I won’t celebrate my 30th birthday. Vast swaths of land are going up in flames. Were we to meet outside for socializing, we’d be nursing headaches, scratchy throats, and aching eyes, and that’s if we were lucky enough not to get rained on by ashes. Meeting inside isn’t an option, either, having all suddenly become potential vectors of disease. The heat wave has us running to open the windows as soon as the pollution indicators drop from red to yellow.
This is California, summer 2020.
And frankly, I don’t want a celebration, even virtual. I don’t think anyone has energy left for a Zoom party.
Before this year, I’ve gone to enough friends’ 30th birthdays to know it’s a time to catch up with the people who moved to pursue their dream career. To listen to your friend who, after quitting a job she hated, is now happily taking art classes paid for by her voluntary severance package. A time for commiserating about the dating market, talking about how hard it is to make new friends, and setting goals for the decade ahead.
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When I picture the 30th birthday that could have been, I picture finding out about breakups, secret boyfriends, and new hobbies. Some invitees arrive late because they waited to tuck in their newborns and toddlers. Later, they listen to the hopes and fears of those who “are thinking about it.”
“Next year, hopefully. I really wanted to have a more secure contract before trying,” I imagine one friend saying. I smile and hug them, saying how happy I am for them. We discuss pregnancy care and why we’re looking forward to having children. Someone retreats quietly, staring off into the distance, so we change topics to reel them back: “How is work?” “I have a book for you.” Anything to defuse until the chance arises to ask softly, one on one, if they want to talk about anything and how we can help.
Later I get caught in a cloud of inebriated advice about mortgages — now is the time to buy new, old, renovated, to borrow, to refinance, to apply to first-time buyers programs. I learn who is moving to the suburbs in search of (very) relative affordability. There is always someone buying or building a cabin in the woods, moving to a disused chapel, joining a commune of some sort.
We debate politics with some hope, while our activist friend rolls their eyes at our trust in electoral politics. Some of us are living on Twitter, building a virtual wall around ourselves as we stare down at our screens or discuss the latest scandal nobody else has heard of. We notice and shift the conversation, inquiring instead about our respective siblings, promising to look into the internships programs and write recommendation letters for someone’s younger sister, and wishing we had had someone lifting us up like that at their age.
I don’t want a celebration, not before having time to mourn what’s come this year.
The group congregating in the kitchen is saying shit about continental philosophy while someone plays a dusty ukulele. We find out whose parents are about to retire and their health scares, promising to visit them “next time we’re in the area.”
We laugh at how old and boring we sound.
The jokes about adulting get rarer in the late twenties. In truth, we have been adults for a long time, despite the commentaries about our immaturity for working at companies with suspicious business models, living with roommates, living alone, not having children, depriving everyone of a proper wedding. Our memes, dislike of meat, and “radical” politics. We have careers. Maybe not the careers we would have had if we’d been born 20 years earlier, but carefully strategized careers regardless. Weddings get announced at birthdays between awkward conversations about those of us who lucked into a significant inheritance.
I’m French, but know that if there are enough Americans in attendance at my not-happening birthday party, the night will end up in karaoke. It bores everyone else, including our younger selves, and that’s the point.
(That, and getting drunk in good company.)
But this dreamed-up birthday party won’t be happening.
I don’t want a celebration, not before having time to mourn what’s come this year. Fertility treatments were upended, weddings canceled, wakes were held on our screens. Dream homes slipped away. Mortgages became an enormous pressure overnight. Pregnancy plans were delayed. My friend lost her job and became a de facto stay-at-home mom, even as lockdown eased. Parents who kept their jobs are burning out. Positions and promotions disappeared. Some of us wanted to make big changes that never happened. Some of us went back to a sort of normality. Some would rather not talk about it.
Our 31st birthdays won’t be the same.
Concerns about the impact of the pandemic on the millennial generation, who had already been struck by the 2008 financial crisis, have largely focused on the economic fallout. Discussions of the impact on social relationships are largely focused on a younger cohort, whose social lives will be strictly limited as they enter college or the job market, a key period for building lasting relationships. Yet people in their thirties and forties are also experiencing these fallouts — these groups ordinarily report a high level of loneliness, due to diminished “access to the night [life] economy[…] but also the loss and convergence of friendship networks that appear unique to midlife.”
These decades are also a key period to build a family. However, far from the expected lockdown baby boom, a large number of Americans are delaying pregnancies.
This could have been avoided (or a lot of it, anyway).
My actual 30th birthday came and went. It was filled with messages, cards, and a chocolate-coffee-strawberries cake, but was otherwise unusually quiet. Some friends asked me if it felt like my birthday had happened at all. No big news, no announcements, just some careful, tentative plans to meet next spring on European grounds. Mostly we spoke of our lost sense of time, which somehow feels slower, faster, irrelevant, or a mix of those depending on the day.
We may have missed out on turning 30 the proper way, like we missed other milestones. But hey, we’re still here.
