Calling Us "Old" Is The Weirdest Insult
Greetings from the invisible ones.
Welcome to Cheaper Than Therapy, a healing newsletter for 80s babies by Shani Silver. This newsletter does not publish free content, but if you’d like to read it you can subscribe here. Thank you for enjoying the work of independent writers.
An unfortunate consequence of being someone who uses Tiktok is that I am keenly aware of the shenanigans that happen on Tiktok. Did you know there’s a 9-month-long Royal Caribbean cruise happening right now? Did you know an influencer convinced a brand to send him on it for 18 days? Did you know that the hardcore cruise people (eeep) absolutely hate him? And finally, did you know his main retort back to them is to insult their age? While he’s right to wiseass his responses right down to the ground—these people are insufferable—his reliance on age as insult is hollow for me. He seems oblivious to the fact that he’s moving in precisely the same direction.
I have a theory that age is just one more thing we’ve been trained to care about so that we’ll spend money, either in celebration or in fear. Capitalism is very good at taking normal things that happen to everybody and turning them into reasons to either party or panic. A massive midsection of life is occupied by the “panic” portion when it comes to age, and you can tell when you’ve reached it—it happens earlier than you think and lasts longer than you want. There’s an uncomfortable switcheroo. When people ask your age, it’s suddenly followed by, “if you don’t mind me asking.” Bitch why would I mind?