"The Best Years"

This might just be a sensitivity on my part, as an 'underemployed' and/or 'out of work' young man, but there is no overused term that puzzles me as much as when somebody (usually almost always on TV) refers to 'the best years of your life.' Yeah. Those years.

Sometimes, it is true, the person referring to their best years has been abused, or incarcerated, or somehow put in a position where they have possibly missed the best years of their life due to limited or withheld freedom or outside interference of another sort. But, if you rob a bank, you might be able to get a best day out of it before someone traces the money, at least. The jail time is just shit icing on your overpriced cake, and maybe you'll learn a lesson so, by the time you get out, you'll be wise enough to actually appreciate those 'best years' you almost threw away.

What's worst about anyone referring to 'best years' is it's usually referring to the years between 19 and 29. I don't know what happens to numbskulls between 29 and 30 that makes them incapable of appreciating life or even having a 'best year' after the hallowed twenty-something phase of human development, which is typically the largest chunk of a human biology textbook, is elapsed.

For comparison, the TV show Friends was notably less enjoyable than Seinfeld, and the latter show as about older people who were, arguably, less cool than Chandler and company. This was an important lesson, from an otherwise untrustworthy medium, about things getting funnier the older and more pathetic you get. You used to have to go to Shakespeare for these kinds of lessons.

I did a search about 'best years', and the internet search I did confirmed my worst fears, except that they are even more ageist than I thought. Today's "best years" are the teenage years, which makes sense, because when I was a teenager I had two shows convincing me that the best years were in later life, and if nothing else the unknown-but-ruling forces of the world prey on making you think you lost your best years but can buy them back. I could cry when I remember that I actually believe in safety scissors or adult supervision. I don't even think a two-year heroin binge could deaden the knowledge I've fought for and won, like that there is a shadowy consortium built around the idea of 'best years'.

If nothing else, the concept of 'best years' makes people in various parts of their lives more liable to circle the wagons, more liable to be tricked into being content with what they have. Not that it's wrong to be satisfied with your life, but it's too easy sometimes. Even if it is not true that life continually gets better, like aged cheese or well-cellared wine, it's probably healthier to always keep pushing those best years ahead of you, no matter how persuasive the shallow arguments that your sexual peak was a decade ago, or that people who got published at 16 are better writers than you, or that older people can hold their alcohol better and know how to smoke a fine cigar. We live in a society where fruit is plucked from the branches before it is ripe, and where pumped ethylene gas replaces a few extra days in the sun...

...I actually forgot where I was going with that. The real points I wanted to make are lost in the past. Things were better then. But allow me to dispel any fears about best or worst years. The younger you are, the more likely you are too callow to appreciate the really fine points of living, and the older you are, the less likely you are to really notice the originality of life. Old or young, the amount of time spent thinking about best years is inversely proportional to the amount of enjoyment that could have been got instead. So, what troubles me, what I wrote this whole nonsense about, is when someone thinks they have life figured out enough to tell you that you missed that critical phase of life when anything would be better. With prevalent attitudes like this, modern ageism isn't such a mystery anymore.