One of the most common responses when people learn my age (aside from the flattering “I had you pegged for twenty-six”) is the ubiquitous “thirty is the new twenty” line. I’d love to know who began this meme; my money’s on a lifestyle-magazine intern. Even my mother wrote it in my birthday card. I guess there is some truth to this new cliché: Outside of Bhopal, life expectancies have generally gone up, people are changing careers well into middle age, and men in their thirties seem to have unprecedented carte blanche to act like teenagers (thanks, Maxim!). So I guess I’m okay with the new twenty. This time around, maybe I won’t be such an insufferable prick. And, I can drink legally.

Which is not to say I don’t have anxieties. Even when I’m not on the cusp of a major life transition, I think a lot about my age. As many of my friends can attest, I tend to preoccupy myself with the age of others (from acquaintances to friends to celebrities) and how those people stack up next to me (in looks, in achievement, in number of cavities—you name it). Almost any time my consciousness seizes upon another extant human my age or younger, I am instantaneously doing elaborate mental calculus to figure out what they’ve accomplished and whether it’s less or more than I have. It’s petty and invidious[1] but it’s inevitable and human, and if you tell me you’ve always been immune to this unhealthy little habit I will politely call bullshit. Though it’s entirely likely you’re not as plagued by it as I am. That said, I don’t so much have a problem with many wildly famous people who are dramatically younger than I am (e.g. Paris Hilton) because by most indications, they’re repellant. And by the same token, I know that it’s dangerous to measure success by dubious benchmarks like riches amassed or celebrities dated.[2] And, finally, Mr Rogers taught me a long time ago that everyone’s situation is unique.

[3]

But measuring myself against others can also be encouraging: At the risk of overgeneralizing, the people I know in their early-to-mid thirties are, for the most part, pretty chill and well-adjusted. A lot of people I know in their early twenties, by contrast, aren’t.[4] I know a lot of people in their twenties (and I was one of them) who are constantly worrying about Who They Are and What To Do Next and What Their Options Are—and a lot of people in their thirties who aren’t. But I don’t consider the people in the latter category In A Rut, or Giving Up, and here’s why:

Perhaps more than anything, I’ve spent the last year or in a state of what I’ll call progressive acceptance, reconciling myself to realities and likelihoods I resisted throughout most of my twenties: I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’ll probably never be a best-selling author, or a member of an improbably successful rock band, or have a walk-on role in a buddy’s breakout indie-film debut. I won’t find success by being “stumbled upon” or having anything “fall in my lap” or through “serendipitous encounters” with “persons of influence.” Furthermore, that which I achieve will only come with hard work. I have also spent the past several years wondering when I will start to suddenly, almost magically, begin feeling like a Grown-Up. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I’ve only recently realized that the degree to which one feels grown-up is directly proportionate to how much. One. Acts like one.

I find these epiphanies simultaneously banal, profound, obvious, and hard-won. But they are not dismal; they are not defeatist. They are not the sound of me settling for less or lowering my standards. If anything—and I’m fully aware of how much I sound like a self-help guru right now—they are strangely liberating.

Because for all my whining, guess what? I like being this age. I like having been in elementary school in the 1980s. I like that I can recall the series finale of the “Cosby Show”.[5] I like having graduated from college on the crest of the dot-com wave and then doing nothing to take advantage of it. I like that I owned a small island nation’s GNP’s-worth of Transformers action figures and can still name them all from memory. I like that I vividly remember Challenger and Chernobyl and Iran-Contra and other Regan-era cataclysms.[6] I like that I can begin a story with “Ten years ago …” and not have it be about high school. I even like seeing a few gray hairs near my temples. Coming out of my twenties, I am beginning to identify the preceding sensations with some emerging feeling of belonging—to a generation, to a time (at the risk of aggrandizing) to a pop-culture zeitgeist—and it’s a neat, weird feeling of which no one, of any age, should be deprived.

So, I’m glad to be thirty. Even within the last few hours this mantra has passed from a sour-grapes exercise in self-convincing to a simple, optimistic nugget of truth.

This is a good sign, I think.

[1] As Cervantes/Marlowe/Shakespeare/Donne/Kerouac said, “Comparisons are odious.”

[2] But the pop-culture media machine knows that our urge to compare ourselves to famous people, especially of our own age, is irresistible. That is why no magazine profile can resist including the subject’s age within its first few paragraphs, because it knows people like me will skim ahead and look for it and either panic because the person is four years younger than we are and owns two yachts or emit a sigh of relief because the person is ten years older and has only published one book. My thought process here runs a gamut that, like most things, is best illustrated with examples: For instance, I hate that the creator of the “OC” is a month younger than I am almost as much as I hate the fact that I know the age of the creator of the “OC”. Further along the spectrum, I am vaguely unnerved by the knowledge that Chuck Klosterman is four years older than I am. But the fact that David Cross is a dozen years older than I am seems about right. Not that I regret never having created an “OC” of my own, or that I’m oblivious to the fact that CK was already an established freelance writer by the time he was my age, or that I’m under the slightest impression that I’m somehow going to turn into an alt-comedy darling over the next decade.

[3] “We all know how old Mozart was when he did … all that. And Keats, as in big poet Keats? Keats was dead at twenty-four.”

[4] And let’s face it: some people in their early twenties just plain suck. To wit: as you know, I’ve been poking around Craigslist trying to find some like-minded, TC-area musicians who will perhaps want to get together and kick it with a tasty groove. In the course of this quest, I responded to an ad seeking a drummer for a nascent band. (I can’t remember what qualities the ad possessed to elicit my response; as you’ll soon see, the story that follows doesn’t bring them to mind.) When the ad’s poster wrote back, he stated the band members’ ages (19 - 22) and asked me how old I was. No mention of the type of music they wanted to play, no links to any online demos, websites, etc (all pretty standard CL musicians-wanted etiquette these days). Despite the fact that I didn’t take this as a good sign (or the sentence, “Our instruments are our lives”), I responded truthfully, saying I was 29 going on 30. No response from them, not surprisingly, and it’s obviously for the best. Why would I want to be in a band that prioritizes its members ages above all else? Even the Backstreet Boys had that one guy.

[4] (This should seem obvious, but it’s an actuality that has been largely held at significant length from my generation by the overnight success stories perpetuated by reality TV and MySpace.)

[5] Whose creator, incidentally, shares my birthday. (Along with Milton Berle, Henry David Thoreau, Richard Simmons, Cheryl Ladd, Pablo Neruda, and Andrew Wyeth [to name a few].)

[6] On the flip side, I recently spent a couple long drives listening to the abridged audio version of Bill Clinton’s memoir, and while it causes me to yearn bitterly for good foreign policy and economic growth and bipartisan cooperation and civic responsibility, more than anything it makes me nostalgic for the 1990s, because with each episode mentioned, positive or negative (the 1992 election, Waco, Oklahoma City, the 1996 re-election, Lewinsky, etc) I could also cast back and recall—almost to the hour—each event’s coincident personal moment (usually positive because this is nostalgia here): making out with my girlfriend, Siamese Dream, playing a gig at Gardner Lounge, high school graduation, etc.