Does teenage angst ever go away?
Not too long ago, I finally entered my fourth decade on this earth. It was a cloudy and unremarkable day that I had dreaded for years. Friends and family older than me kept assuring me that the thirties is the best decade. "You will finally not care about what others think of you," they said. "It will set you free."
They were not totally wrong. The late twenties are quite stressful for anyone. There is so much pressure to have a clear career path, to get married, to have children, and to adopt a couple of golden retrievers. Personally, it weighed on me every day. And, somehow, the day I turned thirty, it all disappeared, even though I am still a single guy living in an old apartment with squeaky floors, working on a humanities dissertation that no one cares about.
I think I put my twenties behind me. But sometimes I still feel as angsty as a teenager. I get fixated on indie rock songs that contemplate heaven and hell coexisting on earth. I watch youtube clips from movies that discuss love and life. "Sometimes I dream of being a good father and a good husband. Sometimes that feels really close, but other times it just seems silly," says Ethan Hawke in a flick from the 1990s. Somehow I feel like that's profound (it's not), even though I'm much older than his character in that movie. And I like the concept of going on strolls on breezy fall days, with the wind blowing my hair as I contemplate life, love and death.
Is that normal? How is it possible to still feel the emotional maelstrom from when I was 16? Why do I feel the need to return to a time period when George Bush presided over the American economy? I am not so sure. I guess I have been fortunate to have teenage years that I do not mind reliving. Maybe "teen spirit" will keep me young a bit longer, even though I'm not supposed to care about that in my thirties.