Why is being 30 considered ‘old’?
Ever since I turned 30, the above question has been bothering me because there’s this weird disconnect between what people on either side of 30 and 40 refer to as ‘young’ and ‘old’. So I’m going to give you a handful of examples and infer my own conclusion.
I am still on Facebook, even if its becoming a bit of a graveyard these days, I’m mostly following pages that post cat pictures. Its nice. Its a hugbox for my eyes. But because Facebook knows my address, other social media sites, my blood type, my insecurities and deepest darkest secrets, it also happens to know my age. So basically everything in the Facebook reels, which are basically like tiktok or instagram videos, my recommendations are usually short ‘comedy skits’ from millennial influencers who’ve just turned 30, and almost all of them are along the lines of “being in your 20’s is like this, while being in your 30’s is like this”. I keep seeing reels by this guy called Matty Chymbor who seems to have made a career out of 20’s/30’s comedy skits on Facebook. About 90% of his videos seem to be from this “30 is old now” genre.
I’m not calling him out for lack of originality because yeah, since turning 30, I have noticed the aging signs. My hairline is thinner than it used to be, my knees make this weird crunching noise now, whenever I consider doing something fun and exciting that involves staying up late, I just can’t be bothered and would rather lie on the sofa watching TV all evening. Then I stop and remember “wait that last one has ALWAYS been me even in my late teens/early 20’s”.
I was just listening to an episode of the James O’Brien show, this popular radio call-in show in the UK, and one of his callers, when referring to his perspective on a political matter said “I’m 30, so y’know, I’m quite young” and James laughed and said “I think I’ll let you get away with that”. Which is quite a familiar line I’ve heard elsewhere when people around my age try and refer to themselves as “still young”.
I recently had a drink with an old friend who was asking about my YouTube channel, my short films, my plans. I’m slowly trying to make moves into filmmaking, and he started prodding me with the age question. He didn’t explicitly say that I AM too old, but the “aren’t you a little old now?” line comes with the implication that people in the field I’m interested in are younger than me. He did say “wouldn’t this be something to do about 10 years ago?” — as in when I was 23. I don’t blame him for not knowing that the average age of a Hollywood director is 47. Its quite rare you get an Orson Welles making the ‘greatest movie of all time’ at the age of 25 (also you’ve got to note his cowriter, Herman Mankiewicz was in his mid 40’s at the time they made Citizen Kane). I couldn’t have made anything even half-decent at 23 because I didn’t have the life experience to mine for stories yet.
The “30 is too old to be doing anything interesting” assertion is all to be expected, but let’s flip to the other side of the coin.
About 3 years ago, just after I’d turned 30, I told my mum I was going to see the comedian Stewart Lee in London. She asked me “oh is he still around? How old is he now?” I said he was 53. She said “oh, I didn’t realise he was still quite young.”
…so being 53 is “quite young” but being 30 is “old”.
This also reminded me of when my dad was changing jobs when I was a kid. He was around the age of 40. I remember him talking about it and him saying the words “I’m only 40, I am still young.” I don’t remember the full context. It was probably a joke, but it stuck out to me because being 10 at the time, I couldn’t imagine being 40.
There’s an old saying that “life begins at 40”. The phrase essentially means that by this point you’ve reached a point where you have life experience and financial stability, so you’re in a better position to enjoy life. If so, then it really doesn’t follow that entering your 30’s makes you ‘old’ if life only ‘begins’ ten years later, but it does FEEL like it.
Friends was a staple of my childhood and there’s this episode where all the characters turn 30 and its treated as this massively depressing end-of-the-world scenario.
Its not an inaccurate depiction. I turned 30 in the middle of lockdown in the midst of circumstances I really don’t want to go into because they give me nightmare flashbacks, but I probably would have been just as depressed anyway. Something about that number just makes people go “Jesus that’s a big number.”
But when people get to around 40ish, this seems to change back to “young” again. Usually about the point of the mid-life crisis where people try and convince themselves they’re still young, which they’re not wrong to do. Its around the point where you’ve lived approximately half of your life. Half isn’t actually that much is it? Is the glass half full or half empty?
It just seems weird to me that if you read in the news that someone died when they were 36, people would typically respond to that with “he was so young”. But if you’re alive at age 36, people would refer to you as ‘old’.
Even if someone died at 62, people would say “he was so young”. If someone dies at 70, people would just nod and say “hmm, bit early, but basically to be expected.”
So we’ve got these two periods between 30 and 40 that is ‘old’ and anything post-70 is ‘old’….that doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, does it?
Personally, I think its a children issue. Around the age of 30 is the age people expect you to start having kids, even if you’ve spent basically your entire life making it crystal clear that that’s not on your list of priorities. “You’ll change your mind someday,” smug people say, somehow under the impression they know you better than you know yourself.
Next time I get into a conversation with someone where I tell them that I want to build up my creative projects to eventually make a feature film that’s as professional as I can possibly get it, and they say:
“Don’t you think you’re getting a bit old for that?”
I’m going to try responding with this:
“Okay. What else do you think I should be doing instead?”
And see what they say.
Given just how bizarre this timescale of young and old is, I think the old implication that someone over 30 shouldn’t be doing X anymore because that’s for someone in their 20s, appears to me to be implying “MARRIAGE AND KIDS. 30 IS THE AGE FOR MARRIAGE AND KIDS. WHY ARE YOU NOT DOING THIS?”
The person saying “don’t you think you’re getting a bit old for that?” might not even think this, but I think its a subconsious thing. Its a message that’s just sort of stuck throughout the years that 30 is the age you SHOULD be doing this even if you don’t want to. So we’re all surprised when someone in their 30s is actually doing something they want to do instead of what everyone expects them to do.
I’m genuinely not expecting anything else as a concrete answer to “what else do you think I should be doing instead?” because what else could it be? What do people over the age of 30 do if not get married and have kids? What’s the point in being this age if your hopes and dreams are for people younger than you?
I’m over 30. I’m old apparently. What do I do now?
