32 Minutes and 29 and a half years

On measuring the end of my 20s

Note: I wrote this essay in late Summer of 2020 and have been sitting on it since. Some of the references are out of date (LOL low interest rates) but others still hold. A lot in my life and the world has changed in the two years since then.

There are 57 stairs from the entrance of my building to my apartment. There are 6 stops on the train between my house and my office - sometimes 4 if I can swing an express train at Columbus Circle. My commute is on average 32 minutes (lowest is 24, highest is the upper bounds of MTA dysfunction). 

I have not done that commute in 195 days. 

I have a habit of measuring things. Even things that aren’t worth measuring. Especially things that aren’t worth measuring. Numbers used to comfort me. To quantify is to know, and to know is to understand. If it can be measured, it must be true. Anything else is bias or hysteria. Numbers are the language of the objective, the gospel of the secular mind.

But numbers can be cruel.

For example, 32 minutes is not a large amount of time. It’s just enough time in a dark tunnel surrounded by strangers to ask “is this it?”

As of this moment I am 10,823 days old, which is a little older than 29 ½. 195 days in quarantine is only 1.8% of my life. 1.8% is higher than current interest rates with the Fed, but many wouldn’t notice a 1.8% change in salary, weight, or anything else people use to measure themselves. 1.8% sounds miniscule until it is the percentage of life in lockdown. Then, empirical measurement can’t capture lived experience. 

One of the more counterproductive things I measure is my life and how it compares to others. Prior to turning 29, which happened to coincide with the arrival of a global pandemic, my methodology had been the following: 

Take someone’s biggest problem, and see where it falls on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If it is at rungs four or higher, life is probably pretty good. Right around that point, you’re not worried about a bear chasing you, or starving to death, or even questioning if anyone loves you. If you make it up to rung five, you have enough time and financial stability on your hands to ask pesky questions like “what is my purpose?” “What should I be doing with my life?” “How can I live up to who I am supposed to be?” 

The higher up the rung you are, the less people care about your problems. It seems daft at best to lament about “finding your highest self” while we have a global pandemic and a nation at 20% unemployment and families being evicted and racial violence and a democracy in disarray. Given all that, ennui seems like an absolute luxury, a problem you only get to have if you have no actual problems and are willfully ignorant of anyone but yourself. It is dismissed as maudlin self-pity. You’re told to practice gratitude, to check your privilege, to remember that there are so many others who have it worse than you, to do your part and donate time and money to help others out. And don’t forget selfcare. With just a sheet mask a day, you too can be at ease with the universe. 

So I do the things I am supposed to do. And while the world may seem like it is going to hell in a handbasket on a macro scale, on a micro scale, I have an objectively wonderful life. I have a loving family and husband, caring friends, a good job where I can put a roof with stupidly high rent over my head, no deep childhood trauma. I benefit from all the privileges I’m obligated to acknowledge, including being white, cis gendered, and heterosexual. So when I hear a faint voice ask “is this all there is,” it feels greedy to ask for more. 

I used to think if I just worked hard enough, I would get to where I needed to go. I would cross some finish line of “Congrats you did it! You found your life’s purpose and now you’re fulfilling it!” 

29 ½ is not old, but it’s old enough to know that finish line doesn’t exist. It’s a plot device reserved for airport novels and sponsored posts from instagram gurus. I know I’m not running a race. But the more times I entered that tunnel, the more times I lived those same 32 minutes, the more I realized I wasn’t even moving.

Now, I am indeed not moving - at least not physically. I leave my apartment one time per week to get groceries and little else. But during this COVID induced sabbatical from “before,”  I have had to reassess how I am measuring my 29 ½ years of life.

29 ½ is an odd age to be (both literally and figuratively.) To many it sounds so young, to others like practically a death sentence. I do not feel like I am on a funeral march to 30.  But the steady drum beat of time makes the mundane faint and the existential deafening. There is a deep knowing in my bones that every second of my three decades here is borrowed time. They know in an urgent and ancient way this body must someday be returned to the earth - the hydrogens and the carbons and all the other atoms repurposed. My life, this thing I call me, is borrowed from something, somewhere I can only feign to understand. I don’t know when this debt will be called, but I know there is a piper, and he must someday be paid. 29 ½ is wondering - if the house eventually always wins, what’s the point? 

Maybe the answer is we just spin around on this space rock floating in a universe of questionable origins, our beings controlled by a series of electrical impulses and reactions to scents and chemicals. Maybe asking for further meaning than that is like trying to squeeze water from a rock or find Jesus on a piece of toast. 

Sometimes, I envelop myself in these nihilistic thoughts while watching reruns of The Office after another day. Like a favorite blanket, they comfort me from scary thoughts like maybe, just maybe, saying everything is meaningless and nothing matters anyway, is a coward's alibi for not asking for more. And maybe feeling tired and run down protects me from the deep, eternal part of me that defies logic and reason, the part that burns and wants, the part I worry could consume me whole. Perhaps it is not depression, but rather wild, burning hunger for something more that leads to this sinking feeling that I am sandbagging my life. I scarf down rewards for futile activities, and, for a bit, I am half fed. Full enough to avoid desperation, but never nourished. The perfect amount to just keep going where I’m going, and not have the energy to ask ‘why?”

