Am I a U-Haul lesbian? Five years later, I was unhappy. I didn't know how to say that. But I never really tried. I can justify that in any number of ways, but the fact is that they had no idea it was coming, and that is fucked up. I fucked up, even if it was the right decision in the long run. Anyone who lives without regrets does so by convincing themselves that they are in the best possible timeline. Certainly all of those mistakes made them the person they are today. Does that mean they're better? I knew about Bitcoin by 2012. Similarly, I actually considered putting money into Shiba Inucoin like a year and a half ago as a joke. And the latter hurts more because I did have some money then that I could have burned in a way I kind of didn't back in 2012. Am I better off for not being a crypto millionaire? Maybe? I do make myself feel better with a reminder that I forget passwords on a near daily basis and have lost account backup codes before. So, if I had made one of those bets and it had worked out, I would almost certainly be just another idiot with theoretical riches on a hard drive I couldn't unlock. And the reality of that would be far more depressing than the hypothetical that I'm in. I have considered, as I think we all have, what I would do if I suddenly came into a stupid amount of money. And I think I would finally make that feature film that I keep talking about, you know, Daylight, the cabin in the woods story that I started writing all the way back in 2014. Sure would like to make that someday. The only male character in his early 30s, one of the chances that I get to make it before I'm older than he is. Zero. It's weird for me to think that the first 52 weeks of this YouTube channel made for unquestionably the most creatively prolific time of my entire life. Because when I think about my high point there, I always go back to April's 2014 to 2015. In my final semester of college, I shot a martial arts psychodrama that was originally intended as just a funny little side project because a then friend had said, I want to be in an action movie. And I said, okay, and wrote one. But it got more and more complex until I delayed the whole thing a year so that I could make it into a thesis of sorts. I also shot someone else's heist movie, which was when I learned many of the fundamental lessons about cinematography that I still carry with me. I was very run and gun back then, only one scene in my film used artificial lighting, and the practicals weren't particularly well considered if I'm being honest. Sam was the opposite. He had worked as a PA on real sets, and he wanted to do it like they did. My camera was handheld, and we put his on a real dolly with actual tracks. The heist movie came out okay. I like to mind more, but his certainly looked nicer. He told me after that he learned basically nothing in the process but paid $10,000 for the privilege. I learned a lot, and it didn't cost me anything. I shot real that fall. Sam helped out, actually. It wouldn't be done for several more years, but actual production on the thing happened that same year. And that wasn't even all. Before I officially became a guy with a day job in April 2015, I shot Not Too Young, which remains in many ways my magnum opus. After I became a guy with a day job, things turned for the worse. Over the next few years, I killed the follow-up to Not Too Young, which was tentatively titled Shooter after filming about a third of it. Then I stopped the in retrospect needlessly complicated rap EP I had been working on called Suicide Note. I did do two performance art pieces, and those went well, but also literally no one saw them. So did they really happen? I started working on another show in 2019 called Hunger, and had shot a good chunk of that before my frequent collaborator, and the closest thing I've ever had to amuse, just stop talking to me. For a while, I was mad. The last time I saw her was when I went to some church in New Jersey on what was apparently Palm fucking Sunday, so that I could witness her anointment or something. I don't know. I was just there to support her, and her response was nothing ever again. It's fucked up in a similar way to my big breakup. So it's karma, I guess. I'm not mad anymore. Time heals wounds, but it mostly dulls emotion. All of the grudges that I had at 20 and 22, and even 27 are just gone now. Hating people is so much work. Being sad is exhausting, but it's also effortless. That whole thing represented a broader issue though, which is that she had always been a pretty bad friend, but I just let that be the case because I didn't and still don't have many of them. I have lots of acquaintances with whom I will talk about far too many things because if I'm willing to talk about all this shit on YouTube, imagine what I'm willing to talk about when there's not a permanent record. But those interactions are about as real as this is. I am not playing a character on YouTube, but I'm also not giving you the raw, unfiltered version of myself. I'm not even sure I know what that looks like anymore. But true authenticity is overrated anyway. You can be