Warning signs to identify if your 20s is dying a slow death
As an ode to my last year as a 20-something, I put together this list of observations to help you identify and accept that you are no longer relevant.
- Coldness. You are suddenly more cold than you’ve been. Is it climate change? Or is it your decaying body? If you catch your female friends wearing more of these at an increasing frequency, it means the end is here:
2. You experience an immediate and overwhelming urge to control the music played at the house parties you attend. This is because as you get older, your ears are no longer receptive to the frequencies in music composed by artists unfamiliar to you (or you didn’t happen upon your Spotify Discover). Such frequencies are converted into pain signals that your brain sends to your entire body and you spend the rest of the evening in vague but definite discomfort
3. Whenever you plan your next trip or travel, you always spend at least 5 mins pondering over how this change in routine will affect your poop schedule
4. Ancillary sign: Overnight, with zero explanation of any kind, it becomes socially acceptable to talk about gas, and poop regularity with your friends. It has become a thing that concerns everyone, like relationships or jobs. So it no longer makes sense to shy away from the topic
5. Another ancillary sign: if you are having a bad day, at least one of your friends will ask you if you pooped in the morning. At a later point, you’d realize there is a definite correlation
6. Your couch has one of these:
It wasn’t long ago that you slept on soiled mattresses or carpets after a bender in the apartment of someone you think you knew but weren’t sure. But now, your couch needs bedding
7. Bags of green tea spontaneously combust into existence in your pantry. You don’t quite remember buying it, you definitely don’t drink rose mint green tea or whatever. But there it is. Just random bags of tea that will eventually go into the trash when you move houses
8. You find yourself saying things like
“Yeah I cut out diary, I am lactose intolerant”
“The whole thing brought up some unresolved childhood trauma, it was literally gaslighting, what she was doing to me”
“I’ve been taking retinol, it is very important for women over the age 25 to take retinol for skin health” in conversation, despite never consulting a medical professional even one time about any of it.
If it can be told through Instagram stories by influencers, it must be medically sound.
You aren’t above retinol, nobody is
9. The coming of a new social media platform that somehow you just don’t enjoy as much. You don’t quite like the interface, it seems too busy. You don’t understand how something this stupid became a trend. You just don’t get why anyone would like this, but you say “it isn’t for me, but it looks sooo fun, people on it are sooo creative” with sincerity that nobody is buying. It was Instagram. It was TikTok. Another platform, another nail on the coffin of your youth
10. You ate 2 slices of pizza and some gelato for dinner, and by 8 AM, you’ve gained 3 kgs which you’ll spend the next 2 years trying to work off
11. You remember which one of your friends won’t return your Tupperware. You didn’t work to acquire this power, you just have it now.
You implicitly know that X receives the cake in Tupperware, whereas Y gets it in the disposable food containers you kept after takeout last week
12. You keep cardboard boxes. Your friends keep cardboard boxes. The strength of your relationships is easily quantifiable by how willing you are to part with cardboard boxes when they ask
13. You are acutely aware of how much water you drink (or don’t drink). You talk to everyone about the importance of hydration. You are actually a dehydrated bitch yourself. You worry about it though, so that counts
14. Hangovers take minimum one business day to recover from. This is terrible because nobody (especially yourself) is remotely tolerable when sober
15. You are tired. So tired
It has been fun.
