I’ve heard a lot of people make the statement that they were born in the wrong time. As if that’s something to be proud of. I didn’t used to get annoyed with these people haughtily proclaiming their belonging to a different era, at least not when I was a teen. But now, it pisses me off to no end. Because I now feel that every day of my fucking life.
I’ve only been an adult for three years now, and already I’ve come across a major problem in my biological code. To put it bluntly, I’m inherently backward, I have an innate fear of change, and to make matters worse, I’m entirely self-aware of it. All this puts me at a distinct disadvantage in life. Life only moves forward. Society and culture move with it. It never stops for anyone. Some people can deal with that, relish in it even. Those people are the people we read about in history books. The people who are now seen as heroes of our time, changing the world for the betterment of everyone.
Where do I fit in? Well, I don’t.
Because everyone is capable of moving with the times but me. I’ve realized that during my time studying in woman’s history, that I fit into all the things that those woman have tried to purge from society. Passive, weak-willed, pathetic. Backward. I realize that history only remembers the revolutionaries. The people willing to push the boundaries. That’s not what I am.
And its not just with history, either. Everything political going on around me feels to foreign and uncomfortable, everyone might as well be speaking a different language. Like trying to fit a square peg in the round hole, but there wasn’t even a hole to begin with. Just a place where the hole should be. My ideals, in the grand scheme of things, are bullshit. I’ll only drag everyone down. I know this, as I’m already dragging myself down. I can’t relate too most people in my age group, I can’t relate to most people. I can’t relate to anyone. I’m only going through the motions, playing pretend, acting as if I’m just like everyone else.
I guess maybe it’s not the case that I was born in the wrong time, but I was born incomplete. My function to move forward with the rest of the world, to “get with the times” is stripped from me. I’m not moving at all. I’m a literal statue, a relic from a time and place that probably never existed in the first place. I don’t understand myself, my ideals, my place in a world that’s moving far too fast for me to keep up. I just want to die. I just want to just fade away like a piece of history. Something that doesn’t belong in the world anymore because everyone has just moved on. I don’t to be remembered, I don’t want to be missed, because my being here was a crime against the nature in the first place. I feel gross. I feel sick of myself. I just want to go the way of the dinosaurs and stop fighting to find my place in a foreign world.
And honestly, I’d rather not live my life watching everyone else move forward and I only stay in the same goddamn spot, until I’m a crochety old woman that everyone around me wishes would just die already. I’d love to just be able to leave everything and everyone behind. To just isolate myself on an island somewhere, with nothing around by myself. No one to compare myself to, no one to watch pass me by. All alone, I don’t have to hate myself. I can just pretend, in this isolation, I’m the only one here. Living in my own stagnant corner of time. But that’s just a fantasy.
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3 comments
If so many are saying it, perhaps it’s not just you? Perhaps the way our society operates is screwing with people’s minds, though you may be at the sharp end of that.
It wasn’t always this way. For hundreds of thousands of years, people have been getting by on sticking to the old ways. Following the skills taught to them in childhood, and living their whole lives in small family groups, living off the land. Then along comes modernity, with it’s demands that everyone be entrepreneurial, endlessly adapting, moving, and updating their mindsets. What was progressive 10 years ago is now outdated and backwards. It’s toxic to the human soul.
Some adapt well to this. We’re a relatively flexible species. But a whole lot of people are made miserable by it. You’re not alone in that. Rates of mental health problems are through the roof, particularly among the young. And a lot of the time you won’t even see it, because everyone is so desperate to project perfection and confidence on their social media. Nobody can bare to show weakness any more.
If this society isn’t working for you, look for a way out. Look for other misfits. Return to the land. The pace is slower there. You don’t need to be a revolutionary. You don’t need to stand out. You don’t need to internalize political ideals you don’t agree with.
If you’re not hurting anyone, then there’s nothing wrong with you. You just don’t happen to fit into the current warped society. Opt out. Look for a way of being that feels right. Find your island. Become a hermit if that’s what it takes. Go live off grid in a cabin in the woods if necessary. Join a hippy commune, or a convent. People do it all the time. Whatever it takes to feel ok in yourself.
Everyone dies, everyone is ultimately forgotten, and the world spins on. But you don’t need any justification to keep existing in the here and now. There’s nothing inherently wrong with you. For most of history you’d have been just as well adapted as anyone else. You just don’t happen to fit well into hyper-modernity. Few do, though many may be better at pretending.
My fantasy is that I buy a shotgun the day I turn 18 and kill myself in a place far deep in the woods where my body will never be found.
You’re not as alone in your beliefs as you might think. In the USA the Republican Party, which currently holds the vast majority of power, is founded on the conservative ideal of returning to the old ways and resisting progressive change.
It’s an understandable philosophy to resist new things if the old ways work for you. That’s the key: if the old ways work for you. But where we, as a society and as individuals, fall apart is when the old ways clearly don’t work and we still resist progress. That’s when stagnation and decay happen. It sounds like you’ve come to this realization in your own life, and that’s really impressive that you can objectively see things the way they are despite your instincts urging the contrary.
What’s the solution? Easier said than done, but maybe try altering your lifestyle in small steps? The fact that you’re on the internet communicating with strangers proves that you aren’t quite the ‘crotchety old woman’ from bygone days who is afraid of computers or anything more modern than a sewing machine. Maybe just for laughs you can dive into social media like the kids do these days, instagram, facebook, snapchat, kik, and all that, just to prove to yourself that you’re not a dinosaur.
But above all, don’t feel obsolete because there’s a whole world of people who also feel overrun by the “new” ways, it happens with every new generation. Just don’t isolate yourself because that’s when you really get left behind (I say from experience).