I wrote this in London, while sitting on a couch in Canary Whalf, struggling to find work and having an existential crisis. Bully for me. But it’s something I reflect on quite often. Even now, as I sit at my desk in Jozi, looking for work, but this time without super fast internet to keep me company. This year I’m 29 and I’m saying goodbye to my 20s.
26 to 30. People older than you talk about it all the time and up until now you never quite understood it. How life is short and time flies. People who have experienced it already and have come to grips with it and tend to be condescending about it, you know? Fair enough, I guess. I’m pretty sure I already am. It’s like that look your parents gave you when you told them High School is impossibly hard or that they don’t understand what you are going through. And the look you gave your younger friend or lover when they cried about exams being the toughest thing they’ve ever been through. It’s something we will all experience at a point.
We all get older, whether we like it or not. It’s constant. Time, that is. It slips through your fingers and is gone long before you’ve even begun to grasp the whole theory of it. You read that a lot in books or hear it in films, but it really does become very real. And you wonder how horrifying it must actually be to spend a huge amount of time in a prison cell or be stuck on a desert island where every minute and second is wasted. You’ve either become extremely tolerant or intolerant of people or things, sometimes a bit of both depending on the situation you are in. Me? I find myself intolerant of just about everything. Flaws, I got them for days.
But I’ve been blessed, I guess. The last couple of years of my life have been rather interesting, even exciting, and I have been trying to figure it out, like you do. What have I wasted? What have I gained and so on?Things you’ve learnt like how I often spend way too much time in my head. It’s probably a good and a bad thing. But I’ve realised that I have lived and that I’ve achieved way more than I ever expected to. And at the same time not nearly enough. And at a certain point it seemed like every single door was open and now it seems like every single one is ajar, till you get close to it and it closes right in your face. I mean, you start to look at romance for example. The majority of my friends are in what will probably be their last serious relationships, whether they like to admit it or not. And if you are single like me, you look back at failed attempts and wonder what could have been, then accept it. Cos what else are you going to do? I only really ever had a few people I truly ever loved and I guess that’s better than none. But there is always hope, even now there is someone I care about a lot back home and maybe if I’m willing to be brave for a moment, something good or bad will happen. But to be honest I’m lucky to have her in my life regardless. And growing older you realise that there are a lot of people out there and a lot more people see something in you than you probably think.
With time moving on, things seemingly get a bit more real and things often get a bit deep. Life and time suddenly become a lot more precious, along with all the time you have left with it. Life went from everyone getting drunk and being stupid to something a lot more interesting and depressing. You suddenly aren’t thinking ‘YOLO’ but ‘If I get to bed at 9:30, I’ll have a lot more energy for tomorrow’s challenges’. You look at your friends who are now either welcoming new life into the world or saying goodbye to someone who has touched or made theirs. And most of the time all you can do is watch. Your parents are no longer the illusion you established so long ago in your mind. They are fallible and more human than you. And spending time with them and drawing on their experiences has become more important than ever. Things get put into perspective and there are two ways I’ve seen people handle it. Some choose to ignore it and continue on living the lifestyle of ‘live once, party hard’ while the rest step up and realise that it’s gotta be just as interesting on the other side. Truth is it’s all going to be okay and we are gonna come out laughing on the other end. Hopefully we can impart some of our knowledge or something like that onto others. And hopefully we can all share it with all of our friends and loved ones. One thing is for certain though, we will all have an interesting journey.
So what’s this got to do with anything? Well Another-Day is going through that change, I guess. Well, me and Nas are. We are growing and our lives are changing. And guess what? We are it. The only writers left. We aren’t particularly happy or sad about the current situation. Jaz is in Japan for the foreseeable future and everyone else is living their lives. So something has to give. The tone of the blog will slowly change with us. We will always be the cynical cunts you love, sure, but we cannot in our hearts post about things that do not interest us. Or worse, think are below us. And yes, comic books will never not interest us. Parties and hanging out in loud night clubs with underaged patrons and brand events on the other hand are not so interesting. We will as usual be your sarcastic and slightly arrogant friends. There is just a lot less chance of us writing about, say, that party in Braamies. But we will write the hell out of that new Keanu movie. With that let’s see how it goes. Probably badly. Which is of course way more interesting…