How Do Weirdos Grow Up?

And did we miss our chance?

“Most people don't grow up. Most people age. They find parking spaces, honor their credit cards, get married, have children, and call that maturity. What that is, is aging.” - Maya Angelou

There’s this feeling that I’m picking up on amongst a lot of my friends lately. A feeling like maybe we’re the holdouts, that other people around us have done this thing that we haven’t done, and now we need to somehow join them or at least do something different from what we’ve been doing. Mid to late 30’s, looking around, no regrets really, except for maybe not paying attention to crypto in the early days (as obnoxious as that time was, some of our fellow broke weirdos became god damn millionaires, wtf). We’re looking around and we’re wondering… “so, how do we grow up now?”

I’m having these conversations with lots of weirdos. Radical people. Queers, artists, punks, burners, polyamorous freelancers, psychonaut event organizers. Many of us don’t have a sense of how we’ll ever buy a house, though some of us do or have already taken that step. Many of us want kids. Some have them already but are still confused about how to “do it.” Some of us are partnered. Many are not. Our specific class struggles vary. Our specific relationship quandaries vary. Our specific career issues vary. But something links us. We’ve all been actively and decisively bucking norms up until this point. Calling bullshit on the whole Get a job / Get a family / Buy a house / Save for your kid’s college / Watch them leave the nest / Retire with your boo sequence of events that we watched our parents do or at least attempt to do. We didn’t get a business degree or a medical degree in college. Some of us didn’t even go to college. We followed our passions. We followed the passionate people. We freaked out the normies. We took acid. We figured out that life is chaos and we decided to enjoy it with everything we had. We took care of our friends. We organized direct actions. We made stunning works of art, some of them only witnessed by a handful of people who didn’t even know or care who the artist was but who wept in reverence nonetheless. And the whole time it felt right. It never felt easy. It certainly never felt clear. But it made a certain kind of sense.

We were rejecting a prescription, a hegemony. Let’s call it The Traditional Path. And we were rejecting it for a reason we were aware of, and maybe a contradictory reason we weren’t aware of.