(* that's... errr... happy about missing out.)
(This piece was first published in Scroll at the end of 2016 and since then, the symptoms described have become even stronger.)
It's
a surreal sort of feeling when you realise that one of your favourite
sensations is when a plan that has been laid out and is waiting for
you has been cancelled the afternoon of the event. There's a sense of
liberation, an “ahh, now I can stay indoors,” a cozy,
pit-of-your-stomach warming that comes with the anticipation of an
evening spent in your pajamas, doing nothing but surfing the internet
or reading a book or binge-watching a TV show. It's almost as if this
plan cancellation has created time
out of thin air, a pocket of free hours to do with as you wish.
Long ago, in a book of fairy tales
by Alison Uttley, I read a story about a man who was selling time. He
offered a free hour to anyone who wanted it, and the story went on to
follow a busy housewife who wanted to dance, a painter who wanted an
extra hour to paint and so on. The children in the story followed
behind the vendor jeering, “Who needs time? We have all we need!”
and since I was those children then, I too wondered at a world where
adults would need to “buy” an extra hour. It was never my
favourite story in that book, but if a time man came by today,
shaking his golden hourglasses, I'd buy one. I might even buy two, if
he'd let me. And what would I do with this spare time? I suspect I
would do what I usually do—spend it reading or thinking or talking
to someone one-on-one, close activities that conjure up nothing more
exciting than a cup of tea or a purring cat.
And yet, I used to be one of Those
People in the early 2000s and the beginning of my twenties. You know
“those people”: they're always on the go, their Sundays require a
Monday because Sundays are full on, restless activity, from a boozy
brunch to late dinner, phone constantly buzzing with texts and
messages. A weekend that isn't complete with at least three house
parties, preferably all on the same night so you could prove your
social credentials by hopping from one to another, never putting your
handbag down, because you could never settle. I took pride in my
ability to socialise, relentlessly, without getting bored of having
the same three conversations over and over again, pride in my
throbbing head the next few days, because I knew what FOMO meant
before the acronym was even invented. I went to parties and I blogged
about them later; not because someone was paying me for it, but
because by then my audience expected to see what I had done that
weekend by Monday night, they waited for it, fingers poised above
the comments button. What had I worn? Who had I kissed? What was
Delhi like? And I delivered—spilling out insecurities and nausea, a
little banter which I wished I could have actually said instead of
only writing out on my blog, and so on and so forth. And, yet, I
never realised that my favourite bit was actually the sitting at home
and writing about all of my activities later.
I only came across “social
menopause” as a term when this article was commissioned and I went
looking for it. But it's so perfect! The feeling of slowing down in
your late twenties and early thirties, when you'd rather go to a
quiet restaurant than a heaving nightclub, when your best social
evenings can be summed up with three friends and a bottle of wine on
your coffee table, and you try and not schedule more than one
engagement per weekend, because it takes you the rest of the week to
recover. Everything is slowing down, and unless your friends keep
pace with the extent of your ageing, sometimes it's quite lonely.
They're all “WHEE CLUBS!” and the most exciting thing on your
calendar is finishing watching Stranger Things
on Netflix finally.
Especially now with the end of
December upon us. Is there any other month in the whole year so full
of anticipation and dread as this month? For me, in particular, this
is also the month of my birth, so there's always that great
expectation. As far back as I can remember, I've spent the week
running up to my birthday wishing that birthdays were never invented,
but also really looking forward to it at the same time. The day of my
actual party, I'd be the one probably having a nervous breakdown from
all the emotions, and so was fairly casual about the rest of the
year. (Happy to report that this year, as always, I had a super
time.) Anyway, for those of us not born in December, and there's the
whole New Year's Thing. Oh god, the New Year's Thing. Anxious emails
start going out in August, your social media feed gets filled with
people running away, and finally there's only about a handful of you
left in the same city, and what do you know? Each of those people is
having their own individual New Year's Eve party. This is where you
can either ride out your ageing (“I'd rather stay home and
celebrate with one other person and a nice whiskey”) or be
rebellious and rage against the dying of the light.
I found my friends in general
falling into two camps: the ones that had achieved social menopause
(SoMe) before me and the ones who were still ready to put on their
high heels at the slightest bell of a Whatsapp group message.
The older SoMes usually had some
sort of extenuating reason: some had married, and as marrieds, you
were more excused from the usual carousel of social stuff than single
people, the reason being that people with husbands or wives had to
answer to one more person at home. Some had embraced their SoMes way
before any of us did, and you knew not to ask those people out on
Saturday night. They were your Thursday evening coffee friends, or
your Tuesday impromptu early dinner friends, they could usually cook
pretty well, and because they spent so much time at home, their
homes, unlike yours, would be tidy and perfect, no plastic dishes, no
need to BYOB either. You judged them a little bit before you went
over, but there'd be a moment, when you'd be standing by their
bookshelves, and it was only about 10.30 pm but the night was
obviously, clearly over, and you'd envy them their surety. How nice
to be so certain about your place in the world.
The ones not yet in SoMe desperately
clung on to the last of the partying like they knew what was coming.
Every time you messaged, “Not tonight, I'm tired” it was a
betrayal. They were an army poised against ageing, and you were the
person down, leaving them with fewer and fewer to fight. They took to
new friends sometimes, and you'd see them smiling out at you from
Facebook or Instagram photos, each captioned “best night ever!!!!”
with duck face and glitter shoulders. Some, you'd lose track of
entirely: there they were at a music festival in Berlin! There they
were on a beach! There they were anywhere but home where things grew
old, trying to recreate Neverland. They were the Lost Boys and Girls,
and sometimes you run into them at parties, but often you take in the
feather headpieces, the carefully faded t-shirt with an aspirational
slogan and you hide behind the kitchen cabinets so they won't see
you, and anyway they're not at the party long enough to notice you
were there. Others come limping back to you once they're done, and
now it's them who message you, “Can't make tonight, have had a
hectic day at work.” And you message back a sad face, but secretly
you're sort of glad that the guilt of cancelling isn't on you.
But I recently hit my mid-thirties.
And I can see a glimmer—the very faintest little Tinkerbell
light—in the distance. Now that it's okay for me to stay home for
three weeks in a row, I'm suddenly up for being social again. I've
accepted my SoMe, made peace with it, and as a result, my calendar is
filling up. My blog is a thirty something's musings now, people don't
engage with me on it, but occasionally there's the fun of taking the
perfect picture, writing the perfect caption, composing the perfect
tweet storm. Interestingly, my older SoMe friends are feeling more
and more that way too—a few are hunting for the perfect New Year's
Eve bash, while my friends who had not yet achieved SoMe-ness, are
talking of quiet evenings at home. Maybe this is how the world is
going to whirl now with all of us and longer life expectancies, maybe
it will ebb and flow, like the end of Gatsby:
“and so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back
ceaselessly into the past.”
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