32nd Birthday Thoughts of Waterworld

It’s my 32nd birthday tomorrow, the last power of two birthday I’ll have for a while (32 years, in fact). I don’t think there’s much else that’s special about being 32: it’s firmly into my early 30s, one year before my Jesus birthday. I think I can say about a third of my life has been done so far. Half would be very pessimistic, and a quarter would be putting me as the oldest person who’s ever lived (yet).

I wrote a birthday post last year which was sentimental, reflecting on suddenly feeling old. Those emotions are more foreign to me now. I still feel old, for sure, but I also have a much stronger sense of anxiety about the future. The world a year ago seemed predictable, which is why I felt safe to engage in my favorite vice of treacly nostalgia.

Image made with AI, of course, far better than anything I could ever draw.

Now the world is much less predictable. I don’t feel confident in where I’ll be in 6 months, how much money I’ll have, what my partner will be doing, or how I’ll be doing my work. I no longer know how to relate to the country that I’ve lived in almost all my life. How I interact with the science, the entrepreneurship, and the philosophy that I love is mediated so much through AI now that it feels equally dizzying. Sometimes I don’t know if I’m using it as a tool to help me think or as a tool to replace thinking. Worse yet, I’m not always confident the latter produces worse results than the former.

My girlfriend and I are now very much serious with each other. We’ve met each others’ friends and family and speak often of the family that we’ll make together. I worry about her future, too (there are those words again, “worry” and “future”). She’s made herself home in my apartment, setting up a desk in my adjunct room and a dining table with proper chairs, driving my clothes dresser to the closet and my round coffee table and bankers’ chairs to the street.

She goes for runs with my dog on the river, who seems to appreciate it but still hasn’t learned to pace himself. He sprints ahead of her, jumps in the water to annoy the geese, gets worried when he loses track of her after she jogs slightly ahead of his swim path, and then sprints again to catch up with her. He usually makes it about a mile before he’s exhausted.

We do the New York Times Connections every day and discuss science and the world. I try to explain to her that, normally, the US President isn’t trying to demolish Harvard or openly taking crypto bribes, but I think she still doesn’t entirely get how weird it is. Politics where she comes from have been a lot crazier for a lot longer.

I see my friends less than I did a year ago, although I’m still within walking distance of a few. My college friends are all having kids, now, which I was reminded of when I went back to Princeton a week or so ago. So are my siblings. My Boston friends aren’t, for the most part. They seem to be heading towards DINK lifestyles.

I think I understand more now how the adults in my life when I was a kid became who they were. Life, as an adult, is about waves and currents. The waves are unpredictable and crash into you from behind. You can ride them or you can be swamped by them, depending on how you swim. The currents drag you across the sand, rounding your edges and dulling your sharpness. They’re predictable, but invisible, and you don’t notice them until you’re already caught in them. Barring a serious effort or a rogue wave, they deposit you right where they’ve deposited everyone else.

The adults who I grew up with had mostly been carried there by currents. That’s how you end up in Waterford, Connecticut, in the 90s and 2000s. It wasn’t a bad place to end up in, though, and the waves that crosscut the current were pretty kind, right up until the financial tsunami of 2008. Then a lot of Connecticutians found out they never learned how to swim in rough waters.

But look at me, getting lost in the past again. 2025 is no time for that. We’re plunging headlong into the future. I’m swimming fiercely and looking for an island of normalcy in this Waterworld (I’ve heard contemporary references help ground an essay for my audience).

There are literally 5 words after this paywall. I’m just using this opportunity to shamelessly ask for paid subscriptions for my birthday. I have no justification other than the wanton greed which has supplanted my youthful generosity in my old age.