vulnerable without being boring. That's what I tell myself. A couple months ago, I was watching videos about what makes Gen Z humor interesting, and one by Ola Sunvia heavily referenced this other video by a channel called Dreg, maybe, about post-truth satire and the different forms of irony that have developed as comedy has gotten weirder, specifically what he calls post-irony and meta-irony. Regular irony is straightforward. Say something that you don't mean. Post-irony is the next level. Say something you do mean like you don't mean it. Meta-irony is when you've gone so far that it is impossible for an outsider to tell if you mean what you're saying. The section of Inside where Bo Burnham is putting a projection of himself saying you shouldn't kill yourself over his disinterested future self is a good example of that last one. I know there's a joke, but I don't know what it is. Watching those videos, I realize that I have ended up with a habit of speaking post-ironically. I almost always say what I mean, but I often don't say it like I mean it. This is especially true when I am talking about myself, and I think it's part of that whole need to turn my problems into a show under the assumption that no one would care otherwise. Dang. But like, why should they? I'm a lot to deal with, and maybe that's a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I would be less a lot if I didn't need to perform my emotions. But that's not something I want to think about right now. Fortunately, or maybe exactly the opposite of that, I haven't given myself a lot of time to think that deeply. In the last two months, I have attended five concerts, eleven plays, three comedy shows, one YouTuber show, and seen almost but not quite 30 movies, many of them in theaters. I've also completed several YouTube videos and worked on several others that I didn't complete. I also traveled for Thanksgiving to see my family, and there were some other social events scattered in there. And again, I have a day job, which has been more stressful than usual over the last few months. Altogether, it is an even more hectic version of the life I lived in the before times, the one that made the week I reviewed possible in the first place. Almost all of these things that I saw are interesting enough to merit their own reviews. And had I seen them in a more spaced out fashion, maybe I'd have been able to do that. But with things as they are, it is getting harder and harder for me to finish anything. I indirectly predicted this in my second year retrospective when I described the channel as built on hot takes and noted that the further away I get from the initial experience, the less I believe I have to add to the conversation. Virtually every video now takes at least a week for me to write versus the day or two it took in 2018 and 2019, which means I increasingly reached the point where my opinion feels superfluous, and I end up just scrapping it. By enforcing that Monday schedule in my first year, I was able to put out 52 weeks worth of videos without too much trouble, because I never had time to second-guess myself. Those reviews are worse in pretty much every way than the ones that I'm doing right now, and there are plenty of arguments to be made that quality is more important than quantity to anyone who isn't an algorithm. I mean, algorithms aren't people, but neither are corporations, and they sure seem to have more fucking rights than I do. But this channel is called The Week, I review. And though I did try to get back to that after my hiatus and got a few consecutive weeks in, I think it's time to admit that I will never get back to that place. Sometimes I have a fully written script, and I stare at this part of my living room and think absolutely not. I'd hoped to move into a place where I could just leave my equipment set up so that it wasn't such a hassle anytime I wanted to shoot, but we didn't do that. For every other part of my life, it was the right move. For the channel, not so much. I like, the channel's not my life, and it sure as fuck ain't my partner's. So there is arguably a creative upside to this, which is that no two videos will ever look exactly the same because it's going up from scratch every time. And a key aspect of this whole enterprise was a desire on my part to practice filmmaking in general and lighting in particular. But to do that, I have to really practice. I have to take more time to try different setups. The one for my last night in Soho Review was radically different than any that came before it, but it also took more than twice as long to set up. And do you remember what I said a couple minutes ago about all those things I've been doing? I don't really have time, and when I do, I don't typically want to spend it making light plots. Sadly, I am not sure my general lighting ability has improved all that much. Sure, I can make one of my YouTube videos look good, but could I make someone else's? What about a movie? Could I light a scene in a way that would make you feel something? Six months ago, I would have said yes, but then I actually tried to shoot someone