480 Months: Turning 40 at the end of world (as we knew it)

This was supposed to be another zine. A zine, 10 years later, about turning 40. It was also going to chronicle this past decade of my life and provide a reflection on the 360 Months project, with an additional 120 months of wisdom to offer. 

Part of that initial inspiration was to utilize the resources at the mostly empty office I go into on Thursdays. With the upper management and almost all of my coworkers logging on remotely these days, I would be able to print out 100 copies of my 480 Months zine on the down low. Then I realized there would still be all the labor of assembling and distributing ahead of me. On top of that realization, things became complicated by an impending major life change as my 30's entered their final months (more on that soon). 

So. In lieu of a zine you can hold in your hands on my 40th birthday, I simply offer this...

*

In March 2011, I began confronting the urgency of entering into a new decade by inviting others to share their thoughts on turning 30. I wanted to learn what my peers were experiencing and feeling on the cusp of that milestone which had no official rite of passage.

"Many of us who are approaching the 3 decade mark are anxious about officially entering adulthood," I wrote in this invitation one month before my own birthday. "Others attempt to embrace this development. How we feel about turning 30 has a lot to do with the extent to which there is a disconnect between what our lives look like now and our own (and society's) expectations for this moment; how what we are doing measures up with what we wanted to be when we grew up."

In less than 30 days, I received submissions of personal essays from 30 different people about turning 30. The stories and observations ranged quite a bit. While many of us focused on the innumerable challenges we had been navigating, there was still a hopeful thread connecting them all as we anticipated the some of the possibilities ahead. 

But where are we now? How are we feeling about turning 40 as the world continues to reel, over 1 year into a global pandemic? 

In one way, this past year has felt like a full decade. But at the same time, it just feels like April has finally arrived after the longest March ever. Spring is finally blooming again and some of us are starting to get vaccinated even as the world remains forever transformed by COVID. There is finally some hope even as we struggle to grasp the magnitude of this collective suffering and loss. 

And my personal transformation which I alluded to earlier is that I am moving back to my home state! That's right, after 12 years in Philadelphia I'll be shipping up to Boston just a few weeks after my 40th birthday. I'm excited to live closer to my family in Massachusetts and to explore this city I honestly haven't spent much time in beyond bus layovers at South Station and punk shows in my youth. And I am happy to report that even though my 30's began with heartbreak they are ending full of love. I feel so much gratitude for this and for making it to 480 months in good health and with a supportive community that transcends city, state, and national borders. 

So I'm feeling pretty good about turning 40 and continuing to embrace getting older. For me, it doesn't have quite the same urgency, surprisingly, as the existential dread of a decade ago. Should I be feeling anxious and deflated about being "over the hill" now? Should I feel regret for not "settling down" and starting a family? The dominant culture (shaped by systems like capitalism and hetero-patriarchy) sure would like us to all be paralyzed by such questions. 

If I have learned anything from this past decade, and particularly this past year, it's how interconnected everything is and how important solidarity and mutual aid are in pointing toward a better world for us all. If we remain in our individualistic, competitive bubbles then our lives will be driven by scarcity and fear. But if we dare to build and learn with others for the common good then anything is possible. 

Happy 40th to my peers and to a better future beyond the current society. 💓  

*

The Embrace of 360 Degrees: Matt Dineen

The 360 Months zine is here! Replete with the stunning cover art by my sister Sarah Dineen, it contains 30 essays by 30 people sharing their thoughts about turning 30--in 72 pages. If you are in Philadelphia, come check out the zine release event at Wooden Shoe Books at 704 South Street at 7:00 pm.

Here is my essay from the zine in honor of today, my 30th birthday. Enjoy! Also, check back next week for the rest of the essays. I'll start posting the remainder on Tuesday. Thanks for reading!
---

Life really does come full circle sometimes. I guess this is no surprise since our lives are not single linear journeys of constant progress. We are on a continuum that ebbs and flows and our personal histories often have the pesky tendency to repeat themselves. Our current selves are an amalgamation of all of our ups and downs, and the journey we’re on is a complex one.

On the cusp of 30, I feel like I’m 15 again. Half a lifetime ago I spent the summer washing dishes at Nonnie’s Country Kitchen in Orleans, MA—my first job. I was paid under the table, in cash, to scrape the remains of chocolate chip pancakes larger than my face, scrub lipstick stains off coffee mugs, and listen to the classic rock station that the sexist cook would sing along to all morning. It feels like yesterday.

Actually, it was yesterday.

I arrived at my new job to discover an envelope in the back room with my name scrawled in full-caps: MATT. It contained a (small) pile of 20 dollar bills for my previous week of labor. After counting the bills, I stuffed the envelope in my backpack, grabbed a glass of ice water, and squeezed into a fresh pair of bright-yellow dishwashing gloves. Something was different though.

