Three-Oh
On Drake, negative capability, and turning thirty.
There is a line in a song called ‘Make Me Proud’ in which Drake says he likes a woman with a future and a past. Three Sundays ago, on my thirtieth birthday, I woke up thinking about that line and how it applied now. I have always been someone who can’t wait to turn thirty, partly because my soul is seventy-five and partly because I have an unhealthy habit of looking forward. Over the last six months, though, I had surprised myself in that I was avoiding its arrival. Perhaps this was because the deadline was looming and I wasn’t going to meet it with all the right parts in all the right places. The home, the relationship, the job were all meant to add up by now and they didn’t. But on Sunday morning, as the alarm went off and I opened my eyes, nervous about who I would see and how I would feel, there was an intangible feeling and it wasn’t a bad one. It was a sense of belonging, either to the age or within myself. I couldn’t pinpoint it, so I thought about Drake instead.
The strangest thing about your twenties is that it is the one decade of your life where you’re meant to do it all. You’re meant to have the most fun. You’re meant to travel. You’re meant to make drunken mistakes, again and again, but you’re also meant to recover. You’re meant to go to work and work hard, in fact hard enough that by the time you reach your thirties you’re exactly where you want to be. In that position in your career where you simply need to stay put and master whatever it is you do in whatever industry you have chosen. You’re also meant to have found a partner by now and, if you live in Australia, you’re also meant to have bought a home. One that you have saved for diligently over the last ten years while you drank tequila in Mexico and lost your phone thirteen times and made terrible mistakes and hopefully learned from them because you are thirty now and you don’t lose your phone anymore. The absurdity of the expectations we carry through this decade is perhaps summed up best by a line in the 1994 film ‘Reality Bites’, when aspiring filmmaker Lelaina Pierce (Winona Ryder) says to Troy Dwyer (Ethan Hawke), “I was really going to be something by the age of 23.” He replied: “Honey, the only thing you have to be by the age of 23 is yourself.”
There is a naive ambition that comes with youth. Donald Glover once told the crowd this at a concert and I’ve never forgotten it. He said this naive ambition is both useful and necessary. It is the thing that drives you to do ridiculous things like move overseas or pursue a career that others might call a pipedream. It is the thing that allows you to fall headfirst into a relationship without a second thought. It is the thing that encourages you to take risks, risks where you sometimes reap the benefits and sometimes cop the punishment. This naive ambition is also something you apply directly to your selfhood. It is the thing that has you buying self-help books. It is the thing that makes you incessantly curious about the world. It is then the thing that has you believing you know everything about the world. You make black and white statements about what is right and wrong and draw clear lines that can’t be crossed. The ‘90s soul icon Erykah Badu once said that in college she and her peers would have really heated conversations about politics and life. They would offend each other and hold grudges, each person unwilling to change their mind or position. “It’s only because we were trying to build an ego or a self,” she said. “We needed to define ourselves, and you’re supposed to do that.”
Everyone has something to say about turning thirty. You develop a quiet confidence. You stop caring what other people think. I’ve always thought this quiet confidence comes from meeting the expectations we have for ourselves during this decade, from having all the right parts in all the right places, and part of this is true. But I’ve also grown to believe it comes from not meeting them. From making mistakes and losing and learning and starting again. From taking risks that teach you the cost of your choices and, perhaps, the cost of living. Over enough time, you come to realise that situations are not always black and white, that clear lines can’t always be drawn, and that no amount of naive ambition will protect you from the shit that sometimes just happens. The world is complicated. While our twenties are spent chasing destinations, answers, conclusions, over this decade we slowly learn that there is no neat, pretty ending to this thing, even if you get everything you have ever wanted. The goalposts shift. Life, as they say, goes on. And this newfound awareness frees you.
There is a term called ‘negative capability’ that was first used by the poet John Keats in 1817. In a letter to his brothers, Keats wrote about Shakespeare’s ability to observe and recognise truths beyond consecutive reasoning. “I mean Negative Capability,” he wrote, “that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” The term is now used to describe a certain ability writers and creatives have to pursue artistic beauty even when it leads to intellectual confusion. In short, it’s the ability to sit in the mess and look around; to see the beauty in situations even when they don’t make sense. I’ve had many conversations about turning thirty but this term is the closest thing I can find to describe the shift. There’s a tension in this life of wanting to let go while also stay in control, and as you broach your thirties, you’re willing to let go of the wheel a little. You stop blindly striving toward a destination. You slow down. You can change your mind or veer off course. You don’t need as many answers and start delighting in the questions.