else's YouTube video and I fucked it up. It was completely unusable. I spent $700 the next day on this light right here so that I could never fail like that again, but it was too late. I never even asked for reimbursement for the fucking car rides to get there, let alone payment because I was so embarrassed. I am still embarrassed and fucking angry, and I will think about it at least once a week for the rest of my life. I need to get better at things. I want to, but despite paying for Skillshare since May of 2020, I haven't watched a single class to completion. There's just, there's too much. It's overwhelming, so I don't do anything. The one time I tried, I also got overwhelmed. I had an introduction to Ableton open in a browser tab for fucking months, and I just never got all the way through it, and maybe calling myself out here will make me watch a video on Skillshare just to prove me wrong, but no. It won't. Speaking of Ableton, if I am mad about my filmmaking skills, can you imagine the depths of my fury that I haven't released a song since fucking February? And that said song was only the second I have released, period? I've had the exclusive license to a third track from the same guy who did those first two beats as well as multiple other non-exclusive instances for the entirety of 2021. What have I done with them? Nothing. I tried, and it always went nowhere. Every time I've had an idea that was maybe interesting, I just couldn't stick the landing. A couple weeks ago, Netflix dropped Tic Tic Boom, an adaptation of the late Jonathan Larson's breakout musical before rent blew up the entire dang world. It's good, I liked it a lot. And if you know what it's about, you're likely unsurprised that the next day I listened to its opening song for three straight hours, and have done many more since. Had Spotify not stopped tracking on October 31st, it would have been in my top ten for the year easy. For those who don't know, well, 3090 is a song about turning 30 in the year 1990. The show is about Larson's conflict between his justified belief in his own talent against his inability to succeed with his first big musical, Superbia. My mom was friends with Jonathan Larson in high school, and she and my dad actually went to a reading of Superbia on one of their early dates. As he approaches 30, which he likes to remind people is three years older than Stephen Sondheim, R.I.P., was when he broke out as the lyricist for West Side Story. The movie didn't make me feel better about turning 30, but it did make me glad that I never thought I would be a prodigy. I certainly hoped that I would be creatively successful at some point, but there was no real time marker there, and so the fact that I have officially missed the boat on prodigy as a designation isn't as psychologically damaging for me as it is for some people in my position. The movie did make me feel worse about my inability to write music, though. I'm a pretty good singer, but it doesn't matter because I can't conceptualize a melody or even write a musical hook for the fucking rap verses I put over a beat I paid $100 for but still can't monetize a video with. I want to be able to make my own music. I want to understand why it matters, what effect goes where in the fucking chain I bought Ableton. I also bought FL Studio, and anyone can make pleasing sounding four bars with that thing, but when it comes time to actually make that a song, well why don't I just plug this fucking midi keyboard that I bought at the start of the pandemic and never learned how to play? That sounds fun. You think that I've learned by now? After graduation I wanted to join a gym, but having lived on a campus with a gym that I rarely went to, I knew I needed some sort of incentive. Ultimately I decided to go with a stick rather than a carrot, an absurdly high monthly cost that I would look at and think, fuck, I need to do something about that. And I couldn't do it until I had some kind of employment, so it was a few years, but eventually I found one. The Sports Center at Chelsea, Pierce. Why? I don't know, they had a pool, and I wanted a pool. Problem was, they only had annual contracts. $1,928 hurt a lot, but as soon as the money left my account, what difference did it make? It was already gone. I went six times and gave up. To get any sort of refund, you had to prove that you had moved more than 20 miles from the location, so I temporarily changed my bank address to my parents' house so that I could provide the gym with a statement showing a different address out of state. There was still a $300 penalty though, so in the end I wasted somewhere between $800 and $1,000. I haven't paid for a gym since, so like good for me I guess, but a financial millstone just doesn't seem to be the motivation that I'd hoped for. Then again, I don't really know what it's like to face true financial hardship. I had very little spending money in college and was unemployed for five months at the start of 2015 and needed to cut way the heck back on spending, but I was being supported in ways that meant I was never at serious risk of hunger or