Instead of elderly retirees filling Nonnie’s counter (and inhaling her second-hand Lucky Strike smoke), there were tables full of people gazing into laptop computers, sipping lattes and eating pasta salad. Instead of AC/DC and Van Halen on the transistor radio in the back, Modest Mouse and Arcade Fire were playing on an iPod through the surround-sound speakers of the café. Everything has changed. But as I stood in front of the industrial sink scrubbing lipstick off a coffee mug it hit me that, actually, everything has stayed the same. In one week, I will be a 30 year old dishwasher with a college degree.

How has my life reverted to this, 15 years later?

It would be pretty easy to wake up on the morning of my 30^th birthday in despair that my life is not going anywhere; paralyzed by an internalized classism, making me feel like an utter failure of a human being. Luckily, I have dedicated a lot of my time since school to analyzing, rejecting, and documenting alternatives to the dominant culture that defines people by what they do for money, first and foremost. I have spent more than half of a decade now interviewing activists and artists about the dilemma of following their passions, doing what they truly love, while surviving in a cutthroat capitalist society. So I have thought about this stuff a lot. 

Over the years, when people I meet ask me, “What do you do?” the answer is always complicated. “Well,” I’ll reply. “It depends what you mean.” We are all so much more than our wage jobs. We are complex, multidimensional creatures. And this should be celebrated.

As I approach 30, I think back to that requisite thought exercise throughout many of our childhoods: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Is this it? Am I grown up now? At one point, I wanted to be a professional baseball player. Apparently I told my mother (who was 29 when she had me) that I would become rich as a Major League star and buy her a house. She lovingly reminds me of this broken promise every now and then. Sorry mom!

It has been essential for me to talk to people who have spent their lives redefining what success means—prioritizing happiness and community over the accumulation of wealth and power. This is also true of the aging process.

In my mid- to late-20’s it was really inspiring to talk to people in their 30’s who were truly embracing getting older. Actually, I have found that if you ask people who have passed the 30 year milestone, almost across the board they will talk about how much better life is than in their 20’s. So why is it then that many twenty-somethings in our society are so scared of this moment?   

I wear a pin on my jacket that reads: “Growing up is awesome!” The person that created (and gave me) this pin explained that it was in response to the popular subcultural slogan: “Growing up is giving up.”

In a culture that fetishizes youth and perpetuates “glory days” mythology, that teaches us to fear and misunderstand the natural cycles of life, embracing one’s 30’s is a radical act. 

The vision I have for my 30’s is to actualize all of the things that I talked about doing in my 20’s. I want to take inspiration from, and further cultivate, the best aspects of my youthful past. Simultaneously, I want to learn from the mistakes I’ve made, the low points of my personal continuum. This is not to say that it will be easy or that history won’t continue to occasionally repeat itself. My life will inevitably come full circle once again, but I am hopeful for what the next 360 degrees holds for me. Turning 30 is awesome. I am not giving up.
---

Matt Dineen lives in Philadelphia, where he turned 30 on April 7, 2011. Contact him at: passionsandsurvival(at)gmail(dot)com

Transporting My Dog on My Motorcycle: Brihannala Morgan

At the height of the gloomy Bush era, one year after the invasion of Iraq was launched, I found myself living in Madison, Wisconsin. This is where I met Bria Morgan. She had recently moved back to her hometown to work on the 2004 campaign against, well let's just say, Bush's re-election. Bria was one of the most committed activists I had ever met and was one of the people in Madison that helped me make sense of both an unfamiliar city and the chaotic world we were trying to change for the better. Currently serving as the director of The Borneo Project, it is no surprise that Bria has continued to tirelessly sustain her political organizing work since that dark period when we first met. 

---

When I was 22, I set out a life plan: I was going to finish college, travel and work abroad for 2 years, come back to America, get my master's degree, and go work for the Rainforest Action Network in San Francisco. Strangely enough, that is almost exactly what I did. Yes, I dropped out of grad school a year early to work for the Rainforest Action Network, and yes, I traveled internationally for a year and a half instead of two years, but mostly I was right on the money.

Two things strike me now, about this plan. First, I seem to have stopped planning right around the time I was going to hit 30. Considering how detailed my plans had been up to that point, why did I stop? I wouldn't mind having that road map to follow right now. The other part is that I totally left out anything that had to do with relationships, marriage, kids, etc. And when I think about it, I have actually still only been to one wedding, and I have never been to a wedding of someone my age. Most of my good friends aren't even in long term relationships, which has to be an anomaly at my age. If I had planned a relationship into my life plan at age 22, would things be different now?

So, now I am about to turn 30, and it seems like a good time to take stock. Where has following my now 8-year-old life plan gotten me? I have had an amazing career, working around the world on forest activism. I now run my own tiny non-profit which I struggle to keep above water, but which I love. I have dated a series of amazing men, but none that I ever figured I would settle down with. I have cash, which is a blessing, and no debt, which is wearing down so many folks of my generation. In general, I have succeeded in those goals that I set out when I was 22. I am also happy to say that I have only gotten more radical with age, instead of embracing compromise, which I thought might happen.