Hunger that is only half-fed, told to shut up and be grateful for whatever gruel it gets, doesn’t subside. It gnaws and gnaws and gnaws.  And no matter how much the world pats my head, and tells me how wonderful and successful I am, I’m still hungry and don’t know why. Numbers and reason conclude “if you don’t have enough, you just need more.” Do more. Be more. Chase the bigger salary, travel to more exotic locations, gain more followers, get the prestigious degree you’re not even sure you want, all to get another hit of praise, and maybe this time, it will finally be enough. 

But it never is. 

Seeking sustenance from these things is like scarfing bags and bags of cheetos and candy corn and other nutritionally devoid (yet delicious and highly addictive) mutant things created by marketing masterminds - and then wondering why you feel awful. And maybe 29 ½ is understanding that the things we were told would feed us, like status, money, beauty, and power, at a certain point actually consume us. (And that maybe we are too old to eat cheetos for dinner.)

29 ½ is admitting I’m starving. And I don’t want to keep pretending I’m not. I fear this hunger because I do not understand it. It wants and wants, but is indiscriminate in what. Does it know the difference between contentment and complacency? Can it see the line between ambition and rapacity? Will it ever have enough? Will I ever be enough? 

But I must heed this hunger, this inchoate yearning for more. Hunger is a signal - a warning but not yet a sentence. Hunger shakes us out of our numbed resignation. It confirms a part of us still has the audacity to want. Hunger is the flicker of faith that life is more than just eating cheetos and medicating nihilism and living the same 32 minutes over and over again. 

Faith is a touchy word in the WEIRD world. It is impossible to measure; it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny and is incoherent when asked to explain its reasoning. It conjures images of lunatics claiming to hear the voice of God and the Westboro Baptist Church and Sharia Law and people crying in infomercials that through their belief (and use of essential oils), they solved their life’s woes. 

To my secular mind, faith was, at best, an existential security blanket (on more cynical days, an abdication of free will and personal agency.) Anything could be explained away as God’s will. I assumed finding faith was like stumbling upon the proverbial burning bush. If one could find it, they would have some sweeping revelation that would illuminate their path, forever absolving them from fear, doubt, or uncertainty.  They could look up in the night sky, and know there is a divine path already chosen for them. All they needed to do was depart with their grasp of reality. 

But 29 ½ is realizing faith has been co-opted by some and misunderstood by many, including me.

Faith originates from the Latin word, fides, meaning trust. To trust is to accept something as truth without 100% certainty. 29 ½ is learning that truly living, and not just existing, is itself an act of faith. We must show up every day with no guarantee that it will be happy, rewarding, or even comprehensible, but trust it’s worth doing anyway. We have to live through things that have no tidy “moral to the story,” yet trust that we will carry on. We will never have indisputable proof someone loves us. We must simply trust them when they say they do - and more importantly, trust that we are something worth loving. We must trust that our life is going somewhere, even when we are in the heart of the Labyrinth, grasping in the dark, unable to see where. And we must trust that we matter: Even beings as unfathomably insignificant as us, matter. 

Faith can be a fickle friend. Following it may be a fool’s errand, but going without it is a certain death. Life becomes a sick joke where our existence is the punchline. Faith is the reminder that spiraling around this large grade nuclear reactor trapped in a fleshbag body is actually a miracle. Faith is the only thing keeping the vastness of the universe from annihilating us. Faith is the trust that this life is worth doing.

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My 20’s have been a time of learning, and unlearning, and relearning my concept of self and the assumptions that created it. I have mourned past selves and shed identities that no longer fit. I have had to let go of the fantasy that success, life, or even time itself are linear and easy to measure. A decade ago I thought I would know where I was going by now. I would know who I was going to become. Instead, at 29 ½, I must hold the contradiction of knowing far more about myself than I did a decade ago while also knowing identity is tenuous and ever changing. 

I am old enough to see that Maslow’s hierarchy, my previous self measurement method, is a useful yet incomplete tool. It stops at self-actualization. Making self actualization the final goal gets self-centric results. Self-actualization shouldn’t be the end game, where one reaches the top of the pyramid and promptly spikes the football, reveling in self-greatness. 29 ½ is realizing self actualization is actually just the beginning of paying back what I owe. 

There’s nothing quite like a global pandemic to realize I am part of something bigger than myself. My perceived individuality (whether it be self-actualized or not) is just a node in a complex, elaborate system I could never fully comprehend. Everyone and everything are so interconnected, it’s impossible to measure the effect I alone have. The system is too dynamic, the picture it paints too large and on too long of a time scale to see the whole thing. Given this, questions like “What is my purpose? How do I fit into the bigger picture?” seem both futile and myopic. And maybe 29 ½ is letting go of the entitlement I am owed an explanation.

The better questions may be “How can I be the best node I can be in a system I will never fully understand? What do I have to offer? And how do I give it fully?”

I don’t know the answers. I’m hoping that’s what the next 29 ½ years are for. But I think I’m now at least asking the right questions.

I don’t know where this will lead me. But I must let go to find out.  Let go of my incessant need to know the answers. Let go of my blinding cynicism. Let go to time itself because I don’t have forever. 29 ½ is letting go in order to live. 

My life is mine to own and to measure. The world cannot write the rubric, as painful and as liberating as that is. In the quiet moments when I close my eyes, I will need to answer if I am taking this one life I have, and giving it my best shot. And then I will need to have faith in the voice that replies.