This has been a week of feeling my age – but also wondering exactly what that means.
I'm currently working with a small editorial team who are, pre-dominantly, quite young. Like “born this century” young. That in itself is a strange feeling because knowing people who were born in the previous century has never been part of my experience. The oldest person I remember when growing up is my grandmother, who was born in 1910: although I'm sure I met people born in the 1800s, it never really registered.
It shouldn't make a difference. And yet, there is something about the turn of the century that marks a change, so working with people for whom the 20th century is nothing more than history feels strange. Particularly when someone refers to “vintage music” and they mean “stuff from 2005”, as happened to me this week.
I read Simon Kruger's excellent piece on finding yourself in the home stretch of a career race, and it has prompted more thoughts than I care to have about my life. I am at the very stage that Kruger describes, “the antechamber between work and pension” where your world starts to change whether you like it or not.
Your network of work contacts declines as people either retire, die, or just check out of the industry you're part of. For me, this is exacerbated by the decline of publishing as a business: most of the people I know who are around my age are gone from it because when an industry contracts it loses its most experienced people first.
I didn't really even choose journalism as a career. In a sense, it picked me. When wrapping up my PhD, I knew what I didn't want – to be an academic – but had no idea what I did. When the opportunity to join MacUser magazine appeared in Media Guardian (essential Thursday reading for the humanities student) it seemed like someone had created a bespoke job for me. Writing, technology, and – as I swiftly found out – daytime drinking were all interests, ones which were well served by technology publishing at the time.
Finding out I was good at it was a surprise. Finding out that I was also good at leading people was another one. But at no point at all did I think about whether that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
I suspect that's in part because “the rest of your life” is too hazy a concept when you're in your 20s and 30s to make any logical sense. For me, it didn't really appear as a concept until I was in my 50s, when “the rest of your life” became an alarmingly short amount of time. “Slowly, and then all at once”.
Things I have been writing
A busy week for non-fiction, and a slow one for fiction. I wrote a very short piece which was basically me rolling my eyes at people who should know better. There was a Ten Blue Links post – and I think my link blog is getting well into its stride. And more substantive, I wrote about John Gruber's approach to privacy and antitrust.
Fiction-wise, I wrote a small piece of micro-fiction about death, and that I liked enough to think about expanding into a proper short story. I like writing micro-fiction, but ultimately, I think they are the equivalent of a yawn and a stretch when you wake up. And exercise, valuable, but not substantive.
Things I have been reading
For the past few weeks, my reading has been all over the place: some days pass without a book being opened, some are nothing but a book. I have been dipping into Julian Barnes' Through the window quite a bit, though. I love Barnes' non-fiction more than his fiction. He's a stupidly clever writer.
