drwex | Journaling project, Day 9

As you age, you’ll learn to value your time, genuine relationships, meaningful work, and peace of mind, much more. Little else will matter. Thus, the strongest sign of your growth is realizing you’re no longer worried or stressed by the trivial things that once used to drain you.

What’s something that used to drive you crazy, but no longer bothers you? Why?

I continue to think that whoever wrote these prompts was a pompous arse. This entire thing seems to be condescending to young people, and that irks me. "there, there" it says, "you'll value things more when you're older." Um, fuck that noise. I have always valued my friends. One of my current sadnesses is that it's so much harder to make friends as an adult in a nuclear family. Even those friends we have who don't also have kids still have busy lives and schedules and we're lucky to get adult socialization with many of them more than once or twice a year. The gaming group is something of an antidote for that, but still. I don't feel like I value that more now than I did twenty or thirty years ago.

Likewise, meaningful work and peace of mind are things I've long sought. I think lots of people of at least college age also seek and value these things. They may have different ways of expressing it - an all-night rave isn't the same as an evening of fine cocktails with a small group - but I think the core happiness experiences (meaningfulness, connection, fulfillment, social enjoyment) are essentially the same things. My being older didn't change how I felt about these things, though it changed how I expressed them.

As for what makes me crazy? Still the same stuff. I may be a lot more worn down by things, but I'm still bothered by them. To loop this back around, one of the things that makes me most hopeful is watching how younger people are picking up some of these challenges, be they taking on big banks or big gun lobbies.

OK, maybe there's one thing - people being wrong on the Internet. I used to spend a lot more time arguing with people online. Nowadays there are so many more wrong people online and they're so much more aggressively wrong about so many more things that it's very much shoveling sand against the tide even to try correcting them about basic factual things, never mind opinions or nuanced beliefs. I'm still irked by it, but I don't divert much energy into dealing with it. See "not on Facebook, thanks".

But at the same time, change has brought me lots of new things to be irritated about, like eavesdropping ... excuse me "smart" devices everywhere, and so on. I promise I won't go on one of my "get offa my lawn" rants but people are just super dumb about some things.