Why it’s both the best of times and the worst of times to be turning the big 3-0.
In the world that I grew up in, and perhaps the world that you grew up in too, turning 30 was a Big Deal. Television prophesied the doomsday of the 30th birthday, doubly doomed if you were a woman. Aunties from Cantonese soaps bemoaned their still unmarried 30-something daughters, Rachel from Friends sobbed on her 30th, surrounded by her titular friends, about being one of those daughters. The seminal film, 13 Going on 30, implicitly put pressure on a whole generation to be a magazine editor with boobs and Mark Ruffalo as a love interest by the time they were 30.
Yet the propaganda never touched me in any deep way. 30 was always far, far off in the distance, always irrelevant. I would never be 30. I would be 81 before I was 30. And yet, here I am, in the year 2023, 30 years after my first wailing breath.
Turning 30 would mean a whole lot less if humans didn’t love to freak out about numbers ending in 0. 19? Who cares. 243? Zzzzz. But 250? 40? Yes!!! That’s the good shit!! If only we had embraced the binary system – 11101 to 11110 – what a gentle graduation. A numeric sonnet. But we have 10 fingers, not 1010 fingers, and in our cruel decimal world, 29 to 30 is a violent lurch that forces even the most blasé of us to react.
On the eve of another notable decenary year, the year 2000, people were freaking out believing that everything would end because all the computers would go back to 00. Stocks would be deleted, planes would fall, everyone’s money, databases, our genetic code, all kaput. The numbers would roll over and us with it. I was seven when this happened, a noble age to face a pending apocalypse. I had a vague grasp of the hysteria that was going on, and I stayed up for the countdown, waiting for everything to tick over and with each passing hour, I became more and more excited for the end of the world. I would never have to wake up early to go to school ever again. I was stoked. How would the end happen? Would it really be a whimper and not a bang? Whose head would explode first? Midnight arrived, fireworks burst across the CRT TV screen. I held my breath. There was no human-based combustion. Absolutely nothing happened. An anti-climax two thousand years in the making.
I did not eagerly stay up until midnight waiting to turn thirty, nor did I dread it. Time-warping global pandemics, flights charging for snacks, the Olsen twins becoming irrelevant, living through an authoritarian takeover, blinding depression, ads on YouTube. I was in a starkly different world to the one that I grew up in. Projected milestones don’t feel important anymore, wait, does anything feel important anymore? Surely, it is the best of times, and it is the worst of times, to be turning 30.
It’s the best time to be 30 because all the expectations that were bred into us are now meaningless. Bizarre relics of the past. Marriage is now strictly only for Instagram content, visa purposes, reality TV purposes or visa-based reality TV purposes. Having children is worse for the environment than ever before (according to the latest stats, having a baby in 2023 = directly killing two polar bears, source: me). The only career expectation is having a job that can pay for both rent and lattes. And with advances in medicine and plastic surgery, 40 is the new 20 and 30 is the new 3.
It’s also the worst time to be 30 because a latte is now $6, compared to when they used to be 6 cents in 800BC. If you want to buy a house but don’t happen to be one of those five men who own the entire world and Mars, a house costs even more than $6, or so I am told. And it will be cold and crappy. The world is literally more on fire than ever before and you will be told this, constantly, by screaming metal rectangles that you sleep next to every night and you will feel guilty for this, while not actually doing anything. You’re also pretty sure recycling doesn’t do anything anymore but you’re too scared to check, and you will still never date Mark Ruffalo.
If a 13-year old Sharon woke up as 30-year old Sharon, she would probably think that nothing had changed. She would still have no boobs and she would still be endlessly craving chicken nuggets. Her room would still be a mess, she would still have instant Nissin noodles in front of the TV for dinner, she would still not be able to explain “Nasdaq”. It would be a straight to FreeVee, 0% on Rotten Tomatoes remake – 30 going on 13.
The 13 year-old me wouldn’t know that all these old cartoons, old video games, the same comfort foods, now all so frictionlessly accessible, gift a desperate whiff of the past. A whiff of what it was like to be at the age these comforts were set, an age where the belief that the future would be good was a given, that the desire for tomorrow was as accepted and assumed as gravity. The future meant hoverboards and robot dogs, everyone would be Jimmy Neutron. Instead of Neutron we got Musk and Bezos, instead of hoverboards and robot dogs we got vapes and inflation. But with each bite of a McNugget, purchased with the (slightly) disposable income of an adult, a voice in my head awakens and asks: if this can taste exactly the same as it did back then, is it really impossible to not also feel as it did back then?
The only thing I really felt when I turned 30 was disbelief that I’d survived three decades of whatever this is. Three whole decades of fashioning up my own personal hells and being sleepy to a fault. Has it really been that long? Time flies when you’re squandering your own potential! It all feels exactly the same as when you’re watching TV on a Saturday morning and you think it’s 11am, but then you realise it’s actually 4pm on a Sunday. I still have until 2am to keep watching TV, and I will enjoy it.