Tag: age

Dear Reader,

The Roman orator and senator Cicero warned anyone defying one’s age is asking for trouble from the law of nature. I have no intention to falsify my date of birth in legal documents or to make a pact with the devil to keep me from being an old hag. Instead, I want to address the vagaries of getting old and the travesty of maturity that has become all the more conspicuous as time passes. It is a life to tell, and I am addressing the voice from the heart with a spirit of undying youth at the center of the heart to you, my readers, young and old, across the oceans and lands. Thus begins my soliloquy.

They say we are all young at heart with willing spirits, but the weak flesh. While truth is truth to the end of reckoning, the reality of life forces you to realize that you are getting old and older as you find yourselves surrounded by people who are decades younger, the race of the new generation -especially the MZ Generation. Gone are the Second World War generation with the departures of Queen Elizabeth and her better half, Prince Phillip, Tina Turner, Jane Birkin, etc. The Korean War Generation has become a thing of the past, along with the former, replaced by the Vietnam War Generation. Here’s the Reality Bites Moment. The MZ Generation born in the 2000s has taken over the workforce, equipped with digital savviness and adorned with Social Media. 

For instance, where I work is filled with the MZs, and they take such a shining pride in being of such a high-tech era, dwarfing all those born before them. I wallow in their endless chatting and overtly hyped self-promotion. To them, anyone over the evolutionary scale of 30 years old is, needless to say, “Old” and therefore not worth being associated with. To them, we – yes, I am one of them – are invisible and ignorable unless you pretend to be someone you are not so that you can be jovial with them. What a tragedy!

Looking back, the years of work since I graduated from college at the beginning of this century – Geronimo! – I see the working environment then and now and realize the world has changed a great deal in terms of the way people think and behave. Until 2015, people still had the cultural traits of the analog times when writing journals with pens was more prevalent than typing into iPads, laptops, or iPhones. I could find people I could talk to effortlessly, and they would also speak to me about a common topic back then. But now, it is a different world because it is filled with the neotypes of humanoids. It’s like being marooned on a planet surrounded by cone-headed aliens or besieged by hideous Its in Backrooms. 

Have you ever seen the movie Logan’s World? It’s the world of Youth and Beauty where anyone over 30 is being put into a spectacle death under the pretext of being “renewed.” Renewed because the presence of the Old becomes purged by

the company of the New Army of Beautiful Youth. I look at the world around me and see the images from Logan’s World, which dissolve into one another and shape the Leviathan of the MZ Generation. I know now how Hamlet felt when he uttered thus with the skull of the dead jester: “Alas Poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio!” Ditto to that, Hamlet.