Perhaps our ability to harness negative capability in our thirties performs a similar function to the naive ambition we acquire in our twenties. It is both necessary and useful to cope with the fact that the lives of the people we know start veering in completely different directions. In our twenties, most of us are living a similar life, one where we are working and partying and living fairly autonomously. In our thirties, some people are buying their second homes while others are living overseas. Some of us are married with two children while others are extremely single and partying every weekend. Recently, my friend, Elle, and I discovered that over the last five years she has produced two children while I have managed to stop losing my phone. This contrast creates a tension that the author Nell Frizzell writes about in her book, The Panic Years. This panic, which begins for women in our late twenties, stems from the single question of whether we want to have a baby or not. That is an entirely different essay, so I will stick with my original point here. Perhaps negative capability is thing we develop at this age, not only because it is an outlook that allows us to really live, but because we need it to cope with the vast amount of directions our lives could potentially take; and reconcile whatever path we find ourselves on.
A month ago, I wrote down everything I had achieved by thirty. It was a pathological act to quell a feeling I hadn’t reached the destination, the conclusion, the ending I was expecting to reach. And as I wrote, I confirmed that I hadn’t achieved exactly what I wanted but I have also done so much. I have lived in Sydney, Bali, and Melbourne with a total of nine different housemates. I have travelled to Japan and New York and South Africa and Mexico City, among other places. I have worked in magazines and digital media and startups. I have fallen in love twice and had my heart broken the same amount of times. I have a generalised anxiety disorder and an undisclosed amount of money in the bank. I have published a book. I wrote all this down, among other things, and then I wrote down everything I know. I know what makes my life feel expansive. I know I like hiking and listening to records and reading books and swimming in the ocean. I know I love my morning coffees and a gin and tonic at golden hour. I know I like to be alone a lot but I also know spending time with the people I love matters. I know where I want to put my energy for the next year but I also know you shouldn’t make plans beyond a year. I know who I am and what I like and how I want to move through the world. What I have and know by thirty isn’t dissimilar to what Troy Dwyer told Lelaina Pierce she needed to find by twenty-three. Perhaps that is nothing and perhaps that is everything.
Three Sundays ago, after I lay in bed thinking about Drake, my sister and I bought two oat flat whites and took the dog for a walk. The sky was clear, the wind was still and it was my favourite temperature, the temperature that feels like nothing. As we walked and talked about our futures and our pasts, feeling a little sentimental about the day and what it meant, I recalled something Brooke Boney told me which allowed me to identify that intangible feeling. When I interviewed her recently, Boney said that when everything else feels tumultuous or chaotic, she is now able to access a place inside of her that is steady and calm. She has found a home in herself. And that was what I had felt earlier that morning. Home. It is a home I can access easily when things are running smoothly and the day is good, and a home I still find difficult to access when things are chaotic. Each day, each year, I am getting a little better at accessing it but it is there. It is a home that has been built through the wins and the losses of the last decade, and the two decades before that. It is a home that makes it easier to live with the uncertainties, the mysteries, the doubts that come with this life. It is a home that makes it easier to ask questions and change my mind and forgive myself. And it is a home that allows me to walk through life with a little more tenderness. There’s no longer a need to project myself onto the world with black and white opinions and clear lines drawn in the sand. A softening has occurred, and I can only sum it up by stealing a line I saw on Pinterest yesterday: I just get mine quietly.
Related (and unrelated) recommendations:
I recently read this old-ish VICE piece on why millennial culture is no longer youth culture. It is very, very good and slightly relevant to today’s essay.
The model-turned-writer Emily Ratajkowski has been everywhere doing press for her book, My Body. This profile for The New York Times Magazine on Ratajkowski was a standout. If you pick one article from these recs, read this. I could read Andrea Long Chu’s writing forever.
This podcast episode on ‘parasocial’ relationships by The Cut is great. It explores how and why we develop psychological attachments to celebrities. On that note, I am very into this Pete Davidson and Kim Kardashian West situation.
Succession, Succession, Succession. Along with the rest of the world, I wait patiently for the latest episode of season three to arrive each Monday night. Cousin Greg gives me life. This podcast episode by The Culture on the how the show became a cultural phenomenon is excellent.
Obviously, Taylor Swift’s 10-minute version of ‘All Too Well’. Her song, ‘Nothing New’, with Phoebe Bridgers was also a highlight on the re-released album. I’m slowly getting into Adele’s new album, 30. Track three, ‘My Little Love’, is very good.
I’ve been in a bit of an Ethan Hawke phase after watching the Before Trilogy. If you haven’t seen the three films (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight) add them to your list. Directed by Richard Linklater, the man behind Dazed and Confused, it’s an incredibly intelligent and tender take on romance and the evolution of our relationships over time.
Finally, this song that my sister and I played way too much on my little thirtieth getaway, and this song to get you through the last month of work.
Thank you for reading. Side Note is a free newsletter that appears in your inbox on the first Friday of the month, usually.