homelessness. Student debt is the only kind I've ever had, and even much of that was shouldered by my parents. I am very lucky. I was also taught to treat every credit card like a debit card and never spend money I don't have, and to date I have never paid interest on a credit card bill. But I do wish I spent less, and specifically less on stuff for this YouTube channel. I already mentioned how much that light cost, and while that is the most expensive item in my kit other than the camera lens, it's not my much. There are thousands of dollars of stuff just off-screen right now to make this video look nice. Plus I just decimated my savings account to buy this, which will be a better editing machine than the desktop that I have been upgrading myself over the last 10 years. And there's something sad about that, but it means I better keep editing videos to justify the largest purchase I have ever made. And all of this other stuff is just sitting around in my closet or next to my desk or even under this couch I'm sitting on. If I don't have the channel, what is the point of any of that? Sure, maybe someday I'll be able to use some of them on a set and feel vindicated because I don't have to rent anything, but will I though? It's classic sunk cost fallacy, right? I have come too far and spent too much money to give up. Just a few months ago, I paid the fees to make the week I review an actual business like I should have done the day I entered the YouTube Partner Program. Last week, I finally got the business certificate notarized while working on this video. It would be ridiculous to stop just as I was legally starting, but I'm also unhappy again. I really wish I could say that I don't care that my recent return to interesting but niche subjects in the wake of New York's broader reopening has resulted in a notable drop in views. After just one video missing my desired 1000 view floor in the first two thirds of the year, four of the last six have. I wish that didn't bother me because no matter how much I care, it doesn't matter. My caring doesn't make people click. I think they're good videos, whether you have seen or are even really interested in the subjects I'm discussing and I want people to watch them. Too bad for me, as my sister would say, sucks to suck. And so that's already swirling in my head and suddenly I'm coming up on this new decade and those two things together are just making each other feel so much more dramatic. I started this channel in August 2018 when I was 26. I was already pretty old for YouTube, but that was okay. It was fine that I didn't know where things were going to go because I was starting off on a new adventure. It's not new anymore. A lot has changed in other parts of my life and I think there's a decent chance that if I hadn't spent all of this time on YouTube it might have changed even more. I have definitely sacrificed more than I would like to admit to do all this, especially in that first couple of years when I locked myself to the schedule. But despite all that, I still don't know where things are going to go. Or maybe I do and just don't want to admit it. I've got three videos with more than 100,000 views, two of them arguably hit and got those views in a short period of time, but to what end? I don't really believe I deserve success, but the fact that my channel has more than a million views and fewer than 15,000 subscribers says something. The fact that nearly 90% of this channel's watch time has come from people who are not subscribed definitely says something. They say things about me personally and they're not good. I always knew that the premise of this channel was flawed and have said as much, but now I think it runs deeper. The truth is that I'm just not as interesting as I need to be for this to work. That is definitely what I got from my read-through of that review of the Anthropocene Review. And in a different way, it's what I'm getting from this. Now let's be clear about something. I decided from day one to make myself the through line in these videos. And that was clearly a divisive choice, but that's not all I'm doing here. Outside of these retrospective type deals that are all me all the time, I am only a piece of the story I'm trying to tell. I use my experiences and beliefs as a way to explain my reaction to an understanding of a work. I do this in hopes of furthering your understanding of it and ideally some broader idea that it represents. And like, I probably don't need to convince you, the person who has gotten this far into the video of that. But I get frustrated when people tell me to get to the point because it is all the point. When I interned at The Daily Beast, I had it impressed upon me that every story needs an angle, even a review. Have an intention and make sure that everything you say is in service of it. And despite how it may seem to some people, that's what I do here. Every video has to justify its own existence to me before it sees the light of day and if slash when I eventually realize I've got nothing to say, I just stop. This doesn't feel like burnout the way previous periods of frustration