So right now I’m happy to be 39 and happy that I’ll be 40 soon. That sounds so frickin’ old, and sometimes it feels old, like after I’ve been to the park, where sk8rs also hang. Or chill, or whatever they say now. Little did I know at 16 that I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass what the kids say when I was 39. I also had no idea that at 39 I would consider 16-year-olds the dumbest creatures on the planet, and for safety’s sake should be locked in a small room until they turn 18. Having this perspective now makes me wonder what baby boomers think of my demographic.

I realized something as I was pondering my advanced age and wisdom. Most of the wisdom I have, I’ve gained over the past, say, five years. From the time I was born, I went through crap, more crap, still more crap, then BOOM, I’m 30-something and starting to process all that crap. Right? I think most people are that way. We’re young and dumb, and then some time after our brains are physically fully developed (I’ve read this doesn’t happen till our mid-twenties) we start to gain real wisdom.

I went to Wikipedia and looked up life expectancy through the years. They say that at the beginning of the previous century, the life expectancy was only 30–45, and in medieval Britain it was only 20–30! So I thought, “Man, if I lived a few hundred years ago, I’d be just about dead by now. I’d be ancient. The wise old lady of my village.”

Have you noticed how as a society we’re becoming more and more enlightened through the decades? That’s why! We all live long enough to at least have a chance to gain a whole lot of wisdom.

Of course then I wondered if our brains just developed faster back in the days when 30 was old. Experience shapes the brain, right? And if a whole lotta life experience was packed in to a shorter time, maybe 30 was the equivelant to 80 now. That probably was the case to an extent, but I believe we’ve outpaced that. What I think is, people were running around with their undeveloped brains being queens and knights and raising babies and working the land.

That’s what I think.