Holy Shit, I'm 50...

I turned 50 years old on Sunday. Half a century. I don’t feel 50, but then, I’ve never been here before so what would I know? I’m know I’m not any more mature, maybe a little. A lot less hair than 25 years ago. What’s left of it is graying. My beard has gone from a rust red to Santa’s white. So the exterior betrays the interior.

A guy I know once said, “One day you’re the youngest guy in the room, the next you’re the oldest.”

I bring this up because this very thing happened two weeks ago. Sitting in a hotel conference room after a long day, I looked around the table and counted the ages of those with me. Shit! It had happened, at long last: I was the oldest guy in the room. And I wasn’t even 50 yet!

Milestone birthdays, for me anyway, induce reflection. I spent sometime thinking back over the years; when I was a kid, what the world was like then. As a card-carrying member of Generation X, I remember the Princess telephone on the wall, still having to get up to change the channel at my grandmother’s house, and there being a computer in the corner of Ms. Bingham’s 5th grade glass. No one knew what to do with it, least of all Ms. Bingham, who for all I know had been teaching since the 1960s.

The fuzzy rear view mirror that nostalgia offers can fool us into thinking things were easier all those years ago. As I look at my own kids, I don’t believe times were easier for me, I know they were. When I went to baseball practice, that was the center of my universe. For that 90 minutes, there were my teammates, drills, and if the coach was willing, a scrimmage. I didn’t know anything else, I couldn’t. That…isolation, that’s not the right word, but I don’t know a better one, was in retrospect a blessing.

We couldn’t know enough to be worried about anything other than what we were doing at a given moment on a given day. We didn’t have unending choices; we had a few options, and we were fine with them. I don’t recall much FOMO (fear of missing out) because how could I know what anyone else was doing?

I don’t recall any of my friends worried about getting jobs as we got out of college in the 1990s. Sure, most of us were working entry level at a company (big or small) but the world was largely on offer. Other than the would-be lawyers, I don’t think any of my closest college friends have a graduate degree. Back then, most of us didn’t need one, and having jumped on the job train 30 years ago, most of us were spared HR departments demanding six or seven years of expensive education to get our foot in the door.

Kids today (my own and others) will be much tougher than we ever were. They’ve had to wrestle with existential uncertainty most of their lives. Imagine Donald Trump being the individual that’s had most political, social, and cultural impact on your young life. I remember Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush (I also grew up in politics so that was part of my world.)

Today, America’s youth cannot escape the world around them. They are stuck in The Matrix we created, plugged them in without their consent, and now they must deal with it. I’m sorry, future adults. I’d say we did the best we could, but what would ever lead them to believe that?

My Next 50 Years

Mark Twain said there are two important dates in a person’s life: The day he’s born, and they day he understands why. I’m lucky to have found the latter, a few years later than I would’ve liked, but located all the same. I am blessed to work with, collaborate with, and communicate with some of the smartest, bravest, and most thoughtful people in America. They are all, to a person, younger than me.

The expression “because we’ve always done it that way” gives me hives. What we’ve done in the last 40 or 50 years has brought us to this place. Does anyone in their right mind really believe we should do more of it? Anyone that tells you we can go back to some magical land before Donald Trump, or Covid, is clinging to a world that worked for them, and are suffering from their own bout of nostalgia.

I have a lot left to do, and am blessed with time to do it. I haven’t written as much in the past few weeks. That’s not from lack of ideas, but lack of time. I have a few projects that are getting off the ground and are very exciting and are taking my attention away from my love of putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard.)

We find ourselves in the midst of an existential interregnum. The Trump Era will end, but its effects will stay with us for a long, long time. I look forward to helping figure out what comes next; not some retread version of an America that’s gone (and was never as good as we thought) but for the version of ourselves that our kids (and grandkids!) can grow up in, make their own, and take in hand when their time to lead comes around.

Thanks for spending my birthday with me.

Reed