Are we still young? How does time affect our sense of identity? Let’s look at the fuzzy concept that is youth. Look for its boundaries, which are a matter of consensus. And cross them, with no regrets.
There’s no other way to start this article: I’m 37 years old. Is that a lot, or a little? The answer will depend on who I am and who I could be. As an athlete, I’d already be retired; as a politician, particularly in Poland – where the average age in the Sejm, the lower house of Parliament, remains over 50 – I’d still be young. And as a person? Well, exactly…
A relative concept
Before we dive into the confusing and fascinating arcana of the soul, let’s check out a bit of equally fascinating numerology. How long, exactly, are we young – in numbers? Obviously we never know this precisely. First of all, the answer depends on who we ask. For a high-school student, a 60-year-old is somebody with one foot in the grave. In turn, a 70-year-old could, without irony, refer to a 40-year-old as young. A relativity that’s somehow obvious, but it contains a deep truth about the experience of time. In 2020, we pass through the various stages of life later than we did 100, 50 or even 20 years ago. Sociologists have probed this phenomenon inside and out; of course, you don’t need any kind of advanced research to recognize it. Today’s 40-year-old is in completely different shape than he would have been a half-century ago, when Jerzy Gruza made his last series about Engineer Karwowski. We can see these changes in every field: starting with the labour market, through the matrimonial market, to the average age of motherhood, which is growing with each decade.
Slightly less obvious is the class dimension: youth lasts longer the higher we are on the social ladder. Money has an anti-ageing effect. Members of the upper- and upper-middle classes can relatively easily extend their youth to the fourth, and not uncommonly the fifth decade of their lives. The rest don’t have this opportunity, and pass the milestones that mark the transition from youth to what follows it even before 30. What exactly are these milestones? They’re defining moments in a person’s life, such as starting full-time paid work, moving out from your parents’ place, and starting your own family. They constitute tangible evidence of the completion of a certain stage of life and the commencement of a new one. Other milestones are more vague and subjective, because after all there’s a thing called ‘bumping up against realities’, which will be different for each person. The burden of responsibility appears, which we didn’t feel so much in our youth. There’s also existential experience, in which our inner child speaks up – specifically the understanding that there’s nobody to blame, and there never will be. If the majority of the situations I’m describing are familiar to you, then you know something’s happening. In fact, you probably know what it is. Since at this point we’ve agreed that our youth is now behind us, we can easily discuss a few issues that can’t be expressed in numbers.
Cautious optimism
Moving from youth to what follows it, let’s remember that the time of sowing, preparations and growing up has passed. We can no longer just ‘have good prospects’. The time of harvest has come. Jacek Dehnel puts it well at the start of his Diary of the Year of Christ. If we want to be good at something, we have to be good right now, and simply good. And so there’s nothing to wait for. It won’t occur to anybody to say we’re good ‘for our age’. This phrase doesn’t apply to us anymore, and it never will again. Along with it, a whole range of comfortable justifications are disappearing from our lives. And this isn’t the only narration that’s running out. There are some things we can no longer do seriously; their time has passed, irrevocably. It’s a little like running away from home. Of course, you can do it when you’re 13, but not when you’re 23: then the most you can do is move out. A 17-year-old may believe strongly that they have the career of a cursed artist, and spout slogans such as “Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse.” But when you’re 27? You shouldn’t be standing in place with your dreams, but realize that it’s high time to start achieving them. After another 10 years, such aspirations will simply sound silly.
Here I’m not using specific terms; I’m not saying ‘middle aged’ or ‘maturity’. This is deliberate: all the complex conventions of ‘that which comes after youth’ are intentional. First, the owl of Minerva flies away after the fact, after all, and it’s easy to comment when everything’s been resolved. So for reflections summing up ‘middle age’, I invite you to read my article for “Przekrój” in the autumn (literally and figuratively) of 2050. Second, it’s worth being aware of what else influences our imagination of maturity. Schoolboy-required readings – from the times of “idyllic, angelic” youth – suggest that from our “high and foolish” youth we immediately transition to “the age of defeat”. This type of romantic bombast can lead us astray, so it’s better not to take Adam Mickiewicz’s Lausanne Lyrics too literally. Because there’s something that comes in between youth and the “age of defeat”. Namely, there appears a space for cautious optimism. Disappointment doesn’t have to come so quickly; moving beyond youth doesn’t immediately mean failure. You can simply shift your perspective, test your thinking about your relationship with the world. Deeming something a failure is quite an easy solution, because it consists purely in negation. And in fact our influence on reality cannot be as great as it could seem to us during our “foolish youth”.
Quite good prose
Let me cite my own experience. I’m a writer and philosopher; I’ve published a range of books that drew a certain response or even became successful; this certainly is not a defeat. And actually, the sun didn’t rise differently after any of them came out; the planet’s orbit didn’t change, nor did the fate of the world. This is the experience of all writers – and more broadly, it affects all areas of the world. Please apply them to your own CV and career path. This is precisely the transition from youth to what comes after it. I’m starting to understand this combination, which youth cannot understand and doesn’t want to. Conquering the world, which we dreamed of when young (or, as some prefer to dream of, changing that world), is just a fairy-tale. But that doesn’t mean that we’ve suffered a defeat. There’s another road, one that can’t be seen from the depths of youth: changing your perspective. In life, you can achieve this and that, but you have to learn to appreciate your own achievements, even if they don’t have a whole lot in common with the rowdy dreams of youth. The prose of life can be quite good prose.
I could end on this nice note, but it’s worth adding one more thing. And that is that good prose is the kind that somehow exists, and that knows it somehow has to be. Let’s dispense with the metaphors and say it straight. I have to come to terms with the idea that life is a march down your own path, not deluding yourself with all the paths at once. Of course, such a path may lead upward; I still have the right to expect development, possibly even taking wing, but I can no longer count on all paths being open to me. Of course, I can take on the world, but I can’t do this in every area simultaneously. This is stressed by Leszek Kołakowski in one of his ‘mini-lectures on maxi-issues’. To be young is to wallow in joyful uncertainty. To be young is to think that you can still become anything – a philosopher, millionaire, artist, thief. In exiting youth, I enter a rut, I make choices and I accept that choices fall on me. I realize that I’m on a defined path, and the others are closed off to me. In other words: defeat doesn’t have to be my lot, but a crystallizing, or actually a certain narrowing, always happens. I am who I am, and I won’t be what I haven’t become thus far. If I can come to terms with this, if I can see in this neither failure, nor disappointment, nor a messy compromise, precisely then can I hope for good prose in the next stage of life – the one that is no longer youth.
Translated from the Polish by Nathaniel Espino
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