A Reflection at the Halfway Point of My 30s

The "Happy Birthday" posts on Facebook seem to be sparser than usual. As the average user of the social media platform becomes older, it has become more and more difficult to keep them engaged and communicating with their equally older friends. After all, older people are busier. They have children to attend to, subordinates to manage, and more responsibilities at work to ponder over. What is more, with more of a stake in work and private life, they are much more cautious about their public image, and try to avoid leaving digital footprints. So many of them have Facebook profiles that stay the same for years.

As I look through the sparse messages and wonder why so many people have simply faded away, I also wonder whether I have also faded away for many people...or why I did not for many others. Years of education left youths with a linear thinking toward their lives. The mid-30s should be characterized by progressive achievement in one's job, which is defined by both a sense of continued passion and commitment. If this is the case, then it makes sense that older friendships, based on Facebook and private lives, disappear, replaced by new, more corporate ones. Perhaps I have undertaken the same journey.

Yet, at the same time, I have and continue to define my identity based on the unwillingness to define my life in such a linear fashion. Frequent relocation to different countries, combined with challenging myself to do brand-new jobs every few years prevented me from high salaries and stability associated with continued career progression in one place and job, but also inspired (I hope) some envy among those who are comfortable enough in their daily lives to start questioning "is this it?" for the careers and lifestyles that they have chosen and stuck with for years, if not decades.

It has become a tradition in this blog to mark my birthdays with a reflection on all the new things that happened to me in the year that just ended. Year 34 was particularly remarkable, with marriage and Ph.D. graduation headlining a year of big personal change. Year 35 is also filled with the new, instead of the professional side. Exiting Blackpeak after 4.5 years has not been easy, with a sense of disenchantment with sales in the education sector followed by an internal transfer to the operations and teaching side of the business. In the year ahead, I foresee continued tumultuousness on the professional side.

That said, the self-expectation of big changes to be announced every year also adds plenty of self-pressure. Scarier than unknown changes in the year ahead is a complete lack of change. Nothing could be worse for the yearly birthday blog than having to announce that there have not been any big life changes, privately, professionally, or anywhere in between. By admitting to having no big changes to report, I am almost admitting that my life has in some way become linear, gearing toward stability. It is like conceding that my identity of "always travel, always new" is dying.

Even at age 35, I am not ready to admit that identity is a thing of the past. Looking at the cities and countries I have been to, I realize that there are still so many places that I wish to explore but simply have had no chance of doing. And I am not willing just to take a two-week vacation to those places to check them off a travel bucket list. As I have always done in the past, I want to live in those places, savor the rhythm of daily life, and imbibe the air, the food, and the vibes. Only working and living in new locales can satisfy such a need.

But I also recognize the difficulty of starting anew professionally at 35. For many employers, looking for potential hires (as opposed to experienced ones) involves an age consideration. Training someone to do something new is much easier if the person is capable of retaining information faster and humbly accepting instructions from higher-ups. Both are presumably easier with the younger crowd. As I look for new opportunities to try something new in the years ahead, I can no longer just offer a "willingness to learn." I also have to offer soft skills that can be carried over from entirely different work in the past.

Finding commonalities among disparate jobs and places is always difficult, but only gets more difficult with age. The perception of experience comes with an expectation of certain conservatism in approach toward work. After all, having worked for so many years and achieved so much, an individual would want to at least stick with certain attitudes, methods, and expertise that worked in the past. Asking them to be abandoned might as well be asking for a part of who one is to be erased. Balancing this "experienced hire" identity with the "new place, new life" identity will continue to take some effort.