did. The idea of doing another video doesn't fill me with dread and exhaustion and make me feel like I need to go sleep. But it's clear that something's wrong. It used to be so straightforward, writing so many reviews, and it's not anymore. Maybe I'm just bored. The basic process of the week I review video hasn't changed in roughly three and a half years of the 157 videos I've done, how many don't follow the exact same formula? It's a rhetorical question. It's not enough. And a depressingly large percentage of those that don't come from the early days of the channel. I realized this when I went to actually count the number of experiments that I was so much more varied at the beginning and it made me so upset that I stopped counting. I know, those videos weren't great. My vlogs on Nuevo Vallarta and Islands of Adventure weren't even good, though I do think I'd gotten a bit better for my two California-based subjects, eating the moon pies and chocolate pies doing that faux screen recording thing for searching. Literally all of that was in the first two months of this channel. And now I just follow a routine. It's most frustrating with the editing. I have come to loathe editing these things. It's boring finding assets, putting them in a timeline, setting up the little fly-in-and-out situation for each. None of that is fun or even interesting. I guess I never really thought about how I would feel at Video 158 when I chose this style. I don't know if things would have been different if I had. It's not like I've ever enjoyed any part of editing that isn't the actual cutting and assembling. Like, going back to my own short films, my least favorite part was reviewing the videos reviewing the footage. So often I didn't. I would routinely do any given shot a dozen or several times and when choosing a take I just went with the last one. Like why would I have stopped if it wasn't good? Sometimes I would check the one or two previous, but typically not. During the initial editing of Reel I was working on the big two-on-one fight with the stunt folks and there was a moment where one of the performers kind of missed a kick and you couldn't even tell what was supposed to have happened and I knew it looked bad but I pretended that it didn't until someone else said, hey, the fight's great except there's this one part I don't know what happened and so I tried to figure out a way to just cut it entirely and go on to the next move but that didn't work and then I thought for the first and hey, maybe we got it in a different take and we had literally the one right before it. I just never thought to check. Classic Alec. More complex videos are more pleasurable to make because they require more thought and effort. When I say that my favorite videos are my reviews of I Can't See, Hamilton, I'm thinking of ending things, etc. It's not because they're the most profound it's because I had the most fun making them. While I was frustrated about the eye lines and some other technical mistakes I made while shooting it I actually really enjoyed putting together the Socratic Dialogue that is my recent review of Thoughts of a Collard Man. I had to create a conversation by myself and I know it is not unique on this platform but it was still an interesting challenge for me. I do wish that I wasn't doing it all alone though and not necessarily in the sense that I'm by myself like I could hire an editor to do the tedious bullshit and that would probably make my life better but it's not the same thing given this style of video editor is not a collaborative role. What I mean is that it would be awesome if I had a little group that I could just do stuff with Patrick Willem style. My favorite find on this platform in quite some time is a channel called Climate Town and host Raleigh Williams having that camera guy who can go around the city with him allows for just a totally different kind of vibe than I could ever do. Would it make sense for me to do a video in that style? Probably not but I'm jealous. All of these are new thoughts by the way. When I was younger I wanted to do everything myself because I thought I could do everything myself. And putting aside your opinions on my capabilities in any given field I was wrong. A producing partner someone who could handle all of those logistics that I am mentally and emotionally incapable of would be a complete game changer but even just someone I could bounce ideas off of to work through some of these conversations that I currently only have with myself would be amazing. Like it wouldn't make sense for a typical the week I reviewed video to have a co-writer like Sarah Zed or James Summerton do but I can maybe do different types of videos especially if that person had a meaningfully different background than me. And it's to be clear this isn't a subtle call for applicants or anything honestly I'm probably a nightmare to work with and there's no money in it to smooth all that out. I'm just complaining about all of the things that I now understand the value of that my younger self never even thought about. I probably could have found that partner in college