But, call it age, or Saturn returns, or whatever the bejezzus you want to call it, I actually do find my priorities changing. I have no interest in “settling down”, but I would really like to set down roots, both in a home, a community, and in a relationship. This wasn't part of the plan at all, really, until less than a year ago. I really want a dog. But I also want to figure out a way to transport a dog on my motorcycle. Really, that is actually a perfect microcosm of where I find myself right now. I want a dog, but I want to carry my dog on my motorcycle. It's not easy to do (although it is possible... at least the in the literal sense). 

I wish I could set a plan out for my 30s the way I did in my early 20s, and stick to it. But I don't have the same closed-minded commitment to career and success that I did when I was 22. I do know that in my 30s I fully intend on continuing to work to save forests and protect the rights of the people who live on them. I fully intend to do whatever I can to topple capitalism, using all the tools I have, from direct actions to clothing exchanges. I know I want my 30s to be filled with dinners cooked with friends, as well as new endeavors that push me to be stronger, and more creative. I know I want to find a relationship that I can sink my teeth into, and I want a dog. And, of course, a way to transport that dog on my motorcycle.

Demobilizing at 30: Ben Webster

I know Ben Webster through the Wooden Shoe. He has been the driving force for our weekly movie night, bringing his cinematic expertise and political savvy to the series. Ben is equally friendly as he is brilliant (as you will soon discover), and I'm sure one hell of a librarian too.
---

It is worthwhile to reflect on life’s milestones, and when hitting the big 10-year intervals, it seems obligatory. Everyone approaching 30, as I did last month, is barraged with outside inquiries. I will pass. This personal reflection is valuable, but I have done it in private, so will try a different tack here. Perhaps a prejudice hardened over three decades is that against gratuitous public navel-gazing; I believe you used to be able to call it petty-bourgeois individualism. Instead I want to sketch a few thoughts relating the anxiety (or fascination?) of turning 30 to our particular moment in 21st century, postfordist capitalism. 

First, a common-place condition at 30 among people I know is a declining material standard of living vis a vis our parents. 30 is a convenient generational marker; it is generally the age when people are supposed to couple off, have kids, and take out a mortgage; it is often about the age our parents were when they had us. Much is made of the supposed moral failings of my generation, always referencing how many of us have boomeranged back to living in our folks’ basements. This is mostly bullshit. We can look instead on the sweep of capitalist restructuring from 1981 to today, in short hand, neoliberalism. This has meant the decimation of social services, stagnation or decline in real wages, rise of debt as a means of maintaining consumer spending and worker discipline, deindustrialization in the US, and the crushing and marginalization of people’s movements. If 30 is the new 20, it has little to do with immaturity, and everything to do with a political economy particularly harsh on young adults. Whereas stability could have been expected by a hard-working, educated 30 year old of generations past, now un(der)employment, crushing debt, and precarious living conditions are the norm. Many of my peers have desperately returned to the university or half-baked entrepreneurial gestures, usually only buying time until the next round of bills come due. The current global crisis has only tightened the screws. This obviously provokes anxiety when middle age is around the corner.

The ideological notion of 30 and of the 30 year old self may continue on autopilot, but the material content is probably gone for good. Yet the flip side (and, historically, one may argue, the root cause) of neoliberal restructuring is the expansion of alternative, autonomous strategies of social reproduction. We may include here collective and co-housing, subversion of the gendered division of labor, independent food production, alternative child-rearing, all-ages venues, etc. The left and its milieu continually elaborates and experiments with these practices, many of which insinuate within mainstream society. The barriers between age-determined divisions, ie 20's & 30's, “student “ or “parent,” tend to weaken. In other words, through the autonomous delinking from capital’s ascribed practices of reproducing labor, we decalibrate age from the standards of capital. 30 as a fetishized, anxious omen- a superego threat to remain passive and isolated, ie successful in capital’s eyes- is possibly weakened by collective rejections of capital’s structuring of our psyches, bodies, and lives. The categories (child, young adult, middle age, senior, 20's, 30's, 40's, etc.) of the life cycle read about in psychology and sociology text books, I conclude, are as much positivist suggestions for subordination to capital’s domination as they are physiological/psychological realities.

So although much of the significance of turning 30 has to do with individual perception, I also feel that it has a small ideological function and material relation to the world. My specific perception of turning 30 in 2011 is inseparable from the cycle of struggle which I began contributing effort to in high school. I suspect this is true of all those coming of age in a movement. Seattle went down my first semester in college, I reached drinking age in time to drown my sorrows during the invasion of Iraq. My participation in the dynamic cycle that is now commonly called the alterglobalization or global justice movement, its evolution and waning, is inseparable from my sense of adulthood, of communal fullness and isolation, of confidence and insecurity. Calendar age loses its hold involved in a movement in close contact with senior citizens and high school kids working for common goals. The waning of a movement hurts and drains, but new expressions of resistance always emerge. I’m no longer a student activist, but now a union member spoiling for a fight, to take one example; Seattle and Iraq are hazy memories, but Egypt and Wisconsin revitalize. If aging and its milestones are associated with resignation, cynicism, and declining expectations, then vigorous collective struggle for a better world may be an elixir of youth. Perhaps my optimism won’t hold up, but this is what I strive towards at the very least as I enter the cultural phenomenon that is one’s 30's.