Why is this sentiment so common in our generation?
Thursday, 13 Mar 2025
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Because each passing year things are getting worse
Thats typically the age where wage slavery starts
I think because teens and early twenties are supposed to be the highlight of your life and after that you have to become a proper adult with responsibilities. And if you’re not successful, it can feel hard to keep going
Hes emo. Let the emo be emo
Because we live to work. Humans are becoming nothing more than fuel for the engine that is capitalism
It’s the internet…
I’m 21 and don’t feel old. I dont think I’ll actually feel old until I’m 70 and even then I can still feel young. My grandparents are in their 70s and live an amazing life. They road-trip, go watch live music and drink wine, they went to another country this summer and just traveled around…ended up at some churches bingo night bc they were just wandering and having fun.
Idk what is “being old”? Just the age? Or are you literally feeling like an old person at 22?? This confuses me
Quarantine messed up peoples time sense.
There’s a massive pressure to succeed, at least from what I’ve seen. Gen Z has to fight tooth and nail just to get onto the bottom rung of the ladder that leads to the bottom of the totem poll. Then, we can make wages that are higher than our predecessors had at our age, but when you account for inflation and how far that money goes, it turns out to be worth less.
I know people who were top of their majors in college who still can’t find work. People who put in the hours and overloaded themselves with projects to prove their competency.
Boomers never had to deal with AI tossing out a resume or a workforce that has globalized to this extent.
I think the opposite is more true, a lot of us still feel younger than we are actually so it probably plays into that sentiment of “what are we doing”
Must be satire.
EDIT: I’m only talking about the pic, I read the title too quickly and forgot to reply to the question. I don’t feel this sentiment but I kinda get where it comes from. If you feel it, the best I can tell you is that I think you still have your whole life ahead of you, even if you’re in your 30s. Best wishes to everyone.
I don’t think it’s terribly prevalent, but I do think it stems from people in that age range losing a large chunk of their early adulthood (15-21) to covid. When you spend 2-3 years doing nothing, you’ll remember nothing, so it feels like life is passing too quickly for us to have the opportunity to make the most of what we have left but it’s not true
Nuh,I don’t think it’s popular. 22 is fine
Perhaps it’s because we compare ourselves to 20-year-old celebrities
economy makes it impossible to live on your own and grow up anymore
Like most things, this is not unique to this generation.
I saw *Avenue Q* on Broadway in 2009. The main character laments that, at 22, he’s “so old!” to laughs from the audience.
Just remember this!! Before you know it you’ll be old and kids will be saying this stuff and you’ll remember you felt that way, too.
I owned 0 houses at 22. I own 2 houses at 38. I’ll take 38.
it’s nothing new, millenial here.
I’ve felt the same way since I was 18 yo. in a way, it’s true.
things are never the same after you start adulting.
the majority accepts adulting quite easily but there’s a segment that finds it very hard to do so.
Brain rot. Same reason he’s 22 with that hot topic wrist band, misfits t shirt and nail polish
can i say it… it’s the phones.
Because age is not respected in western culture. Products have to be new and the latest thing, and that goes for people now. It’s actually the opposite in real life. The older you get ,the more experience you have and the more cool stuff you know. Capitalism and marketing make people feel old at 22 when you’re literally just getting started! Don’t accept it!
I feel this way at 48!
Something happened in 2014-15. Everything seemed nasty. Everyone is angry, rude, entitled.
It just feels awful to be in America and be an American.
Because no other generation is 22 right now
lmao i’m turning 29 in two months and i don’t even say this.
there’s never a point where you *have* to start behaving old, and if behaving old isn’t what defines it as a negative thing idk what the point is.
It was common in damn near every generation.
Your 20’s are for watching the old world you built as a teenager crash and burn to make way for the real world you build.
Early 20’s for moderately social people are about losing friends to make way for the ones that stick around a while. If you haven’t went to college it’s for fumbling around at different random jobs until you figure out what you really wanna do.
It’s an era for finding yourself, and I mean REALLY finding yourself. The self image you created as a teen turns out to be a hollow shell of who you really are, so at some point in your 20s, you end up building back better.
Slowly but surely, the thirst for life you lose will come back as your frontal lobe develops, and you figure out what actually matters in life.
We are having a growing sense that the world and civil society will not exist in the way we know it by the time we are our parents age
So with many of us not having financial stability or long term aspirations, and feeling like the world as we know it coming to a close soon, we feel like our lives have peaked in terms of happiness and stability in our early twenties.
Ooh, I’ll bite. It’s because a large portion of today’s youth are systematically denied the opportunity to just be a kid, and the barrier for having what is considered a successful life has never been more unreachable.
Me on Monday when i turn 23
Cause we’re taught from a young age; age /= beauty and the older you are the less desirable you are and social media/skincare craze/celebrities with unrealistic aging expectations have ruined us. There’s a whole trend of saying gen z looks old for their age and our skin is bad. Our body images are terrible
the impact of the internet on gen z would be my guess. like time moves at light speed where things that came out 4 years ago are considered “old”. and theres a constant wave of younger and younger people becoming prominent while the people you watched when you were 12 are becoming obscure.
I think social media often shows hyper successful young people, giving other young adults a skewed idea on what they should’ve achieved by their twenties, they know they’re growing into an adult but then they look back on their life thus far and realize they haven’t achieved much of anything, leading to the “I’m so old now and my life is cooked” mentality even when they’re still pretty young.
Because they locked the whole world down and told everyone 365/24/7 that they were going to die if they breathed wrong. Also when they locked the world down they showed you that they can stop the whole world when and how they want to. And now you’re still not allowed to talk about it, you’re especially not allowed to say that time sucked.
Gen X had this when we were little with nuclear annihilation but it was never so personal like it got with C_OVID.
Im going on 24 and i feel like a weathered dinosaur
Because there’s not much hope for their future unless they get extremely lucky. Once they are old enough to have to take care of themselves and can’t get free rent with mom and dad it’s just work work work die.
Because we only get advertised youth up to ~25yo. Then it’s time to make a family
22 isn’t old people. Old is like 45.
Millennial here. This was common in my generation as well. Definitely make sure you talk to any friends even remotely showing a sentiment like this. I know I wish I had done it more, so they’d still be here today.
A lot of people in their early 20s are still mentally/emotionally teenagers.
Paradoxically a lot of 30 year olds feel younger than 22 year olds because their perspective changes and they feel like a young adult instead of an old teenager.
Maybe loss of religious faith. Suffering had a meaning back in the days and now we know that we suffer for literally nothing. That’s depressing.
Because we are growing up very fast,constantly overwhelmed,experiencing and seeing a higher volume of tragic things in a shorter amount of time and the rhetoric that you need to be successful and financially independent at a young age just like all these other famous young adults but failing to account for the privilege they have.If not this then you will rot as part of the corporate system and end up alone dead in your bed.Hard work and you’ll get your reward but you constantly see how the system was built against you.You still will keep working but everything is meaningless.It’s not that deep but you wouldn’t be thinking about it if it wasn’t.
Now I ,personally,don’t care about any of this.Just a potential explanation.
Every passing year we realize the freedom to live our lives the way our parents and grandparents did will never become attainable again. We grew up watching our parents work everyday and complain about it because they would rather be with us instead, only to be in the exact same position of how they felt about it in our early twenties rather than our 40s-50s.