but not as I was. See I finally know what wisdom is you hear that word all the fucking time growing up and it just seems like bullshit old people made up to feel better about the fact that many of them are very stupid and don't have much of value to say. And it's not entirely not that wisdom does not confer superhuman cognitive function nor is it necessarily a good thing but it does exist and it does matter and so does the difference between it and knowledge which is really the same difference between content and context. When you're young you can know a lot but the longer you're living in a society the more things you know mutate. A lot of things I knew at 20 are still rattling around in my head but I sure do think about them differently. Those 10 years of context shaped the form of the content in a way that if nothing else helped me improve as a critic my reviews now are better than they were not just because I've had practice though that certainly helped but because I've had another decade of life experience that I can pull from and put into my work and most people don't do so as explicitly as I do but everything is informed by your context and thinking about wisdom in that way is useful going back and also forward. I knew at 20 with an ignorant piece of shit I was at 15 it took a lot longer to understand that I was that at 20 as well and only in the last few months have I really come to understand how I'll feel that way about myself right now in 10 years and that if I don't feel that way it's because I stopped growing as a person and that would be worse which isn't to say that I had nothing of value to offer at 15 or 20 or 30 or etc context is a double-edged sword sure a wise person may give excellent advice because they had been around the block a few dozen times but the world's changing fast and it's very possible that that context stopped mattering because the block has changed and so has the way people get around it this is the problem with conservatism as an ideology it rejects the reality of change it's also why so many people get more conservative as they age a lot of older folks just don't know what it's like to live in the world anymore and they are mad that no one is asking them for advice because they are now the ones with nothing to offer it's a joke I saw on a tiktok what is the easiest way to destroy a boomer's worldview make them apply for an entry-level job in 2021 I spent a lot of time on tiktok less than I did during the height of quarantine when I would scroll literally hours a day but still more than any platform that isn't youtube and while my for you page has a fair number of people in my generation it is also full of those who would have described me as old yesterday and probably think I am ancient today and so I think about my relationship to those people not the literal children really but folks in their first few years of adulthood like my sister who is only eight years younger than me but by being born right at the turn of the century grew up in a radically different world I am part of the last generation to have ever lived without the internet it existed when I was born but the majority of Americans my family included wouldn't have access for a few years yet I didn't get a phone until middle school and that was in the days of limited minutes and texts and no other capabilities the iPhone launched when I was 15 I didn't get my first smartphone until I left for college and I remember coming home from break and seeing my sister and her best friend sitting squeezed right up next to each other on a mattress looking at their phones I asked what they were doing they were texting each other it was deeply bizarre to me and was actually probably the first time I ever felt old but it also felt like a perfect encapsulation of the existence of a digital native that's what they are that's what Gen Z is the first generation of digital natives being a younger millennial I can pass but I will never really be one and I kind of like having that perspective and context I like being an adult I still have some fond memories of childhoods and I wish my mom would continue to set up my doctor's appointments but youth is overrated and sure there is a lot of societal stuff behind that as outlined in Khadija Embo and Saint Andrewism's excellent new video on youth liberation but that's the world we live in and so being in my 30s will inherently grant me a modicum more respect from the people who are in charge even if it will take some respect from the people who are doing things I'm actually interested in and that's really the core of my conflict I am not concerned about getting older or being older I'm not excited about actually being old but I have got to get through literally a whole other one of these lifetimes first instead I'm concerned about being that weird guy at concert venues and the like Spotify says my number two artist of 2021 was one of those pop punk TikTokers my number three genre was hyperpop good for you was my 15th most played song I genuinely love what kids these days are making and I am thoroughly uninterested in arguments about