Hi Zan, Hi Pa
Volume #24
September 10th, 2024
Dear Readers,
Volume #24 marks one year since we started Hi Zan, Hi Pa! To mark the occasion, we’ll be sending out some anonymous surveys later this week—one for paid subscribers and one for free subscribers. We’d appreciate if you could take a couple of minutes to complete them and give us some feedback on our newsletter. Your opinions matter to us and may shape the direction Hi Zan, Hi Pa takes in the future! Keep an eye out for our email. And as always, thank you for your continued support.
HI, ZAN: I’m a few weeks shy of 71 and you’re a few months shy of 27. Close as we are in so many ways, because of that big age gap we can’t help but see the world through different lenses. So let’s talk about those perspectives, okay?
HI, PA: Sounds good, you old man!
I’m only teasing, but from the age of 26, 70 feels a long way away. What is it like to be your age?
PA: Horrible. Nothing but misery. Don’t be jealous.
Actually, it has its positive side. Much as I loved raising you and Juliana, and much as I miss those days, there’s a lot less stress in my life than there used to be. The pressure to make money then was intense, and raising kids is an all-hands-on-deck activity, often as full of worry as it is of joy. Many days I wake up now and there’s nothing I really have to do, which can be nice…but feeling like I’m making zero contribution to the world sometimes brings on a nagging uneasiness. On the plus side, Mom and I are still healthy enough to exercise and travel, we have enough money to live on, and I find that I feel less rushed in just about every arena of life.
What are the best and worst parts of being 26?
ZAN: Not that it will change anything, but I personally think you’ve contributed multiple lifetimes’ worth to the world so a break from that is well-earned…
The best part of being 26 is feeling like I have all the benefits of youth and all the benefits of adulthood. I’m in good physical shape and still look young enough to be ID’d at a bar, but I’ve also established myself in my career and relationship, can rent a car without paying an underage-driver fee, know how to take care of myself, and have navigated some of the tough identity questions and social life dynamics of the late teens and early twenties.
The worst part of being 26 is that it feels like a turning point in a lot of ways. Of course this varies from person to person (less so than at your age, I’d imagine), but I’m looking ahead to “next steps” like buying a home and having a family, and trying to figure out how to get there while also feeling overwhelmed with the realization that this relatively free phase of my life might be over.
PA: Just remember, we took you to Italy for the first time when you were four months old, and we weren’t then, nor ever have been, wealthy. Sure, kids will change your life, but there can still be a lot of freedom if you’re not constrained by poverty, and if you’re willing to take certain risks.
ZAN: A good reminder!
I don’t think this is what all 26 year olds experience (I’ve always been 4-ish years ahead of the curve, especially since I didn’t go to college), but I’m sure I’m not the only one. And I also feel 30 looming, even if it’s still a few years away. There’s something about that number that seems to come with a lot of pressure, like I have to get my shit together before then.
PA: A) Your shit is quite together. And B) 30 is a number.
ZAN: Did 70 feel like a significant birthday for you?
PA: Yes and no. To my mind, at least, those numbers—30,40,70—mean something and don’t mean anything, simultaneously. In your chapter of adulthood, a lot depends on one’s professional, financial, and relationship situation. In my chapter, much depends on one’s physical condition. My father lived to be 66 and my mother to 95, so I’ve seen both ends of the senior life-expectancy spectrum, and really don’t worry about it very much.
While, at this age, dying has a sharper reality to it and there are constant reminders of oldness—friends dying or falling ill, my own bodily changes and new limitations with each passing year—I’m fortunate that I’ve not yet gotten to the point where those changes and limitations are severe. If and when that happens, I think the realization that I’m old will be ever-present. Right now it certainly is not.
There are noticeable mental changes, too, and in some ways those are more present to me. It’s hard to remember names, harder to study and retain a new language than it was years ago, and there’s definitely the sense that the mental wheels turn more slowly.
ZAN: For what it’s worth, you still seem sharp as a tack to me.
PA: Thank you. To me some days it feels like the tack wouldn’t pierce a piece of wet cardboard.
What I think is interesting is that, when I ask friends my age if they wish they were in their twenties or thirties again, to a person they say no. Sure, the physical vitality and lack of aches and pains would be nice (though I had much more pain in my thirties than I do now), but your stage of life has those pressures you’ve noted, and they are very real, nearly ever-present I’d guess.
It’s always bothered me when older adults say to people your age, “This is the best time of your life!” Malarkey, as a certain aging president would say. If there was a ‘best’ time in my life, it was my 40s and 50s, when I was totally absorbed in raising you and Juliana, when my writing career was finally in good shape, and when Mom and I had worked out a lot of the differences that had sometimes made our early married years challenging. But those were the ‘best’ years only by a small amount over now.
ZAN: Hey, those were the best years for me, too so far!
PA: Kindly give me three suggestions—from your twenty-six-year-old perspective—for improving the world we live in.
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