My dad turned 30 in 1990, by which time he’d found my mum, accrued a kid, a dog and a house with a large back yard for the dog and kid to run around in. A life, in other words. That was 30 back then.
This month I turn 30, when I’ll celebrate with about 20 mates, a lot of beers and an Oasis cover band I’m hiring to play at the expensive, rundown share house in Fitzroy I rent, which has hardly any back yard. This is also 30.
I am pleasantly surprised to find how content I am with this situation.
This isn’t a “hey, 30 ain’t so bad” article, something that I see as being subjective. Reader, you might be in your late 20s or early 30s and your life might actually be quite shit – that’s not for me to judge.
But there’s a rising number of people my age who live extraordinary lives yet fail to see it on account of this generational comparison. It’s a form of thinking I specialised in not so long ago, plagued by insecurity about my progress as a human in the kind of quarter-life crisis that is surely recognisable to every millennial.
Our generation has developed an unhealthy tendency towards this thinking, which in many ways is supercharged by social media.
I see pictures on Instagram of friends with kids; newlyweds shooting loving looks at each other in black-and-white wedding photos, and think about how much their life looks in order, like some sort of happy ending. And it probably is. Life is good there.
Life is good here too. I think about the 3am wine sessions with friends, deep conversations I wasn’t capable of a few years ago and probably won’t be bold enough to attempt in a few years’ time when I’m eventually married with kids. This is 30, too.
We naturally compare ourselves to our parents, who act for better and for worse (in my case, very much for better) as a compass. When we need to reach a decision, we are able to make out the rough path that they carved to guide us.
In 1990, when my dad turned 30, the average house in an Australian capital city cost $117,571 – four times the average annual income. Today the same house costs $1,065,447 – 11.5 times the annual average income. We’re often criticised for whinging but this is a cold hard truth. This is 30 now: a difficult time to buy a house.
Still, those who spent the 2010s in our 20s (I wish our decade had a catchy name like the 80s or 90s) are blessed and cursed with options our parents didn’t have. Why focus on the housing situation?
There’s the option of choosing your own identity, rather than having it chosen for you, through an open mindedness towards gender, clothes, sexuality and life choices.
Careers are varied and changeable. There’s the option of travel, safe drug use and festivals. Losing the plot at Meredith for a couple of days before rocking up at your office job on Monday.
Expectation, too, fuels hope and ambition and disappointment. The schools and universities we graduated from told us what great things we were going to do. Pixar films led us to believe that we should have found the one by now.
I haven’t written a world-famous novel, I’m single and I’m mildly crippled by student debt.
But I’m happier than I was last year, and in turn the year before that. I love my job. And I’ll have many people around me for a birthday not spent in lockdown.
All of this isn’t justification of my life when compared with others, but rather a comment on how placing a different, positive lens changes things. It’s almost too obvious. Because for all the comparisons we make of ourselves with others, no one really cares what you do or don’t do.
Tim McGlone is a Melbourne-based writer. He writes about sport, food, travel and agriculture. @mcglone77
