the timeline

“Many men die at age 25, but aren’t buried until they’re 75.” - Benjamin Franklin, attributed

I’ve been counselling young men recently, 25 and under, and something came up in each inquiry, which men seem particularly vulnerable to: the timeline.

That dreaded, haunting timeline.

Put simply, the timeline is a series of accomplishments, skills, and experiences that should be had by a certain age. The implicit meaning of not meeting your timeline criteria: you’re a loser, meaning, someone who has lost, and will continue to lose, because now it is impossible to win.

The timeline can only be adjusted so much, then you fall behind, painfully behind, forever behind. That’s the other thing I heard: I’m behind.

They are behind in getting a girlfriend, being looksmaxable, making tons of money, accomplishing something uniquely special and meaningful that of course can go viral.

Fuck you money by 25 by saving the world or what are you even here for.

Hearing all this, I want to grab these young shoulders, shake them, give them a few good slaps, and say:

“Dude, you’re 23, you have the world in front of you. And this timeline does not even exist!”

It feels like it does though.

If they fall behind, they will try to “redeem” themselves, through some Hail Mary goal, a Herculean hustle, a chimerical attempt to reverse time or jam all the redeeming accomplishments into a year, a month, a day.

There are many men who are 35, 40, 50+, living with timelines that have due dates long past. They have heavy hearts, because everything reminds them of being far behind: a conversation with an old friend, seeing a well-dressed stranger, or a movie character who has everything together.

The timeline exists for a reason. We are born to matter; it’s our firmware. As babies, if we did not matter to our mothers, we’d be dead. This desire to matter extended to our family, our tribe, our people, and to matter to them we give value. In exchange for value we receive status. Status is not only hierarchical, it comes with a timeline.

If you fall behind the timeline, “you fail to launch,” and then you have low status, and you give no value, it feels like you do not matter, to anyone, ever again, and if you don’t matter, you are cut off from love: the one thing that naturally inspires you to matter in the first place.

Better to hide and slowly die.

Franklin was onto something. 25 seems like a magic year, where one is “on target” or “falls behind.” More are falling behind today. The reason for this is the “other” we are trying to matter to.

The “generalized other,” as George Herbert Mead calls it, an imaginary audience that gets formed in our head, that expects things from us, judges us, and ensures you have the correct timeline criteria in place. The generalized other forms from the constellation of those you are surrounded most with.

In previous eras, when people grew up in modest communal settings, the rest of the world was a distant place. You actually knew your neighbours’ name, not strangers from distant lands, and you knew what they do for a living, and what your people actually needed, giving you a sense of place, and a sense of what your place should be.

Many don’t know their neighbours’ name, but have bent necks looking into their phones, scrolling through the spectacle to see hyper-impressive, gorgeous, viral people who live way more accomplished and interesting lives than anyone you know. These are your neighbours now, and they give a sense of placelessness, with an increasingly impossible sense of what your place should be.

The generalized other formed from the spectacle hits differently than one formed amongst 150 people you live with and upon whom your survival depends. The timeline that forms from it becomes impossibly demanding, especially if your calling is not legible to present status economies, which is increasingly the case for those trying to create something new.

Once behind, you can desperately try to catch up, driven by shame, or get lost in fantasy, or perform as if you already have the status your timeline demands. All these approaches keep the lie of the timeline alive, blindly running away from the pain, tripping right back into it.

The bad news: I don’t know any worldly way out of this.

The good news: I may know a few unworldly ones.

The first and most radical approach is the Christian one: everyone, the poorest to the richest, drinks from the same chalice with their forehead meeting the same floor. Status still exists, but it’s background noise, and does not matter in the way it does outside of God’s love. You taste the primordial love that reaches beyond the mattering firmware.

The second approach is art. Not slop you find on the spectacle, that is distraction from the pain. Real art allows you to touch the world in-between, giving a brief reprieve, with Beauty reminding you second chances are real, you can begin again, and timelines are bad dreams you can wake up from.

Being with art, or better yet living in the aliveness while creating it, makes you remember the timeline isn’t real in the first place.

That said, maybe I should start writing again.

I’ve re-enabled likes and re-stacking. Feel free to share. I’ll try not to get re-pulled.

I also thought I’d end posts with things that offered me reprieve. I recently watched this Spanish show that follows a couple on New Year’s Eve over ten years. So, so heart-achy. And so, so good.