who is derivative of whom blah the fucking blah new music is great but I understand that it is not for me just as so many of these TikToks I excitedly send to unexcited friends aren't I can appreciate the gays and buys and enbies and trans folk all up and down my for you page but I've never been a part of that world obviously I was an angsty teen though I sang to Paramore with the exact same fervor that many now sing to Olivia Rodrigo Sour is a great album but the emotions it's tapping into are ones I've long since moved past heartbreak means something very different now than it did then and I just know that I'm going to be the oldest non-parent at the Jaden concert in May the same way that I was at the Danny Gonzalez and Drew Gooden show I saw a few years back though they are much closer to my age than Mr. Hossler and I'm going to feel weird about it I just have to accept that as long as I continue to like new things I will be increasingly the exception and then the day will come when I too am just not cool enough for the hot new trend but it is important to me that even then when I no longer understand the appeal I don't look down on the people who do then I never think that what I had as a kid was so much better because it wasn't it was just different my biggest fear is that ultimately none of this matters that 30 comes and goes and a year from now nothing will have changed that I could read the last 7100 words again on my next birthday and minus some specific numbers it will be just as true I hope not and I'm not even looking for huge change I really just like some clarity I want to figure out what I really want from YouTube and start to move in that direction I also want to put myself out there in other ways I mean in the most literal sense of the word I recently acted in a horror film that required full frontal nudity I certainly felt vulnerable lying naked on the floor while a half dozen people leered over me but it was also kind of liberating to know that I've got nothing left to hide I want to creatively push myself in other art forms on other platforms maybe I will write another short perhaps even one I could actually finish maybe I've got another performance art piece in me I don't know if nothing else I'd like to release some more gosh damn music actually um let's do that one right now memories like stories that are told to kids before the medication I'm taking made me complacent with hindsight 2020 plus one they're still painting it but even with this decade of life what have I made of me 40 blocks south down an aisle of concrete dream is not the issue I just couldn't commit my bed will be a list of shit I wouldn't make fit I'm on the EVA 30 I've been scrolling 40 minutes seeing 50 fucking kids making 60 what I did and it's feeling like 20 was my chance to be at 10 but as I'm looking at the mirror I'm a zero instead fuck but I guess that's today a third of kids unquestioned want influence this way youtuber, tiktoker or whatever's coming next and how could they not want to preach hashtag last it's the best yes well for most a bit less just a fraction making money smaller fraction making rent all the rest are out here drowning in an ocean of content dragged on dirt I'm a zero instead fuck but I guess that's today a third of kids unquestioned want influence this way youtuber, tiktoker or whatever's coming next dragged on dirt screams full of thoughts they were godsend younger generations taught to want to make a difference awesome meaning from a world that regards them with disinterest getting harder every year the population just keeps growing waters rising species dying no signs or climate slowing is it hopeless I gotta know this I need a way to show my future self there's something to roll with her else what's the point that I wrote this and spoke this gotta hold onto something and this void I'm enrobed in I'm at the edge of 30 I've been crying 40 minutes over 50 guys just like me flexing 60 what I got had I thought to start by 20 maybe could have been at 10 but I didn't get out of bed so I'm a zero instead I'm at the edge of 30 I've been crying 40 minutes over 50 guys just like me flexing 60 what I got had I thought to start by 20 maybe could have been at 10 but I didn't get out of bed so I'm a zero instead well age is just a number right that bullshit motivation or justification for crime inspiring with impact font black borders and a cat pick convince the younger dumb or me that somehow I had this but the decades culminate cynicism cuts through idealism begets realism it's pessimism but new jaded glasses looking forward with neuroses looking back the longer that I keep going the more it feels like a trap 24 I had my crisis saw diverging paths before me emerging options span horizons but the fact is I chose boring early mornings with a bedtime I'm still 30 years sober friendships withering on vines and no one cares when it's over rollercoaster's getting slower I can get off anytime just clock the 9 to 5 with fuck all else inside of my mind but I won't live that way truly anything's better so bring me in cut me up I can bleed out in letters